A Companion to Literary Evaluation (Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture) [1 ed.] 1119409853, 9781119409854

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A Companion to Literary Evaluation

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and postcanonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field. Published Recently 78. A Companion to American Literary Studies Edited by Caroline F. Levander and Robert S. Levine 79. A New Companion to the Gothic Edited by David Punter 80. A Companion to the American Novel Edited by Alfred Bendixen 81. A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation Edited by Deborah Cartmell 82. A Companion to George Eliot Edited by Amanda Anderson and Harry E. Shaw 83. A Companion to Creative Writing Edited by Graeme Harper 84. A Companion to British Literature, 4 volumes Edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr., Heesok Chang,  and Samantha Zacher 85. A Companion to American Gothic Edited by Charles L. Crow 86. A Companion to Translation Studies Edited by Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter 87. A New Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture Edited by Herbert F. Tucker 88. A Companion to Modernist Poetry Edited by David E. Chinitz and Gail McDonald 89. A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, Second Edition Edited by Stuart D. Lee 90. A Companion to the English Novel Edited by Stephen Arata, Madigan Haley,  J. Paul Hunter, and Jennifer Wicke 91. A Companion to the Harlem Renaissance Edited by Cherene Sherrard‐Johnson 92. A Companion to Modern Chinese Literature Edited by Yingjin Zhang 93. A New Companion to Digital Humanities Edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens,  and John Unsworth 94. A Companion to Virginia Woolf Edited by Jessica Berman 95. A New Companion to Milton Edited by Thomas Corns 96. A Companion to the Brontës Edited by Diane Long Hoeveler and  Deborah Denenholz Morse 97. A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, Second Edition Edited by Dympna Callaghan 98. A New Companion to Renaissance Drama Edited by Arthur F. Kinney and Thomas Hopper 99. A Companion to Literary Theory Edited by David Richter 100. A Companion to Literary Biography Edited by Richard Bradford 101. A New Companion to Chaucer Edited by Peter Brown 102. A Companion to African Literatures Edited by Olakunle George 103. A Companion to the Global Renaissance, Second Edition Edited by Jyotsna G. Singh 104. A New Companion to Herman Melville Edited by Wyn Kelley and Christopher Ohge 105. A Companion to Children’s Literature Edited by Karen Coats, Deborah Stevenson,  and Vivian Yenika-Agbaw 106. A Companion to American Poetry Edited by Mary McAleer Balkun, Jeffrey Gray,  and Paul Jaussen 107. A Companion to Latin American Literature and Culture Edited by Sara Castro-Klaren 108. A Companion to J. R. R. Tolkien, second edition Edited by Stuart D. Lee 109. A Companion to Multiethnic Literature of the United States  Edited by Gary Totten For more information on the Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture series, please visit www.wiley.com

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C O M P A N I O N

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LITERARY EVALUATION EDITED BY RICHARD BRADFORD MADELENA GONZALEZ KEVIN DE ORNELLAS

This edition first published 2024 © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions. The right of Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez and Kevin De Ornellas to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with law. Registered Offices John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, USA John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, customer services, and more information about Wiley products visit us at www.wiley.com. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats and by print-on-demand. Some content that appears in standard print versions of this book may not be available in other formats. Trademarks: Wiley and the Wiley logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and other countries and may not be used without written permission. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty While the publisher and authors have used their best efforts in preparing this work, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this work and specifically disclaim all warranties, including without limitation any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives, written sales materials or promotional statements for this work. This work is sold with the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a specialist where appropriate. The fact that an organization, website, or product is referred to in this work as a citation and/or potential source of further information does not mean that the publisher and authors endorse the information or services the organization, website, or product may provide or recommendations it may make. Further, readers should be aware that websites listed in this work may have changed or disappeared between when this work was written and when it is read. Neither the publisher nor authors shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Bradford, Richard, 1957– editor. | Gonzalez, Madelena, editor. | De Ornellas, Kevin, editor. Title: A companion to literary evaluation / edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, Kevin De Ornellas. Description: Hoboken, NJ : Wiley-Blackwell, 2024. | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023047951 (print) | LCCN 2023047952 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119409854 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119409878 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119409892 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Criticism. | Literature–History and criticism–Theory, etc. | Literature–Philosophy. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC PN81 .C7437 2024 (print) | LCC PN81 (ebook) | DDC 809.001–dc23/eng/20231031 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023047951 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023047952 Cover Design: Wiley Cover Image: © miljko/Getty Images Set in 10.5/12.5pt Garamond by Straive, Pondicherry, India

Contents

Notes on Contributors

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Introduction1 Richard Bradford 1 Literary Values Peter Lamarque 2 Complexity as a Criterion for the Evaluation of Literature Anja Müller-­Wood 3 Schooled Aesthetic Asymmetries: (Back)firing the Canon in Secondary Education D.J. Howells

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4 Defining Literature: The Route to Aesthetic Evaluation Paolo Euron

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5 Kathleen Raine: The Less Received Andrew Keanie

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6 “Is (This) Translation Any Good?”: The Evaluation of Literary Translation Giuseppe Sofo

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7 The Algorithm of Beauty: Aesthetic Judgment as a Science Madelena Gonzalez

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8 Literary Value and the Question of Insight on Humanly Relevant Matters Emanuela Tegla

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9 How Books Get Reviewed: Evaluation and the Freelance Journalist D.J. Taylor

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vi Contents 10 A Lifetime of Evaluation Penelope Stenning

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11 Evaluating Unfinished Novels: Octavia E. Butler and the Improbability of Justice Rafe McGregor

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12 “How to Bring So Goode a Matter into a Better Forme”: The Value of the Horse in Early Modern Writing Elisabetta Deriu

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13 Reading Performance for the Values Underpinning Production Amanda Finch

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14 Bridging the Gap between Page and Performance Poetry Karen Simecek

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15 Aesthetics and Efficacy in Applied and Community Theater Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill

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16 Antonin Artaud Beyond Judgment: A Radio Reading of “To Have Done With The Judgement of God” with Local Prisoners Gary Anderson and Niamh Malone 17 “Chief of the Second Rate”: James Shirley and Dramatic Value Heidi Craig 18 “The Glories of our Blood and State” and The Lady of Pleasure: The Genius of [Counterfactual] Britain’s National Writer—­—J­ ames Shirley Kevin De Ornellas

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19 Evaluating Literary Evaluation Peter Barry

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20 The Horrible Legacy of Modernism Richard Bradford

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21 Evaluating Poems Amy Burns and Richard Bradford

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Index

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Notes on Contributors

Peter Lamarque is one of the most prominent aestheticians and philosophers of literature of our time. For the past twenty-­three years, he has been a Professor of Philosophy at the University of York and prior to that he held the Ferens Chair of Philosophy at Hull University. He has published nine major books, including The Philosophy of Literature (2009) and Word and Object: Explorations of the Metaphysics of Art (2010). The latter won him the American Society for Aesthetics Outstanding Monograph Prize, and in 2018 the Italian Society of Aesthetics awarded him the “Premio Internazionale d’Esthetica.” From 1995 to 2008, he was Editor of the British Journal of Aesthetics and he has held Visiting Professorships at Cornell University and the Australian National University. Anja Müller-­Wood is Professor of English Literature and Culture at Johannes Gutenberg-­ University Mainz (Germany), which she joined after studying and working at the Universities of Marburg and Trier. The author of Angela Carter: Identity Constructed/ Deconstructed (1997) and The Theatre of Civilized Excess: New Perspectives on Jacobean Tragedy (2007), she has extensively published on early modern and twentieth-­century British literature and culture and (co-­)edited several essay collections, most recently Translating Renaissance Experience (2020). D.J. Howells was educated at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he also did postgraduate research into twentieth-­century English literature. He has been a classroom teacher and examiner of A level English, mainly in South Wales, for many years. In addition to contributing to various publications—­including a previous Wiley-Blackwell Companion—­ on contemporary Welsh writing in English, he has published, among other subjects, on teaching methodologies in secondary schools, Christopher Marlowe and Keith Douglas. Paolo Euron received a Ph.D. in Aesthetics (University of Bologna) and was an Associate Professor of Aesthetics (Italian Ministry of University and Research); he taught at the University of Turin and then at the Chulalongkorn University (Bangkok), and he is now affiliated to the European International University. His publications include Aesthetics, Theory and Interpretation of the Literary Work (Brill, Boston/Leiden 2019), “Uncanny Beauty. Aesthetics of

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Companionship, Love and Sex Robots” (“Artificial Life” Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT 2022), and “Uncanny Attraction. Intercultural Remarks on the Aesthetics of Gynoids and Sexbots in Pop Culture” (“Popular Inquiry” Aalto University, 2023). His fields of research are literary and intercultural aesthetics and intercultural studies. Andrew Keanie is a Lecturer in English at Ulster University. He has published widely on the English Romantics. He is the author of Hartley Coleridge: A Reassessment of His Life and Work (2008), Sprung From Divine Insanity: On the Harmonious Madness of Byron, Keats and Shelley (2018), and Genius Disregarded: Selected Poems of Hartley Coleridge (2021). He is also a poet, and his first collection, My Cave Art, was published in 2020. He lives just outside Dungiven with his wife and near his grown-­up daughter. Giuseppe Sofo is a Tenure-­track Assistant Professor (Rtd/B) in French Language and Translation at the Ca’ Foscari University, Venice. He received Ph.D. and Doctor Europaeus degrees from Avignon Université and La Sapienza, Rome. He has been a fellow of the Italian–French University and DAAD, and has taught at several universities in Italy, France, and the United States of America. He has published monographs on translation and has translated theater, fiction, and poetry from French, English, and German into Italian. Madelena Gonzalez studied at the Universities of Birmingham, Aix-­en-­Provence, and Vienna before settling in France. She is currently a Professor of Anglophone Literature at the University of Avignon and the head of the multidisciplinary research group “Cultural Identity, Texts and Theatricality” (ICTT). She is also in charge of the Master’s program in English Studies. She has published widely on contemporary Anglophone literature, theater, and culture. Emanuela Tegla is a literary critic and translator. She has published on various aspects on contemporary literature, including the volume on J.M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Power. Unsettling Complicity, Complacency and Confession and translated Petre Solomon’s memoirs on Paul Celan. The Romanian Dimension, published by the Syracuse University Press in 2019. D.J. Taylor is the author of thirteen novels, including English Settlement (1996), which won a Grinzane Cavour Award, and Trespass (1998) and Derby Day (2011), both of which were longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and most recently Flame Music (2023). His non-­fiction includes Orwell: The Life, which won the 2003 Whitbread Prize for Biography, The Prose Factory: Literary Life in England Since 1918 (2016), and Orwell: The New Life (2023). He lives in Norwich with his wife, the novelist Rachel Hore. Penelope Stenning graduated in English as a mature student from Royal Holloway College, London University, following her decision to elope as a sixteen-­year old from Lourdes Convent Grammar almost twenty-­five years earlier. She then began doctoral research at the Sussex University and taught English there before deciding to move to France in 2000, where she still lives. She is able to bring to the volume the double perspective of having experienced teaching and researching literature within the academy, and noted the absence of evaluation as part of that environment and that of a voracious reader within the unbounded community of those who live with literature as unprofessional connoisseurs, variously admiring and censorious and always open minded.



Notes on Contributors

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Rafe McGregor is a critical theorist publishing on culture, policing, and climate justice. He is the author of Literary Theory and Criminology (Routledge, 2023) and Narrative Justice (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2018) and affiliated with Edge Hill University (Criminology), the University of Rijeka (Philosophy), and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (General and Comparative Literature). Elisabetta Deriu completed her studies between Italy and France, where she obtained a doctorate from the University of Paris Est-­Créteil and a qualification as a Maître de Conférences in History. Early modern courts, mobility/transfers, and horsemanship are at the core of her research. As far as equestrian topics are concerned, Deriu gained a John H. Daniel’s Fellowship at NSLM and has recently published BibliothEques, a guide to the Vatican Apostolic Library and Archive’s manuscript equestria. Deriu is also a translator and a teacher and currently works in Rome. Amanda Finch is an early career researcher in Drama with a Ph.D. from Ulster University. Her current research explores the relationship between gender, violence, and comedy, using contemporary performances of Shakespeare as case studies. Her broader research interests include feminist and queer theory, gender and social justice, the representation of gendered violence in theater, and the role of costume in the performative representation. Dr. Karen Simecek is an Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Warwick. She is the author of  Philosophy of Lyric Voice:  the cognitive value of page and performance poetry  (Bloomsbury). Her research focuses on the philosophy of poetry with particular emphasis on the value of reading and engaging with poetry in the live performance alongside issues in metaphilosophy, the emotions and the cognitive value of art, and, in particular, how art can enhance our moral education.  She has published articles in the British Journal of Aesthetics, Changing English, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Philosophy and Literature, Philosophy Compass, and Metaphilosophy as well as appearing on BBC Radio 4’s Front Row. Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at The Open University. His research interests are in identity, politics, and drama. He has published journal articles on Northern Irish theater and LGBTQ+ representation in theater. He is writing four chapters for the upcoming Creative Writing Handbook from Bloomsbury, and a monograph on Irish theater is due out in 2024 from the University of Exter Press. As a writer–director, he has worked with major theaters, including Soho Theatre, London; 7:84 Theatre Company, Scotland; and Jagriti Theatre, India. Dr. Gary Anderson, Associate Professor and Head of Drama, Dance, Performance at Liverpool Hope University, specializes in Spinozist readings of applied arts and coordinates with Dr. Niamh Malone HMP to Hope, a long-­term project of inviting men living in prisons to consider university education, and has recently published “Odyssey on the Airwaves: A Journey from HMP to Hope,” in Sonic Engagement (eds. Woodland and Vachon) Routledge, 2023. Dr. Niamh Malone, Associate Professor and Head of International Relations at Liverpool Hope University’s Creative Campus, specializes in applied theater and coordinates with Dr. Gary Anderson HMP to Hope, a long-­term project of inviting men

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living in prisons to consider university education, and has recently published “Odyssey on the Airwaves: A Journey from HMP to Hope,”, in Sonic Engagement (eds. Woodland and Vachon) Routledge, 2023. Heidi Craig is an Assistant Professor (CLTA) of English at the University of Toronto. She is the author of Theatre Closure and the Paradoxical Rise of English Renaissance Drama in the Civil Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2023), and has published several articles and chapters on the production and reception of English drama during the theatrical prohibition of 1642–1660, on bibliography and digital humanities, and on rag pickers and textual culture. Kevin De Ornellas lectures on early modern and modern drama at Ulster University. He has published a monograph, a pedagogical book, a co-­edited two-­volume collection of essays, over a dozen peer-­reviewed essays in books and journals, a hundred reviews of books, plays, and exhibitions, and hundreds of encyclopedia articles. He serves on the Steering Committee of the Irish Renaissance Society; he is a member of the Management Committee of the Riverside Theatre, Coleraine; he is on the Committee of the Aberystwyth Bibliographical Group; he is a Judge for the Global Undergraduate Awards; he is a member of the Cambridge University Press Shakespeare Editions Panel; and he does academic consultancy work for Eton College, Windsor. Peter Barry, FEA, FLSW, is an Emeritus Professor of English at Aberystwyth University. He co-­edited English for The English Association, 1989–2007. His books include Issues in Contemporary Critical Theory; New British Poetries, co-­ed. R.G. Hampson; Beginning Theory, 4th edn., with translations in Korean, Hebrew, Ukrainian, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, plus pirates; Contemporary British Poetry and the City; English in Practice, 2nd edn.; Poetry Wars; Literature in Contexts; Reading Poetry; and Extending Ecocriticism, co-­ed. William Welstead. Richard Bradford has taught at Oxford, University of Wales, and Trinity College, Dublin. He is now Research Professor at Ulster University and Director of the Ulster Literary Biography Research Centre. His thirty-­eight books cover topics from eighteenth-­ century Criticism through Formalism and Crime Writing to Contemporary Fiction; and he has produced sixteen biographies of major writers for trade presses, all well-­reviewed and widely publicized. The latter have been serialized in the Sunday Times, the New York Times, and The Mail on Sunday, and have earned him appearances on BBC TV, Channel 4, Radio 4 “Front Row,” Radio 4 “Today” Programme, LBC, and other popular media platforms. His book most relevant to this volume is Is Shakespeare Any Good? And Other Questions on how to Evaluate Literature. Amy Burns is the Director of the Food and Consumer Testing Suite (FACTS) and is an expert in sensory analysis. She completed a B.Sc. in Nutritional Sciences at University College Cork (1996), MSc Biomedical Sciences (1997), and a Ph.D. at Ulster University (2001) before taking up a post in the Ulster Business School at UU. Aside from lecturing and managing the B.Sc. Consumer Studies program, Amy has set up the Food and Consumer Testing Suite (FACTS) in Ulster University Business School. She has published widely on aspects of nutrition and consumer issues, and her monograph Controlling Appetite appeared in 2009. Her areas of expertise include nutrition and food innovation, and she has adapted her research skills in sensory evaluation to the evaluative scrutiny of poetry in this volume.

Introduction Richard Bradford

Literary aesthetics, the artistic qualities and values of literature if you will, is a long-­serving concept—­as old as Plato, Aristotle, and Longinus—­that has been so savagely dismembered and battered both by literary critics and philosophers to defy even the most liberal, capacious attempt at a definition. Longinus, for example, was responsible for the concept of the sublime: he argued that sublimity is a supplement to the persuasive power of rhetoric, something that transports the reader’s emotions to a state of exaltation. Burke and Kant had doubts about the value of this linguistic drug; Pater and Wilde worshipped it irrationally; Adorno and Lyotard ridiculed it as proof of the limitations of bourgeois thinking. Had these been simply differences of opinion then the matter might in itself be interesting, but when we read these thinkers we encounter not so much disagreement as a lack of consensus on what they are discussing. No one seems clear on what the sublime actually involves, and even if some thread of continuity can be traced back to Longinus’s original thesis, a question remains. Did he argue that the sublime was a defining characteristic of literature? If so, what is literature supposed to do for us? Does it make us feel better? For those who did debate the function and purpose of literature, their exchanges resemble a conversation between figures speaking in different languages, each with only a slight knowledge of what the others are saying. Plato treated poets as superfluous to the proper functions of the state; Shaftesbury and Hobbes, in the eighteenth century, treated them as shifty chroniclers of the harmony or, otherwise, of the society they represented and wrote about. Friedrich von Schiller, conversely, considered the instability of literary works as part of a dialogue between art and the

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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undercurrents that society tried to disguise; in this, he anticipated such Marxist critics as Lukacs and Jameson. My point is that whenever we start to follow a trail that will, we hope, lead toward a conclusive principle of literary aesthetics, all we will encounter are byways, unanswered, and seemingly unanswerable questions about what literature is and what it does. There is no easy remedy to this dilemma, but it will be the purpose of this collection to provide signposts to how seemingly divergent routes sometimes overlap. If the most frequently cited contributors to the sub-­discipline of literary aesthetics have anything in common, it is a collective reluctance to say anything specific about literature. Instead, poems, plays, and novels become an adjunct to their pursuit of other agendas, usually far more elemental and philosophically profound. Matthew Arnold, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Friedrich Nietzsche appear to disagree on virtually all elements of literature and art, but look closer at their writings and a common feature emerges. They are not really interested in literature per se at all. Coleridge uses it as a model for his faintly bizarre ideas regarding perception; Arnold sees it as a substitute for the decline in Christian belief; and Nietzsche treats it as symptomatic of what Arnold fears that nineteenth century society is about to become, a delusional empathy with high emotion as a substitute for thinking. As for hard-­nosed “Theorists” from Barthes onward, it is a given assumption that the overriding principles of “text” or “discourse” have long overridden our expectation of being able to distinguish between “literary” language and everything else. We abolish notions of literary art and therefore also rule out an ability or inclination to make basic aesthetic distinctions between good and bad writing. The hypothesis is too absurd to merit a response. We know the difference between literary and non-­literary works much as we know the difference between a refrigerator and a motor car: our ability to make this distinction involves a facility generally referred to as common sense. Since the advent of Theory it has been a common assumption within universities that literature cannot be defined and academia has therefore absolved itself from addressing the question of literary quality. If we do not know what it is we cannot evaluate it, cannot compare this novel or that poem with another in terms of its stylistic execution and general significance. However, some contributors to this Companion take the view that literature can be treated as something recognizably different from other forms of language and set forth a methodology that demonstrates this. Others take for granted that particular genres and authors are discernible as literary by their very nature and treat this as the epistemological premise for their chapters. The principal purpose of this book is to build bridges between instinctive judgments and reasoned assessment. It will not attempt to impose upon readers a standard formula for the rating of literary texts—­in the end personal preference will play an important part in this—­but it will encourage readers to articulate and formulate arguments. The opening chapter by Peter Lamarque offers a critical survey of some of the main issues concerning the values of literature from a broader perspective of analytical aesthetics and the philosophy of literature. The topics are wide ranging, covering a variety of literary value judgments, the idea of an “institution” of literature, general reflections on the nature of value itself, including the relativity of values, intrinsic and instrumental values, subjectivity and objectivity, David Hume’s notion of “true judges,” the idea of a literary canon, the relation of literary interpretation and value, and finally

Introduction

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questions about how ethical and literary values might intersect. The purpose of this chapter is to offer a broad-­based intellectual framework to help contextualize many detailed and fine-­grained debates that arise across the board about literary evaluation. In Chapter 2, Anja Müller-­Wood considers the evaluation of literary narratives from the perspective of their “complexity.” To extend the meaning of this term beyond the sense of “intricacy” in which it is habitually used, she draws on recent work in narratology inspired by scientific attempts to understand, predict, and model complex systems in the real world. This interdisciplinary field connects well with contemporary process-­oriented notions of narrative, strengthening their claim that a sense of complexity, rather than constituting an integral and persistent feature in literary texts, is apprehended in the course of their reception. Her discussion of Thomas Middleton’s play The Revenger’s Tragedy and Joseph Conrad’s novel The Secret Agent sheds light on evasive “emergent” qualities underneath the overt structural intricacies of these texts, which might be considered tokens of their complexity and hence markers of their distinction, indeed “value.” After Oxford, D. J. Howells taught English up to “A” Level in a number of state schools in South Wales, and his “Schooled Aesthetic Asymmetries” looks at how various methodologies behind the notion of the inspirational teacher have skewed the way literature is studied at this level. Tracing its origins in the post-­war Romantic reaction to the formulaic teaching of evaluation earlier in the century, the chapter explores the aversion to non “life-­affirming” literature and rational analysis in general in questioning the canon. In addition to focusing on how Theory and philosophy have influenced classroom practice and exam-­board criteria, it argues that reasoned subjectivity is unavoidable in how we read and evaluate and, given that it is disagreement that gives literary criticism its meaning, individual judgement should be at the heart of an approach encouraging contention. In Chapter  5, Andrew Keanie defines literature on the basis of the self-­reflective character of the literary work. From this perspective, knowledge about the poetic origin of the text turns out to be a constitutive part of literariness, and the awareness of this specific essence becomes a condition of the full aesthetic fruition. This chapter reveals a sort of continuity between independent positions, dating from the beginning of aesthetic reflection to the present day. Aristotle emphasized the relationship between art and knowledge, and the poets of Early German Romanticism defined the essence of poetry by its self-­reflective character and pointed out artifice as one of the constitutive elements of the literary work. Since then, reflection on the poetic character of a work has become a constitutive part of modern literary creation, which necessarily encompasses criticism and creativity. From Wilde to Rilke and from Borges to Calvino, reflection on the definition of the literary work also turns into reflection on the sense of existence. Such a philosophical perspective presents the literary work as what opposes everyday life and, at the same time, paradoxically, as what reveals possible, unexpected meanings of life. Kathleen Raine’s poetry has no allegiance to the nineteenth century, twentieth century, or any century, and it is never a reaction to the news or a description of the environment. For more than half of the twentieth century, Raine wrote her poems, essays, and scholarly books out of the conviction that life is sacred and that the only “originality” in writing which has any value is a return to the lost knowledge of the Imagination (as promulgated by Plato and Plotinus). This kept her  totally at odds with the Marxism, modernism, postmodernism, social realism, and other materialistic critical attitudes of the time; so too

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did the fact that she championed William Blake and the Romantics, Edwin Muir, and other unfashionable or obscure writers. In comparing her writing with a number of her culturally streetwise contemporaries (such as T.S. Eliot, W.H. Auden, and William Empson), this chapter offers a reassessment of Raine’s achievement, including a sympathetic understanding of her vulnerability to the criticism and faint praise coming from reviewers who considered themselves more suitably down to earth and among the less deceived. Keanie revisits in some detail two reviews of Raine’s poetry, including a complimentary piece (at first glance) by the unlikely Philip Larkin. In Chapter  6, Giuseppe Sofo’s contribution focuses on the evaluation of translation. Translators and translations are in fact constantly evaluated at every stage and in all fields of translation. However, the process of evaluation is as crucial—­both for translation practice and the establishment and evolution of translation theory—­as it is complex and multifaceted. Even if we restrict the field to the evaluation of literary translation, leaving aside all other forms of translation, we still have to deal with an extremely heterogeneous set of approaches, all of them struggling to turn evaluation from a subjective form of interpretation of a translator’s work into an objective method of observation of the final product. Sofo highlights two distinct directions in the evaluation of translation: on the one hand, the value of literary translation as a whole, the merits and faults that have been attributed to this practice of transmission and transformation of literary works, which has at times been deemed impossible and very often an imperfect tool of the reproduction of the original, at its very best; on the other hand, the merits and faults of each unique instance of translation, how individual translations have been and can be evaluated, and how this evaluation has changed over the years, following the shifts in translation theory and practice. Madelena Gonzalez attempts to see whether the principle of an algorithm or automated system can be applied to the concept of beauty and to aesthetic judgment. The chapter uses examples from contemporary fiction and culture to test the hypothesis that aesthetic beauty and its evaluation can be explained by the application of a method. It explains how certain discernible formulaic elements and distinctive patterns can be identified in art and judged systematically. This being said, and despite the well-­known example of the Portrait of Edmond de Belamy, a work of art produced by an algorithm, the digital systematization of beauty seems a long way off. This chapter concludes with the contention that human beings are still, for the present, considerably more productive as artists than machines. The chapter on “Literary value and the question of insight on humanly relevant matters” by Emanuela Tegla explores the question of the importance of maintaining clarity of values in the evaluation of literary works as opposed to the current tendency toward extreme relativization and subjectivism. To this end, it appeals to philosophers and critics who, with lucidity and common sense, emphasize the paramount relevance of content, style, and the human dimension of literature. A brief but careful analysis of Buzzati’s novel, The Tartar Steppe, included in it, is meant to illustrate such aspects that need to guide literary creation, as well as evaluation, in order to offer the reader the possibility for better knowledge and human understanding. D. J. Taylor has taught in universities, but he makes his living as a freelance writer, producing widely acclaimed fiction, biographies, and studies of cultural history. He also appears regularly in the non-­printed media discussing books and other aspects of society. Every week he will write a review or review article for a national newspaper or magazine,

Introduction

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and in his chapter, he makes use of his experience in this last area to look at evaluation outside academia and how it underpins the persistent and sometimes brutal treatment of literature in the book pages. In Chapter 10, the reflections of Penelope Stenning are featured. She read English at the University of London and went on to teach the subject for a while at the University of Sussex. Before and since her experiences of literature in the university, she has treated it as a point of comparison for her impressions of the world as a whole—­she is an enthusiastic traveler—­her political beliefs, her friendships, and her role as mother and grandparent. In this regard, her piece merits comparison with Taylor’s. She has much to say on the notions of valuing and enjoying literature, but she does so from outside the constraints of academe. Rafe McGregor’s chapter is about the value of unfinished novels. Most unfinished novels that receive critical attention are of either sufficient quantity or quality to be evaluated like any other literary work, as either a novel or a fragment. Where neither of these approaches is appropriate, unfinished novels can be evaluated for their unique biographical significance, their poetics of process, or both. McGregor argues that Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Trickster demonstrates the rewards of the poetics of process as a distinct type of literary evaluation. In Chapter 12, Elisabetta Deriu shows that in the early modern period, assessments of horses and horse-­related activities can be found not only in treatises on horsemanship but also in other kinds of documents, especially if produced by or relating to a princely household. Whatever the textual source may be, not only the content but also the writing itself, vehiculating various equestrian topics, is often subjected to scrutiny. For the writing, foreign terminology in particular may prove challenging if the target language is not as equinely nuanced as the source. For the content, its quality and scope are strictly linked to and enhanced by the notions of nobility and usefulness (of the horse, of the master, and of horsemanship itself) and constantly appraised: accepted, dismissed, or further debated and developed over the years within the international koine of connoisseurs. Amanda Finch begins by exploring the reasons for evaluating theatre in performance and what is meant by the values that underpin production. She continues with an overview of key processes that are available for the analysis of performances, including a consideration of theatre semiotics, materialist aspects of production, audiences and reception theory, and the relationship between politics and form. The second half of the chapter puts these processes of analysis into practice with a discussion of Emma Rice’s 2016 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Shakespeare’s Globe. Drawing together so many analytic processes makes reading performance for the values underpinning production complex, but this chapter makes a case for why it is important in order to explore the cultural work that these performances do. In “Bridging the gap between page and performance poetry,” Karen Simecek highlights the need to consider diversity in the writing and performing (and therefore reception) of lyric poetry. This is not only important in appreciating the full range of aesthetic potential of poetry, but it also paves the way to more inclusive poetic criticism and understanding of poetics. In making her case, Simecek argues that we ought to view the poem as an event rather than an aesthetic object. In Chapter 15, Donall MacCathmhaoill makes the case that issues of literary evaluation can be explored by focusing on works that are made at the outer edge of literary acceptability and prestige: community and applied theatre.

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Richard Bradford

Applied theatre magnifies problems of literary evaluation: it does not do (and does not intend to do) what other forms of literature—­and theatre—­do. The form is therefore apt to trouble dominant ideas of quality in theatrical production. This work is primarily defined by its instrumentality, judged as worth doing (and worth funding) for the ability to address social issues and make audiences think differently about the target of the funder’s concerns. In order to achieve this, it relies on affective power: the ability to move an audience and to create a transformative emotional experience. It indicates a set of values or conditions that obtain quality and imply it—­ instrumental purpose, ideology, affective power, aesthetic value, and authenticity—­and conditions that, in combination and in contingent relation to the work, might enable quality to be identified. Gary Anderson and Niamh Malone describe Beyond Judgement, a critical community engagement project with local prisoners who facilitated a performed reading of Antonin Artaud’s seminal final radio work, on its 75th anniversary, “To be Done With the Judgement of God (1947).” This represents a UK premier (perhaps even a world first) of Artaud’s work in a prison setting, by and for prisoners. The main concern was co-­inventing a workable radio performance with prisoners while playing with the paradox of delivering “judgment” culture (taking in definitions from criminology through to Deleuzian and Braidottian philosophy) to a prison population who have suffered multiple deprivations in terms of formal education. Working with Artaud in prison settings presents the almost ideal conditions with which to leave our cultural judgments, literally, at the prison gate in the hope of more affirmative, even joyous cooperation with incarcerated men—­something they believe Artaud was already convinced of 75 years ago. In Chapter 17, Heidi Craig considers James Shirley’s middling reputation in seventeenth-­ century dramatic criticism, linking it with his status as the “last” major professional dramatist before the theatres closed in 1642. She performs a close reading of Shirley’s last play, The Court Secret, whose theatrical debut was thwarted by the prohibition on performance issued on 2 September 1642. The Court Secret is heavily indebted to the Fletcherian tragicomedy and amplifies the narrative complications (without necessarily amplifying value). “Chief of the Second-­Rate” argues that Shirley’s belated position and imitation of his dramatic predecessors all but ensured he would be compared with them and come up slightly short. James Shirley is, of course, the centrally important figure in the (alternative) literary history of the Kingdom of Britain and Ireland, declares Kevin De Ornellas in Chapter 18. As the national dramatist and the national poet of these happily united lands, he is as revered by the infinitely durable, centuries-­old Stuart monarchy as much as he is by popular audiences. Lapped up by children in school, studied in immense detail by researchers, constantly performed in state-­sanctioned arts institutions such as the Royal Shirley Company, and subject to unwavering hagiography in contemporary media, Shirley has truly been shown to be the writer for all times. This chapter simply pays tribute to the Shirley phenomenon: it explains the rise of Shirley by explaining both the cultural and historical factors that have caused the Stuarts’ favorite writer to be adopted so willingly by their loving subjects. With particular reference to Shirley’s humanity-­defining poem, “The Glories of our Blood and State,” and to his endlessly popular comedy, The Lady of Pleasure,

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there is a demonstration of the glorious efficacy of Shirley’s mastery of both finessed verse and universally appealing storytelling and theatricality. Peter Barry’s chapter is difficult to summarize because it is more like a conversation than a “discourse” focused on a given element of criticism, evaluation or aesthetics, and it is all the better for that. Most of the first part involves Siegfried Sassoon, who Barry brings to life, in the same way that real people are by varying degrees present, emotionally active yet enigmatically elusive. This sets the move for Barry’s reflections on the condition of literary studies as an academic discipline through the past few decades of its history, notably the reverberations caused by the retreat of Theory from the front line of academic criticism. He reaches no overarching conclusion. Indeed, he refuses to accept that evaluation can be tied to an impersonal, formal methodology but suggests that individuals should be allowed, encouraged to allow their estimate of the value of a work or its author to come from their private interface with both. In Chapter 20, Richard Bradford, on Modernism, embodies Barry’s injunction. Bradford looks at the conflicts between avant-­garde writers of the early twentieth century and those who treated their work as impenetrable and self-­indulgent. At the time, the latter came close to representing an evaluative consensus, but within ten years the anti-­Modernists had become a footnote in literary history. Bradford urges us to consider why exactly the doubters were opposed to Modernism, a question hardly ever addressed by those who now write about and teach the period. Were their objections based on an aesthetic rationale or were they simply intractable reactionaries who refused to accept the new? Bradford takes their side and argues that Modernism has seriously damaged literature. Is he playing devil’s advocate or promoting his own evaluative convictions and findings? The closing chapter on evaluating poetry, by Amy Burns and Richard Bradford, contemplates how we can assess a poet’s skill as a craftsman in his ability to control the relationship between the formal structures of verse and the undertow of ordinary language. It also looks at how poets deal with matters involving history and morality and considers why academic critics debase themselves by pretending that popular music is comparable with serious verse: Bob Dylan is mentioned.

1

Literary Values Peter Lamarque

The philosophy of literature, as developed by analytical philosophers, places the values of literature, implicitly or explicitly, at the center of its core debates. Is literature an honorific (value-­laden) concept or a descriptive one? What is literary interpretation if not primarily the uncovering of deeper significance and interest in works of literature? What about the pursuit of truth and knowledge? Is it not one of the most valued aspirations of literature? Can readers of novels not sharpen their moral sensibility, their empathy, or their understanding of human weakness, desires, and follies by engaging with the lives of fictional characters? Can the great works of fiction or poetry or drama not offer enduring psychological rewards, not just in the pleasures of literary artifice but in having the imagination stretched through immersion in worlds and possibilities well beyond the banalities of everyday life? These are some of the debates, even if no final resolution has emerged. Are there such distinctive literary values as implied in these debates? Is it possible to generalize across literary genres or are there only, at best, values of poetry, drama, the novel, the short story? How are individual works to be evaluated? Are there objective values or only values relative to individual readers or “communities”? Is there a canon of great works, and if so, how is it constructed? How do moral values relate to literary values? Can great works be immoral? These are live issues for the philosopher of literature.

The Varieties of Literary Value Judgments It would be wrong to think that our only interest in literary value judgments resides in simple judgments to the effect that such-­and-­such is a good novel or a beautiful poem. Bald value claims of this kind have little intrinsic interest. Such interest as they have, and A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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this is true of all value judgments, lies in the reasons offered in their support. A judgment that cannot be backed up is worthless. Those who are inclined to dismiss literary values as merely “subjective” or “personal opinion” are probably supposing that the only support for such judgments is of the form “because I like it.” However, although there is a place for personal preferences and likes and dislikes, these cannot be the sole basis for considered critical judgments. Literary criticism, as the term suggests, is inescapably connected to judgments of value, but these need not surface in a summative form (X is good, and Y is bad); they might emerge, even implicitly, through a detailed analysis. With well-­established works—­ canonical works—­a summative judgment is rarely needed. It is only when works in the canon are being challenged or non-­canonical works being reassessed that explicit judgments seem pertinent. Sometimes, for example, global judgments are made about whole schools of writing, notably in a period of canon revision: It is mainly due to him [T. S. Eliot] that no serious poet or critic today [i.e. 1932] can fail to realise that English poetry in the future must develop (if at all) along some other lines than that running from the Romantics through Tennyson, Swinburne, A Shropshire Lad, and Rupert Brooke. He has made a new start and established new bearings.1

The efforts of critics, such as T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis in the 1920s and 1930s, to demote Romantic poetry in favor of modernist poetry of the kind written by Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, were based on judgments of the comparative merits of the two schools of poetry, backed up by observations about the new social environment: “urban conditions, a sophisticated civilization, rapid change, and the mingling of cultures have destroyed the old rhythms and habits.”2 Staying at a general level of value, some judgments refer to generic faults (or strengths) in works. Here is Virginia Woolf commenting on the novelist George Meredith identifying both a local flaw in his novels and a flaw in any novel: [Meredith’s] teaching is too insistent. He cannot, even to hear the profoundest secret, suppress his own opinion. And there is nothing that characters in fiction resent more. If, they seem to argue, we have been called into existence merely to express Mr. Meredith’s views upon the universe, we would rather not exist at all. Thereupon they die; and a novel that is full of dead characters, even though it is also full of profound wisdom and exalted teaching, is not achieving its aim as a novel.3

If academic critics are primarily concerned with established works, or works that aspire to be so, journalistic critics focus on new works and are paid to offer their assessments. Readers go to such critics to seek guidance on their reading. Here judgments do tend to be explicit, although again the judgments are worthless without support: Successful literary thrillers in the mould of Umberto Eco’s “Name of the Rose” are the stuff of publishers’ dreams, and in [Iain] Pears’s novel [An Instance of the Fingerpost] they may have found a near-­perfect example of the genre. It is literary—­if that means intelligent and well written—­and for the reader who likes to be teased, who likes his plots as baroque and ingenious as possible, “An Instance of the Fingerpost” will not disappoint.4

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In a couple of sentences, the critic has identified the genre of the novel, by comparing it to another highly acclaimed work, valued it within that genre, and offered reasons why readers might enjoy it. Sometimes critics are unsure of the overall quality of a work and find good and bad ­elements in it: [Jane Eyre] is a very remarkable book. We are painfully alive to the moral, religious, and literary deficiencies of the picture, and such passages of beauty and power as we have quoted cannot redeem it, but it is impossible not to be spell-­bound with the freedom of the touch. It would be mere hackneyed courtesy to call it ‘fine writing’. It bears no impress of being ­written at all, but is poured out rather in the heat and hurry of an instinct ...5

A further kind of value judgment connects a summative assessment of a work with the success of localized detail in, or strategies of, the work: one of the triumphs of the novel [Bleak House] is the delicacy with which Dickens handles the knowledge, suspicions, guesses, and mistakes of the various characters.... Esther is never seen by the omniscient eye, nor does Tulkinghorn ever appear personally in Esther’s narrative. This corresponds to their limited knowledge; Tulkinghorn, for all his plotting, never knows of Esther’s relation to Lady Dedlock while there is no substantial evidence that Esther knows anything of her father until after her mother’s death. Granted this, the opportunities for dramatic irony are clearly enormous and it is to Dickens’s credit as an artist that with great tact he refuses many of the chances for irony offered by the interlocking narratives. How close—­all unknowing—­is Esther to meeting her father during her first visit to Krook’s? Yet we scarcely perceive this, even on a re-­reading of the novel. A lesser artist would have wrung dry the irony of such an incident, but Dickens is sound in his refusal to do so. For the novel, as it stands, is so taut, so potentially explosive, that to expatiate on, or to underline, its implications would make it quite intolerable.6

These are just some of the kinds of values that readers find in literary works. They show how natural and familiar such judgments are in the practice of reading, against an often heard complaint that talk of value in the arts is extraneous, elitist, or merely personal. Nevertheless, the roots of these values need careful exploration.

The Literary Institution and Appreciation Institutional accounts of literature provide a useful framework for exploring the fundamental bases for valuing literature as art. The claim of one such institutional account is that the very being and nature of literary works depend on an “institution” in a manner analogous to that in which the being and nature of a chess piece or an item of currency depend on, and are grounded in, a corresponding game or practice.7 Certain consequences follow immediately. One is that there would be no literary works without the institution; literary works are not “natural kinds,” just finely wrought stretches of language independent of specific purposes and actions. They are “institutional objects,” a concept that we shall return to later. Second, the existence of literary works depends on a set of conventions



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concerning how they are created, appreciated, and evaluated; in other words, on attitudes, expectations, and responses found in authors and readers. A third point directly arises from the chess/currency analogies. It is a feature of chess and currencies that there are multiple ways of instantiating the formal roles of the pieces in each case. The king in chess can not only be made of wood or plastic, be two inches or two feet high, take all kinds of stylized forms, but in fact it need have no physical manifestation at all. Chess can be played without a board by simply specifying moves. Likewise, there are any number of forms in which a dollar or fifty pence can be manifested. The institutional account of literature places no restrictions on the forms that literary works can take. Finally, there is nothing in the institutional account that implies restrictions on participants in the practice, their social class, age, gender, or ethnicity. To participate it is enough to know and conform to the conventions and to have had some initiation (“literary education”) into the rules of the practice. The institutional account also points to a contextualist ontology for literary works, as texts that are doubly embedded, both historically as a product of an act of creation at a time, by a person, in a literary-­cultural context, and institutionally, being of a kind that invites and rewards a certain mode of response as determined by a rule-­governed practice, guided by broadly conventional aims and expectations.8 These expectations concern matters such as: salience assigned to the design, form, and structure of a verbal artifact; the presentation of a subject with a reasonable degree of coherence and connectedness; and the development of a thematic interest that allows for deeper, more far-­reaching reflection on, and beyond, the particularities of the subject. To attend to a work with these expectations and to have them rewarded afford a species of pleasure—­aesthetic pleasure—­that inclines readers to spend time exploring what the work can offer. Value resides in the quality of the experience a work yields, focused on two broad dimensions: imaginativeness or creativity evident in the design of the work and the richness of its content at both subject and thematic levels. It is a striking but obvious fact that those works that reward appreciation to the highest degree will be those that readers are inclined to return to and explore in depth. Valuable works of art are those that sustain this kind of interest. Consider an example, Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sonnet “The Windhover,” which exhibits exceptional power and felicity in its language, in a way that seems to epitomize the poetic, indeed the aesthetic: I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-­ dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-­dawn-­drawn Falcon, in his riding Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing, As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-­bend: the hurl and gliding Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird,—­the achieve of, the mastery of the thing! Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

12

Peter Lamarque No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion Shine, and blue-­bleak embers, ah my dear, Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-­vermilion.9

It is more than just its rippling mellifluous melodies that have struck readers. There is a remarkably large body of secondary critical writing about this single poem. Why should that be? Why should some poems such as this, and not others, draw so much attention? The answer is that readers derive pleasure from reflecting on the poem; different readers notice different aspects of it and further reasons for returning to it. Here is a not untypical example: The triumph of this poem is precisely that perception of the likeness in the unlikeness, and of the poet’s own achievement—­the association of bird, self, and Christ. The “buckling” in line 10, then is a sort of gravitational centre, in the poem, where the conflation of figural levels “here,” in the poem itself, takes place as analogy is lifted to the level of allegory and interpretation. The octave of “The Windhover” is to a large degree about perception, but the sestet, a formal revision of the octave, is about re-­vision—­seeing again. Mere perception has become a different kind of vision, and brings the poet access to what we call the visionary.10

As is conventional, this critic notices factors about the poem’s form, its immediate subject, and the wider context of what it is “about,” interrelating all three. The poem elicits quite different interests from other readers: “The Windhover” most famously images Christ in highly equestrian terms, as an endearing “chevalier” (11). Yet, even there, amidst the aristocratic emblem of falconry, the kestrel is a symbol of “mastery” (8), iconizing “Brute beauty” (9), and the poem closes by falling heavily with the weight of the ploughman’s “sheer plod” (12). Any reader of Hopkins’s work, then, encounters a definitely masculine poetics.11

This reader pursues the partly biographical, partly literary critical theme in Hopkins of the “unswerving attention to the embodiment of divine power in differing types of working men,” in light of the idea that “the male body, especially the working-­class male body, has such potency, vitality, and, it has to be said, no uncertain danger in Hopkins’s aesthetics.”12 It is a mark of the great works of literature that a tradition of “readings” builds up around them, representing the fascination that readers have with the works and their desire to explore them further. Of course, it is not just the quantity of readings that indicates literary value but the nature of what these readings reveal. Works that reward continued interest will be those that are amenable to different perspectives, that have the capacity to surprise, and that open up new imaginative possibilities. Lesser works will simply not reward renewed attention. The framework of the literary institution also raises a further context for reflecting on value, which concerns the value of the institution itself. The emphasis thus far has been on the value attributed to individual works, but there are values attached to participation in the practice. Perhaps only quite general comments are possible here, but there are clearly values associated with both the production of works and their appreciation. Artists derive,



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if nothing else, at least some personal satisfaction and sense of fulfilment in producing works that give pleasure to those who appreciate them. In turn, appreciators can find intrinsic as well as instrumental value (ideas we shall return to) in the experience of literature. A literary education is an education in how to acquire worthwhile experiences of this kind, and it takes the form of initiation into some such practice. It is possible to stand back even further and ask about the roots in human life and human society of an institution that reveres certain kinds of linguistic artifacts and that encourages the constitutive benefits to producers and appreciators alike. Perhaps an ­evolutionary explanation is at hand, identifying adaptive features of storytelling or poetry.13 However, given the essential features associated with literature—­ language, design, ­imagination, play, “imitation,” and broad themes of human interest—­it is hardly ­surprising that the institution of literature is such a universal and inter-­cultural phenomenon. The imaginative realization in narrative (storytelling) of fundamental human concerns, about life and death, love, and despair, seems to manifest itself in all cultures, and the roots of poetry are found in song, ritual, and oral traditions. It is difficult to conceive of a society that could find no need for such activities. Whatever detailed explanation is forthcoming for the origins and durability of this phenomenon, its value within human life is there for all to see. The philosopher of literature, though, needs to provide a more down-­to-­earth account of the nature of values in the literary sphere. There are many misconceptions to overcome.

Key Distinctions about Value Valuing as x, as y The value we are exploring is literary value or the value a work has as literature or as art. The innocent seeming “as” is important because when we ask if something is good or valuable we usually need to know what kind of goodness or value is at stake. A paperweight might be good as a decorative object, poor as a paperweight, valuable as a family memento, valueless in financial terms, good for propping a door open, and bad for packing in a suitcase. When asked if it is valuable, it is reasonable to ask “valuable as what?” Note that to relativize values in this way is not to imply that values are relative in the sense that they are merely subjective or dependent on personal preference. Yes, values are relative to interests, but once the interests have been identified, there need be no further relativization. To judge something as a paperweight is to invoke clear, if basic, criteria: the object must be heavy enough to keep papers from blowing away, must be a manageable size (fit easily on a desk, for example), must not be so heavy that it takes two people to lift it, had better not be completely round as it would likely roll off, and so forth. Such criteria affect the design of a paperweight and help determine good or bad examples. Similarly, in asking what value a work has as literature or as art is to relativize value to particular interests. The interests in question relate to relevant conceptions of literature. If the generic conception of literature as belles lettres is at issue, then the question “Is it good as literature?” simply means “Is it fine writing?” Under a thicker conception of literature

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as art, more than just fine writing is looked for. The question now concerns how well the work rewards a certain kind of attention (“appreciation”), how receptive it is to literary critical modes of reading, and, in general, how well it conforms to the norms of the “institution.” Exactly what that entails is a primary topic for the philosophy of literature. Even works that are acknowledged to be literature (under the thicker conception) might reward attention other than a strictly literary one. Different interests can be involved. Social historians might have a legitimate interest in nineteenth-­century novels and judge some more highly than others for the purpose of shedding light on contemporary attitudes and conditions. Their judgments, arguably, are not literary judgments. Similarly, philologists might rank novels and novelists according to the contributions they make to linguistic innovation. Freudian psychoanalysts admire certain works for “anticipating” Freud’s theories of the unconscious; Freud himself singled out the relatively obscure novel Gradiva by Wilhelm Jensen and Schiller’s play Wallenstein for just this reason. Again his interests, and thus his judgments, were not, and did not purport to be, strictly literary critical ones. The works were valued for illuminating his theories. Just as reading is directed, so too is evaluating. More controversially, when readers choose novels for taking to the beach or going on holiday, they are not characteristically concerned with literary merit. They want “light entertainment,” “easy reading,” and something to help them relax and take their minds off work. Much genre fiction can be rated highly as fantasy or pure entertainment without having any literary aspiration. The distinction, though, is controversial because it is sometimes deemed to rest on elitism or snobbery rather than anything more intrinsic to the works. However, the charge is unfair, at least partially, because the values concerned are incommensurate. It is not that there is a single scale of value on which “literary” works rate highly and genre fiction rates lowly; rather, there are different scales. Judged as fantasy, the Harry Potter novels rank high, and Middlemarch ranks low. As tragedies, Hamlet is good, and What Ho, Jeeves is a non-­starter. Of course, some genre fiction also aspires to literary status, and on that scale can perform well—­Harry Potter might be an example or the spy novels of John Le Carré. But the fact that many genre novels neither invite nor reward systematic literary analysis should not be taken as a negative feature of them. Their merits lie elsewhere. The cheery but trite rhyming couplets in a birthday card might suit the purpose (of the card) very well but entirely lack literary interest. Part of the reason why comparisons continue to be made between literary and genre fiction, often to the detriment of the latter, is that the generic conception of belles lettres is being assumed. Genre fiction, so the thought goes, is just not as well written. But then that judgment is subject to the charge of snobbism. Why should works that are sometimes difficult to read (e.g., Henry James’s later novels) be more highly valued than straightforward storytelling? Only snobbism, it is said, could be the explanation. A number of confusions underlie this familiar spat. The first is that there is more to literary value, in the substantial sense of “literature,” than fine writing. James’s novels might fulfil the relevant criteria—­ beyond belles lettres—­better than a standard murder mystery. The second is that the idea of fine writing is itself a relative value as noted earlier; it is a matter of means and ends. The convoluted prose of James’s novels is only admired, if at all, because it serves, among other things, the literary purpose of exhibiting complexities, ambivalence, and fragility in human relations. If it were reproduced in a letter of condolence or a memo around the



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office or a popular whodunit, the writing would not be praised but thought pretentiously inappropriate. In a genre novel where suspense, action, or fantasy is paramount, the writing needs to conform to those ends. Another overriding problem is that in principle any work can be read as if it were literature in the substantial sense. It is always possible to undertake a critical analysis of any work, looking for unifying themes, character development, formal complexity, internal connectedness, moral seriousness, etc., but most genre fiction does not reward such attention, and the enquiry is seen as pointless and irrelevant. However, it should not be concluded that these works are of no value, only that their primary interest is not as literature. The debate cannot quite be left there, although the points about incommensurable values are important. Even ardent fans of murder mysteries, or other genres, are likely to concede that there is a broader framework in which comparative value judgments across works can be made. Within this framework, literary works of art—­those, as we have seen, that reward continued re-­readings—­seem to provide more lasting satisfaction, the chance for deeper and more reflective contemplation, than the self-­ confessedly ephemeral productions suitable for beach or birthday card. If there is a scale of lasting or rewarding pleasures, then literary works are likely to score higher. The thought is familiar from John Stuart Mill’s admittedly not uncontroversial discussion of “higher pleasures.” As Mill puts it, “there is no known Epicurean theory of life which does not assign to the pleasures of the intellect, of the feelings and imagination, and of the moral sentiments, a much higher value as pleasures than to those of mere sensation.”14 In the literary context, it is important to draw the right inference from this: not that there is no value in the works of non-­literary genre fiction or that they are intrinsically inferior or that canonical works of literature should always be promoted over these productions, only that the gains in quality of experience, lasting pleasure, and stimulation of the imagination are likely to be more rewarding from the former over the latter. There is still no reason to run the categories together and to suppose that genre fiction is trying and failing to do something that literary fiction does better.

Intrinsic and Instrumental Values A distinction related to that between reading as literature and reading as something else is the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental values. It is common to speak of works of art as valued for their own sake rather than for some extrinsic end.15 Clearly, to value a work of art as something other than art is not to value it for its intrinsic merit. Instrumental values of literature are associated with values attached to the effects of reading where these effects seem remote from artistically relevant qualities: they might include reminding me of my childhood, giving me the ability to pass an exam, or providing examples of psychoanalytic theory. Reading the works is instrumental in bringing about these desired effects, but the effects do not indicate intrinsic values. However, it cannot be quite right to draw the intrinsic/instrumental distinction exclusively in terms of the relevance or otherwise of effects. The intrinsic value of a work cannot be independent of all effects because works of art only have value for human beings.

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Peter Lamarque

The very existence of works of art is dependent on the responses of humans to art. Artistic values and thus literary values are, in that sense, response-­dependent values. Therefore, now the question is: which effects—­or which responses—­are directly related to a work’s intrinsic value, and which are merely “contingent” or instrumental effects? The question points to a complexity in the idea of intrinsic value. Philosophers can mean different things by this. One idea is that a work’s intrinsic value connects only to the properties of the work that are intrinsic to it, those properties that give it its unique character: these are primarily formal properties such as structure or composition, but by extension these properties incorporate vocabulary, subject, and theme. Another idea locates intrinsic value with the value of an experience intimately bound up with the work: this is usually connected to the pleasure that the work gives. In fact, the two ideas are related because the unique experience that a work yields is necessarily linked to the intrinsic properties of the work. However, once it is admitted that some effects of a work—­ such as pleasurable experience—­are linked to intrinsic value, where can the line be drawn between intrinsic and instrumental? Crucially, what becomes of properties such as learning, moral knowledge, heightened awareness, increased sensitivity to human affairs, and indeed any of the properties that might be considered under the heading of “cognitive”? Are these part of the intrinsic value of a work or are they instrumental values, i.e., merely beneficial consequences of reading? We seem to be pulled in two directions. Either we say that certain extrinsic-­looking properties, such as moral knowledge, are in fact intrinsic to a work and part of its intrinsic value, its value as a work of literature, or we say that certain genuinely extrinsic properties are a part of literary value, so literary value is not confined to intrinsic value. In both cases, though, we are caught with the problem of where to draw the line. After all, if we include all extrinsic properties—­such as helping to win prizes, make money, and impress friends—­as part of the value of reading literature, then we are in danger of losing the notion of a genuinely literary value. But if we include some but not all effects of reading among intrinsic values, why should just those effects—­associated with pleasurable experience—­be counted? One route out of the dilemma is not entirely satisfactory in the case of literature, namely, to appeal to a narrowly defined kind of aesthetic pleasure or aesthetic experience, which is closely tied to the intrinsic, formal properties of a work. This idea is often linked to notions such as “disinterested attention” or attention cut off from practical, utilitarian, political, or moral concern, involving contemplation of an object for its own sake. This might get around the problem of how pleasure could be both an effect wrought by a work and in some way intrinsic to it; it does not do justice, however, to a genuine literary response that goes far beyond the disinterested contemplation of a work’s formal properties.16 A more subtle account keeps the notion of experience, even aesthetic experience, as integral to artistic value but broadens this experience to include more than bare formalism. Malcolm Budd has defended a view of the value of art in terms of the experience a work offers: The value of a work of art as a work of art is intrinsic to the work in the sense that it is (determined by) the intrinsic value of the experience the work offers .... It should be remembered that the experience a work of art offers is an experience of the work itself, and the



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valuable qualities of a work are qualities of the work, not of the experience it offers. It is the nature of the work that endows the work with whatever artistic value it possesses; this nature is what is experienced in undergoing the experience the work offers; and the work’s artistic value is the intrinsic value of this experience. So a work of art is valuable as art if it is such that the experience it offers is intrinsically valuable.17

Budd is at pains to keep the connection, surely rightly, between what the work is like in itself and the valuable experiences it affords. But he rejects formalism and allows that the relevant experience might possess intrinsically, not merely as consequences, all of the following: “the invigoration of one’s consciousness, or a refined awareness of human psychology or political or social structures, or moral insight, or an imaginative identification with a sympathetic form of life or point of view that is not one’s own.”18 Therefore, here cognitive—­and other—­values are reinstated among the intrinsic values of a work. While this might seem a desirable outcome, it does put pressure both on the idea of “experience” and the intrinsic/instrumental distinction. Budd builds a lot into the term “experience,” requiring that an appropriate experience of a work be “imbued with an awareness of ... the aesthetically relevant properties of the work” and be “an experience of interacting with it in whatever way it demands if it is to be understood.” The crucial point is that the experience on which the value of a work is based is not just any response that the work might elicit in individual readers but is subject to norms of appropriateness. If a reader misunderstands a work or is unaware of its important aesthetic properties, then any value judgment of that reader will be compromised. It is a moot point whether Budd’s conception of experience leaves room for a non-­arbitrary distinction between intrinsic and instrumental values. It might, for example, be argued that acquiring a “refined awareness” or “moral insight” (two items on his list) must extend beyond an experience itself as both are dispositional properties, realizable in subsequent action long after any particular artistic experience has passed.19 This would suggest that they are distinct from experience and are consequences of experience; therefore, they are not intrinsic values of the experience. On the other hand, employing a notion such as that of “vision” might bring awareness and insight closer toward intrinsic experiential qualities. A further example might help. It seems to be a clearly instrumental property of a work that it cheered me up when I read it—­this is a beneficial effect but an effect nonetheless. In contrast, being cheerful might be an intrinsic property of the work. Recognizing its cheerfulness might be integral to a proper appreciation of the work. It is a different move altogether, though, to say that feeling cheerful or being cheered up is an experience demanded by the work when properly understood. The work property and the experience property never quite come together as intimately as that. Being cheered up, we might say, is not an aesthetic experience. However the issue of intrinsic/instrumental is resolved, it does seem that in seeking literary value we should seek it, as far as possible, in intrinsic rather than instrumental values, as that distinction is normally understood, although a good case can be made that intrinsic values include values associated with a fairly broadly conceived experience a work can offer. When focusing on literature, however, not merely art in general, a sharper conception of the relevant experiences is needed. That can be provided only by returning to core ideas of what literature is.

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Peter Lamarque

Text/Work If we seek the intrinsic value of a literary work, the value it has as a work of literature, where do we look? It might seem a hopelessly indeterminate matter trying to discern the value of a stretch of writing even if the value is limited to intrinsic value. Why should we expect any single kind of experience to be shared by all readers? This is indeed a problem if the focus is on texts. Let us define a text, in this context, as simply a string of sentences (or words) in a language endowed with the meanings assigned to the words by the language. It is hard to see how a text in itself, so defined, can have any value. A text only acquires value when it fulfils a purpose: it is valuable only to the extent that it fulfils the purpose well. A sentence used in a conversation has value if it conveys information intended by a speaker and grasped by a hearer. A work of literature—­a poem, a novel, a drama—­is not just a text in this sense but, as suggested earlier, an “institutional object,” a text located in a network of conventions and actions, i.e., a “work.” If we are to identify literary value, we must do so, as always, within the context of a relevant conception of the literary work. On the institutional conception, a work is defined through the conventions of a practice of reading and appreciation. A brief look at other institutional objects, as illustrated above, shows parallel cases of the locus of value. A chess piece, a playing card, or a banknote acquire their distinctive value only in the context of an “institution,” in this case a game or a banking system. Taken as a physical object, a chess piece has only the value, such as it is, of the object itself. If the piece is made of gold, then it is indeed valuable, but that is not a “chess value.” How do we account for its value as a chess piece? An explanation can only be given within the terms of the game. Within chess, a queen has more value than a pawn. Why? Because a queen has greater maneuverability than a pawn. Maneuverability is a criterion of value in chess. Of course, that is not to deny that in a particular game at a particular time, a pawn might be more powerful than the queen: the queen might be trapped and rendered momentarily useless, while the pawn is threatening checkmate. However, such circumstances do not undermine the general claim about the relative values of the pieces. Nor is there any inclination to think of these values as “merely subjective.” Someone might have an eccentric personal preference for pawns over queens; if so, that is indeed “subjective.” But it does nothing to impugn the objective fact that overall the queen has higher value than a pawn in the game of chess although, in some particular games, this pawn at this moment is more valuable than the queen in this position. Similar points can be made about the values of a playing card and a banknote. A card’s “face” value is its value determined by constitutive rules of card games: a 10 is higher than a 6, a King higher than a Jack, etc. Undoubtedly, local rules in particular games might vary these values. Banknotes too have “face” values, invariably more than the intrinsic value of the paper on which they are printed. Their monetary value, such as the value of a playing card, is not an arbitrary or subjective matter; rather, it follows agreed conventions. These simple examples show how uncontroversial it is in some cases to speak of an object’s possessing value relative to a practice or system of rules. The analogy between these cases and literature is only loose. The rules governing chess, for example, are stricter and more clearly defined than the conventions of literary practice. However, the fact that there are conventions governing responses to works “from a literary



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point of view” should not be denied. Not anything counts as a literary response or as taking a literary interest in a work. The conventions of the institution provide broad constraints on what kinds of attention literary works invite. The key analogy is in the way that an object (a piece of wood, a piece of paper, or a text) can acquire values it does not inherently possess in virtue of being assigned a status (a chess piece, a playing card, or a work) when located in a “practice” or rule-­governed framework. To speak of the intrinsic value of a literary work is potentially confusing because works can be confused with texts. Those who express skepticism about literary values often succumb to that confusion, basing their skepticism on the thought that mere texts have little or no intrinsic value and acquire such value as they have by being assigned value, perhaps arbitrarily, by those using the text. However, once we locate the text in a determinate practice and apply to it the protocols of literary critical analysis, we have not just a text but a work. The intrinsic value of a work becomes similar to the intrinsic value of a chess piece and unlike the intrinsic value of the material of which the piece is made. Literary value then becomes subject to the conventions of literary practice, just as chess value is dependent on the rules of chess. Exactly how the conventions of the practice determine value we will return to later although the idea is by no means obscure. In effect, a work reveals its value by showing how well it rewards familiar kinds of reading procedures.

Subjective/Objective Before considering the bases for particular literary value judgments, a few comments are needed about a distinction that frequently surfaces in this discussion, indeed which has done so already, between objective and subjective. These terms are notoriously ill defined yet they persist, and in doing so recall debates about “judgments of taste” going back to the eighteenth century. Objectivity is often associated with an ideal of science and as such is thought to be unobtainable in application to the arts. A truly objective judgment might be thought to be a judgment that characterizes an object as it is in itself quite apart from any attitude or viewpoint associated with a human observer.20 Even if that is too stringent a requirement, then at least objectivity is associated with properties of an object, while subjectivity makes reference to qualities in a perceiving subject. It became a fairly standard tenet in eighteenth-­century aesthetics that beauty was not an inherent quality of an object but in some way or other referred to the impression the object made on a perceiving subject. However, another equally standard tenet was to deny an out-­ and-­out subjectivity to “judgments of taste,” allowing at least for what subsequently became known as “intersubjectivity,” a shared and non-­arbitrary conformity of judgment. This was the line taken by both Hume and Kant, who felt that there was more to aesthetic judgment than just the expression of personal preferences. The idea of objectivity came to acquire connotations not so much of “belonging to the object” as of qualities in the judging subject, such as impartiality. An objective judgment becomes one that is not tainted with prejudice, interest, personal desire, or ulterior motives. In this way, it becomes possible to be “objective,” or to take an objective stance, toward value or beauty, without denying that beauty, in the original sense, is inherently subjective.

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Peter Lamarque

Lessons From Hume There is no need to explore eighteenth-­century theories in detail, not least because they were concerned with a more limited range of value judgments—­about beauty—­than are relevant in the philosophy of literature. However, of Hume and Kant, it was Hume who had the most to say about literary value; his contribution is important both for its insights and, arguably, for its mistakes. Hume notices that common sense moves in two directions on matters of aesthetic judgment: on the one hand, it affirms the maxim that “there is no disputing about taste” (extreme subjectivism, there being no dispute about an object as such), and, on the other hand, it rejects certain judgments as wild and unacceptable (supporting a species of objectivity or at least intersubjectivity). Hume offers a notorious literary example for the latter: Whoever would assert an equality of genius and elegance between Ogilby and Milton, or Bunyan and Addison, would be thought to defend no less an extravagance, than if he had maintained a mole-­hill to be as high as Teneriffe, or a pond as extensive as the ocean. Though there may be found persons, who give the preference to the former authors; no one pays attention to such a taste; and we pronounce without scruple the sentiment of these pretended critics to be absurd and ridiculous.21

The reason this passage is notorious is that the comparative judgments, which seemed so certain to Hume, seem far less so to us, in the twenty-­first century. Perhaps our contemporary common sense easily ranks John Milton, author of Paradise Lost, over the obscure seventeenth-­century poet and translator John Ogilby, who few currently have heard of, but common sense is much less confident in the relative merits of John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress, and Joseph Addison, eighteenth-­century essayist, poet, and editor of The Spectator. Bunyan seems to have passed the test of time (Hume’s own criterion of value) as well as Addison. What the example shows, contrary to Hume’s expectation, is that value judgments themselves do not always pass the test of time. Hume reflects a common opinion of his day that Addison was a wit and genius unsurpassed, but now Addison seems to be merely one clever author among others in a century of genius. Nevertheless, Hume’s purpose is not to rest value judgments on common sense in the “obvious” cases but on something more subtle and discriminating. What he hopes to show is that not anyone’s judgment is as valid as anyone else’s; to do that, he needs to characterize the qualities of a “true judge” whose considered pronouncements acquire a higher authority. Value judgments, or judgments of “taste,” are still subjective, in the sense of being founded on “sentiment,” but they acquire an intersubjective validity through arising from the sentiments of experienced and discerning judges. What such a judge possesses is a “delicacy of taste” backed by practice and comparison, unprejudiced, and informed by “good sense.” The lack of such qualities is nicely described by Hume: When the critic has no delicacy, he judges without any distinction, and is only affected by the grosser and more palpable qualities of the object: The finer touches pass unnoticed and disregarded. Where he is not aided by practice, his verdict is attended with confusion and hesitation. Where no comparison has been employed, the most frivolous beauties, such as rather merit the name of defects, are the object of his admiration. Where he lies under the



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influence of prejudice, all his natural sentiments are perverted. Where good sense is wanting, he is not qualified to discern the beauties of design and reasoning, which are the highest and most excellent.22

Such, Hume believes, is the state of most of us. True judges, who overcome these defects, are rare. However, Hume allows for some variation even among the deliverances of the most qualified judges, resting on either personal taste or cultural and historical attitudes. Personal predispositions cannot be eliminated altogether. As Hume nicely puts it, “At twenty, Ovid may be the favorite author; Horace at forty; and perhaps Tacitus at fifty.” He goes on: One person is more pleased with the sublime; another with the tender; a third with raillery. One has a strong sensibility to blemishes, and is extremely studious of correctness: Another has a more lively feeling of beauties, and pardons twenty absurdities and defects for one elevated or pathetic stroke.... Comedy, tragedy, satire, odes, have each its partisans, who prefer that particular species of writing to all others. It is plainly an error in a critic, to confine his approbation to one species or style of writing, and condemn all the rest. But it is almost impossible not to feel a predilection for that which suits our particular turn and disposition. Such preferences are innocent and unavoidable, and can never reasonably be the object of dispute.23

Hume is surely right that however hard we strive for a species of objectivity, or a “standard of taste,” in our value judgments there can be no denying individual predispositions. He is on more controversial ground when trying to find a place for cultural variations. On the whole, he thinks that a discerning critic should be able to make allowances for different manners and customs. However, he offers a famous exception: “where the ideas of morality and decency alter from one age to another, and where vicious manners are described, without being marked with the proper characters of blame and disapprobation; this must be allowed to disfigure the poem and to be a real deformity.”24 This species of “moralism,” as it has been called, is not universally conceded. It is a point to which we shall return. Hume’s overall position on critical judgments contains much to commend, notably the ideas that criticism calls for skill and training, that a degree of objectivity is possible in value judgments, and that there remains an ineliminable residue of personal preference or cultural difference not open to reasoned dispute. But there are problems with Hume’s account. One problem springs from what might be called his “naturalizing” of taste. He believes that by describing the dispositions, aptitudes, and attitudes of a true judge, he has assured soundness of judgment. However, he does so without reference to the peculiar nature of the objects being judged, in our case literary works. In a word, he does not acknowledge the “institutional” nature of literature and the conventions associated with literary reading. The “delicacy of taste” that Hume characterizes is of a generic kind applicable to different kinds of objects and different art forms. Admittedly, he requires that the true judges have “practice” over many examples and are able to affect “comparisons.” He also emphasizes that different arts have different ends or purposes, that of poetry being to “please by means of the passions and the imagination.”25 But our earlier observations have shown that the conventions for reading literary works are more specific than that. Therefore,

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Peter Lamarque

given that the required discernment must be appropriately directed, a more detailed account of the object of the discernment, as well as of the discerning subject, is called for. This Hume does not provide. Another problem for Hume’s account, often remarked, is his assumption that human nature has sufficient uniformity across time and culture to yield reasonably similar “sentiments” in appropriately qualified observers responding to the same objects. But there is every reason to believe that at least aesthetic sentiments have the potential for deep cultural differences. This might suggest that there can be no universal true judges, only true judges within specific cultural traditions. However, we must take care not to fall back on out-­and-­out relativism. As Hume himself observes—­instancing the lasting appeal of Homer—­there do seem to be works that are valued trans-­culturally. Certain myths and certain literary motifs, love and conflict, honor and shame, or self and other generate human interest across times and places. Canonical works in all traditions will treat such themes and as such can be open to non-­relativistic appraisal. Undoubtedly, there are culture-­specific literary modes or background assumptions, but Hume’s true judges can either make allowances for these or acknowledge them in the residue of differences. Nevertheless, the point about “naturalizing” taste arises again, for what matters in the search for universal values are not just common sentiments among true judges but common expectations arising from the very conception of literature. An important lesson from Hume is that literary appreciation is not merely based on arbitrary responses to literature but calls for powers of discernment that to a large extent can be cultivated through experience and training. The idea of “subjective” breaks down into at least two different senses: one refers to what Hume calls “sentiment,” the other merely to personal preference. Value judgments are subjective in the first sense, in that they are ultimately response-­dependent, there being no literary values independent of the experience of readers of literature; but they need not be subjective in the second sense. Recall that “objective” can mean “belonging to the object,” i.e., not subjective in the first sense, not dependent on human responses, or it can mean merely “impartial.” It is not uncommon for one and the same person to make an objective (i.e., impartial) judgment that goes one way and a subjective judgment (i.e., based on personal preference) that goes the other over a single work. Such a person might acknowledge that a work is “great” or “important” or “significant” while offering a negative personal view: “a good work but it doesn’t appeal to me.” Or the other way round, “I enjoyed it, but I agree it is not a great work.” These familiar locutions imply that there are standards that transcend personal preferences.

Being Valued/Being Valuable There is a species of relativism that holds that there is no more to literary value than the succession of local value judgments made at different times by different people. “Value,” writes one proponent of this view, “means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations according to particular criteria and in light of given purposes.”26 On this view, literary value judgments will vary from era to era, from culture to culture, and even from



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group to group: “literary value is radically relative and therefore ‘constantly variable’.”27 Any individual judgment that “X is good” means no more than “X is thought good by y.” There might be reasons offered for these judgments, but the reasons too will only be reasons for y. However, relativizing judgments in this way is problematic on several counts. First, there is Hume’s point that not all judgments are of equal standing. We need to know the authority, as it were, of the judges. Then the question arises of how the group (the “certain people”) is defined, whose values are being represented. Is it just any group of like-­minded people? Or is it a larger cultural grouping, within which there might be dissenting voices? In the extreme, it might reduce to a group of one individual, in which case the relativism collapses into radical subjectivism. In addition, logic indicates that “is valued” is not equivalent to “is valuable.” It is possible to state without contradiction that such and such is valued (e.g., by a group) but is not valuable. “X is valued” is a matter of fact, established by historical enquiry, while “X is valuable” is a matter of judgment. To be valuable is to be justifiably valued. It is often the case that authors are popular in their day but fall out of favor and are later judged to be “dated.” The verdict of history, as it were, is that the work is not of lasting value, which is not to deny that it was once highly valued. Relativists might predict that this state of affairs is the norm and that as social and cultural conditions change so too do values. What is difficult for relativists is to account for those works that do retain their values under changing conditions. Yet it is precisely such works that are deemed to be “canonical.” Before looking at canonicity, there is a further crucial point that counts against the radical relativizing of literary value. Because the very concept of literature is already an evaluative term, there is no neutral starting point from which literary values can develop and diverge. To start simply with “texts” and to ask which of those are valued is not yet to determine a particular species of value. To start with “works” of the relevant kind is already to have incorporated a basic judgment which is not itself relativized: a judgment that this work is open to literary consideration and that it is the kind of work that merits attention of the appropriate kind. Of course, relativists might insist that the identification of literature is indeed relative to parochial and changing contexts. What counts as literature, they insist, will differ at different times for different groups. But then it seems as if the concept of literature has been lost. If each group can decide what counts as a literary work, then there is no common measure by which different value judgments about literature can be compared. To make the disagreements about the values of literature interesting, there must be a shared basis for identifying the objects of those values. However, one more problem for relativists is that they tend to run together the question of how something came to be valued and the question of the basis or justification for its value. Loosely speaking, the former is concerned with causes, i.e., the historical factors that led to some works over others being valued, while the latter is concerned with reasons, i.e., the grounds on which a work is deemed valuable. The history of reception is an intellectual or political history. There are interesting stories to tell about how particular movements or authors or works became prominent. F. R. Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), mentioned earlier, was part of a concerted effort to change the taste of the poetry reading public from the Romantics and Georgians toward modernism. Efforts by other critics, for

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Peter Lamarque

example, in the 1950s, helped shift interest in drama toward writers such as Samuel Beckett and John Osborne. Undoubtedly, there are social and cultural factors that influence these shifts in taste. Arguably, neither could have taken place at an earlier point in history, even, say, forty years earlier. But that is not to deny that there were aesthetic considerations as well as historical ones that underlay the change. Part of Leavis’s case for preferring T. S. Eliot to Shelley is that Eliot skillfully deploys language to express the concerns of the modern age. Eliot, Leavis argued, was not just a good poet for the age but had found a new voice for traditional poetic themes: “The Waste Land remains a great positive achievement, and one of the first importance for English poetry. In it a mind fully alive in the age compels a poetic triumph out of the peculiar difficulties facing a poet in the age.”28 In our terms, we might say that The Waste Land became valued partly because of the efforts of critics such as Leavis (a matter of historical fact); it was shown to be valuable for many of the aesthetic reasons advanced by critics such as Leavis (a matter of literary judgment).

Canonicity Few debates among literary critics are so heated as that over the nature and foundations of the so-­called literary “canon.” There are many vested interests in the debate, some of a quasi-­political nature concerning the very basis on which literature is taught in schools and universities. The concern of the philosopher of literature is not with the underlying politics but with both the concept of canon itself and the validity of the arguments, for and against, as they bear on literary value.

The Idea of a Canon The idea of a canon was appropriated, relatively recently, by literary critics from theology: Over the last quarter of the twentieth century, the term canon, which previously had been restricted to the body of Sacred Scripture approved by ecclesiastical authority, attained general currency in academic circles as a designation for the corpus of secular literary works implicitly or explicitly endorsed by established cultural authority as worthy of preservation through reading and study.29

Prior to the introduction of this term, the idea of “tradition” held a more central place in critical vocabulary, as used by (for example) T. S. Eliot in his essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and F.  R.  Leavis in The Great Tradition. Although some of the same questions arise about the constitution of the literary tradition, arguably the term “tradition” is less contentious as it does not so provocatively invoke the idea of authority. Nevertheless, the notion that there are a number of key works across a long period of history, even across cultures, that help to shape and define literary value, is common to both “canon” and “tradition.” The question is: on what basis do works acquire this status?



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Historical Causes and Aesthetic Reasons Two prominent views show the polarization of the debate, drawing implicitly on a distinction familiar in philosophy, between cause and reason. On the one hand, first, there are those who explain the formation of the literary canon entirely in causal terms, specifically in terms of power: Since those with cultural power tend to be members of socially, economically, and politically established classes (or to serve them and identify their own interests with theirs), the texts that survive will tend to be those that appear to reflect and reinforce establishment ideologies.30

To answer the obvious objection that many canonical works seem to challenge established norms, the suggestion is that they are not really or deeply doing so: However much canonical works may be seen to ‘question’ secular vanities such as wealth, social position, and political power, ‘remind’ their readers of more elevated values and virtues, and oblige them to ‘confront’ such hard truths and harsh realities as their own mortality and the hidden griefs of obscure people, they would not be found to please long and well if they were seen radically to undercut establishment interests or effectively to subvert the ideologies that support them.31

As for the Humean thought that the test of time will weed out works of lesser value, such that only great works will survive from generation to generation, again appeal is made to the overwhelming power of the dominant classes: Since the texts that are selected and preserved by ‘time’ will always tend to be those which ‘fit’ (and indeed have often been designed to fit) their [i.e., the dominant classes’] characteristic needs, interests, resources, and purposes, that testing mechanism has its own built-­ in partialities.32

The scriptural notion of a canon is useful for advancing an argument of this kind because it presupposes that canonical works are based on authority. Works are deemed to be canonical only because they serve the interests of those authorities that establish the canon. The great author is great because he (occasionally even she) has managed to convey an authentic vision of life; and the role of the reader or critic is to listen respectfully to the voice of the author as it is expressed in the text. The literary canon of ‘great literature’ ensures that it is this ‘representative experience’ (one selected by male bourgeois critics) that is transmitted to future generations, rather than those deviant, unrepresentative experiences discoverable in much female, ethnic and working-­class writing. Anglo-­American feminist criticism has waged war on this self-­sufficient canonization of middle-­class male values.33

Arguments of this kind, citing the class and gender interests of critics, are used to promote “marginalized” works and authors. The danger with this style of argument, though, is that it can count against itself. If recognized literary virtues always reflect class

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and gender interests, then there can be no objective grounds for literary evaluation. Any purported reasons for giving a high evaluation to some particular work will turn out simply to be self-­serving or self-­justifying rationalizations. But then what becomes of “marginalized” works exemplified by “female, ethnic, and working-­class writing”? What kind of value can they be ascribed? Presumably, these works are no more subject to objective appraisal than the works promoted by “male bourgeois critics.” Therefore, instead of having the desirable consequence of broadening the canon, reassessing neglected works, and promoting a debate about values, this kind of argument closes off debate and, at its extreme, simply asserts the non-­rational and self-­serving opinions of another interest group. It should be added, of course, that not all feminist critics or supporters of marginalized writing do reject objective standards or recognized literary virtues. They are more likely to see these virtues, or similar ones, exemplified in hitherto unacknowledged places. They can also mount a case for new virtues that can be considered worthy. Defenders of the canon, in contrast to its critics, seek reasons why works acquire canonical status, not merely causes. The most obvious reasons invoke the intrinsic, or aesthetic, value of the works themselves. Harold Bloom has been one of the most vociferous literary critics both in defense of the aesthetic criterion of canonicity and in attacking those who propose ideological explanations. I myself would want to argue ... that aesthetic choice has always guided every secular aspect of canon formation, but that is a difficult argument to maintain at this time when the defence of the literary canon, like the assault against it, has become so heavily politicized. Ideological defences of the Western Canon are as pernicious in regard to aesthetic values as the onslaughts of attackers who seek to destroy the Canon or “open it up,” as they proclaim. Nothing is so essential to the Western Canon as its principles of selectivity, which are elitist only to the extent that they are founded upon severely artistic criteria.34

Bloom puts up a spirited defense of what he calls “the autonomy of the aesthetic.” Its “best defense,” he writes, “is the experience of reading King Lear and then seeing the play well performed. King Lear does not derive from a crisis in philosophy, nor can its power be explained away as a mystification somehow promoted by bourgeois institutions. It is the mark of the degeneracy of literary study that one is considered an eccentric for holding that the literary is not dependent upon the philosophical, and that the aesthetic is irreducible to ideology or to metaphysics. Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature ....”35 Bloom’s arguments in favor of the aesthetic criterion are perhaps not very strong and often rely more on passionate affirmation (“Shakespeare is the secular canon or even the secular scripture; forerunners and legatees alike are defined by him alone for canonical purposes”36) or on name-­calling (the “School of Resentment” characterizes his opponents). However, the force of his case rests not on philosophical argument but on example. His careful readings of the canonical works show what reasons there are for evaluating them; he shows why the works reward attention. That is not to say that his readings and his assessments could not be challenged, but at least he offered reasons that invite critical debate. The critic Frank Kermode also aims to relocate a notion of the aesthetic—­specifically the idea of “aesthetic pleasure”—­in the debate on canon formation as a counter to the view



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that the canon rests only on “collusion with the discourses of power.”37 However, Kermode weakens his case by seeking to naturalize the pleasures of literature, via Freud and Roland Barthes, appealing to notions such as sexuality (jouissance), transgression, and “dismay.” Undoubtedly, pleasure must play some role in the defense of intrinsic literary values, but it must be much more closely linked to distinctive modes of reading and appreciating literature than implied by the debate between Kermode and his fellow symposiasts. Any substantial discussion of the values of canonical literature must both look at particular cases and show in detail the kinds of reasons that might be given in support of the evaluations. Case studies can be revealing.38 The critic Willie van Peer, for example, has tested and sought to refute the hypothesis that canon formation exclusively arises from “collusion with the discourses of power,” specifically the hypothesis that If ... two works of literature deal with the same subject matter (and are also similar in other respects), the one that reflects and reinforces prevailing ideologies of dominant groups most closely will have more chances of ending up in the canon than the one that expresses criticism of such ideologies.39

He compares two works: versions of the Romeo and Juliet story, one by Shakespeare, the other an earlier version by Arthur Brooke, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet (1562). Van Peer shows how Brooke’s work is didactic and moralistic, “anti-­erotic and anti-­utopian in style and spirit,” and “demanding absolute adaptation of the individual to the prevailing social conditions, however arbitrary these may be, without critique, without reflection,” while Shakespeare’s play “shows us a utopian outlook on sexual relations between men and women, without stifling constraints of a rigid social order.”40 In light of this, and other evidence besides, if the “discourses of power” hypothesis were correct, then one might predict that of the two works it would be Brooke’s that became canonical. However, his novella is almost entirely forgotten. The analysis seeks to show, on the one hand, that Shakespeare’s work is far more subversive of prevailing ideologies than that of Brooke, while, on the other hand, that it is of a manifestly higher literary quality in its language, structure, and expressiveness. It is Shakespeare’s work, of course, that is canonical. A single example will not settle a deeply contested issue. Undoubtedly, there are many factors that influence canon formation, and we should not have to choose between a causal story and a story based on value judgments underpinned by critical reasoning. Both factors, without doubt, play a part. Appeal to reductive notions of pleasure is not adequate to explain the constitution of canons any more than are reductive accounts in terms of ideologies. Nor are parallels with the canon of scripture particularly illuminating. In the sense of “canon,” where it just means central and paradigmatic works of literature, there is no coordinated authority issuing fiats as to what works do and do not belong. The literary canon is not a static body of works; there is constant “revaluation” around the edges. Critics endlessly return to established works, reflecting on them anew both positively and negatively, but they also seek out new ones. The idea of a literary “tradition” weakens the notion of a controlling “authority” while introducing connotations of skills handed down. The skills of reading, reflecting on, and evaluating literature are defined not in terms of class, gender, race, nationality, or as the

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province of any social group but in terms of a “practice.” The practitioners who engage in the practice are identified, not in social terms, but in terms of the conventions and concepts that constitute the practice. There is nothing self-­serving about these practitioners—­ authors, readers, and lovers of literature—­so there are no externally defined interests they seek to promote.

Description, Interpretation, and Evaluation The practice of reading and appreciating literature as art shows the complex interplay of descriptive and evaluative elements in this process. It would be utterly simplistic to divide the process into statements of pure description on the one hand and value judgments on the other hand, especially with the additional assumption, sometimes made, that the former provide objectivity, rigor, and clarity, while the latter are subjective, open to bias, and extraneous. There are facts about literary works—­about period, rhetoric, structure, genre, and textual and semantic properties—­which are important to recognize. However, the idea that anything beyond the identification of facts is mere opinion is not only a misapprehension but invites an oversimplified quest for inferential principles moving from fact to value.

Thick and Thin Descriptions One benefit of the philosopher Frank Sibley’s aesthetics is his recognition of the subtly different ways in which descriptive and evaluative elements can interact in aesthetic concepts.41 Sometimes aesthetic descriptions are “thin,” in the sense that they do no more than offer a positive or negative evaluation: “beautiful,” “ugly,” “admirable.” Aesthetic characterizations, though, as Sibley shows, are not merely ways of evaluating works; they can also literally reveal the character of the work and the kind of work it is. Arguably, some aesthetic terms have a substantial descriptive content and function much like “thick” descriptions in ethics, such as courageous, honest, and merciful.42 The correct application of these terms to characterize human conduct seems to rest as much on observable features as on moral judgment.43 In paradigm cases, it is not just a “matter of opinion” whether someone is courageous or honest. Similarly, there are fairly clear bounds on what can count as melancholic, tragic, or comic in verse or prose. Hume, however, sounds a note of caution in the matter of “thick” descriptions in criticism: Every voice is united in applauding elegance, propriety, simplicity, spirit in writing; and in blaming fustian, affectation, coldness and a false brilliancy: But when critics come to particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes; and it is found, that they had affixed a very different meaning to their expressions.44

Hume is correct that readers can agree that elegance is good and affectation bad in literature but disagree over cases. The readers might not mean the same or might apply different



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criteria. On the other hand, not anything can count as elegant or affected, and someone might fail to recognize these qualities not because of disagreement over criteria but through a lack of perceptiveness, a failure to acquire the Sibleyan “gestalt.”

Interpretation and Value In this way, readers can fail in literary appreciation of a broader kind that involves interpretation. They might fully understand a work at a linguistic level but not grasp its literary significance and thus not its literary value. Here is an example, referring to George Eliot’s novel Silas Marner: The literary innocent will read Silas Marner ... merely as “a story of old-­fashioned village life” (as George Eliot described it to her publishers). He will not see the features which he may notice in the novel as requiring any further construal. For him the association of Silas’s gold and Eppie will be innocent of significance. He may notice, but he will attach no significance to, the fact that Eppie’s golden hair, in Silas’s first confusion after she walks through his open door, is seen by him as his gold; to the fact that Eppie is the daughter of the brother of the man who stole his gold; to the fact that Eppie takes the place in Silas’s life that the gold has occupied; that while the gold turns Silas away from society and his fellow men, Eppie again brings him into contact with other people, etc. He may notice, but will not attach any significance to, Silas’s short-­sightedness, George Eliot’s description of him as a weaving spider, the picture of Silas as linked to the loom and dominated by its rhythm, to the fact that he lives by the stone-­pit, that the wasted land around the stone-­pit is turned into a garden by Aaron, the gardener, under Eppie’s guidance when she is to marry Aaron, that the theft of his gold makes Silas keep his door open, that Dunstan is found with the gold at the bottom of the stone-­pit when this is drained, etc.45

The important terms here are “construal” and “significance.” The experienced reader of the novel offers the “literary innocent” a way of construing scenes that he or she otherwise might have passed over. Construal takes the form of assigning significance to passages that might seem merely incidental. This is partially the task of interpretation: to connect elements in a work by making them salient under a species of re-­description. Eppie’s golden hair is not just a minor narrative detail but symbolizes Eppie’s substitution in Silas’s life for the gold he has lost. To assign significance to a passage is to find a reason to attend to that passage. Literary value enters the picture at several levels. To read a novel as literature—­not merely as a diversion or escape—­is to bring to the novel an expectation that it will yield rewards for this kind of attention. It invites construal, the quest for significance, and appreciation in the sense discussed. The pleasure the novel affords is a product of the successful realization of the expectation of value. Not all novels will reward such an expectation. Further value judgments arise in asking about the effectiveness of detail, either in a narrative or in poetic imagery. However, it is not bare textual (i.e., linguistic) features that invite appraisal but features-­assigned-­significance-­under-­a-­construal. We might ask of Silas Marner: how effective is the motif of gold in the overall vision of the novel? How well do the details hang together to make this interesting and powerful? This

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value question cannot be answered without first exploring, through interpretation, the ways the motif is developed. Thus, evaluation is intimately tied to interpretation; it is not usefully contrasted with fact or description.

A Hermeneutic Circle An interesting version of the hermeneutic circle now presents itself with regard to evaluation. When we assess the effectiveness of a feature-­under-­a-­construal and find that it seems strained or weak, we are often forced to ask whether the perceived weakness is in the feature itself (i.e., in the work) or in the way the feature is construed (i.e., in the interpretation of the work). A small example might be the death of Krook by “spontaneous combustion” in a notorious passage in Dickens’ Bleak House. Even early on in the novel’s reception, the passage was criticized for being fantastical and opposed to scientific fact. Dickens himself in his preface to the novel is defensive, insisting that “before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject” and gave putative examples of the real thing. If we construe Krook’s death as simply the exaggerated dispatch of a despicable character, we might criticize the scene for its lack of verisimilitude. But if we construe it symbolically, it seems to have more power and interest. The critic Hillis Miller sees Krook’s death as fitting into a pattern of physical corruption and decay which characterizes the whole world of the fiction: “Krook is transformed into the basic elements of the world of the novel, fog, and mud. The heavy odor in the air ... and the ‘thick yellow liquor’ which forms on the windowsill as Krook burns  ...  are particularly horrible versions of these elements.”46 Value assessments of whole works characteristically develop out of judgments at the level of detail; indeed, reasons given for global judgments will be drawn from judgments at the local level. The interactions can occur down to the level of diction: These are lapses of style, and they extend, also, into Eva and Ruth’s interior voices. Boyd makes occasional resort to formulaic constructions: “There was something very odd happening here, I told myself,” says Ruth when she first notices her mother’s strange behaviour; and later: “Life is very strange, I told myself, you can never be sure of anything.” This is laziness from a writer capable of local, as well as global, brilliance. Take Ruth’s recollection, for example, of her dying father’s mania for turning out lightbulbs, a detail which is Chekhovian in its strange, unsolvable truth. It’s the interest, and insight, of Boyd’s overarching story that overwhelms these small complaints.47

A close interplay between interpretation and evaluation also occurs at the global level. When we judge a work as literature, we judge it not simply as a text or a story or as lines of verse, but always under some conception of what we think the work is seeking to achieve or what underpins its claim to our attention as a work of art. We arrive at that conception through interpretation. If we see the work as “biting political satire” or an “exposure of the horrors of war” or a “comic romance,” we judge its success in those terms. Another reader might conceive the work in different terms with different emphases. This might affect the value attributed to it.



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Ethical Criticism and Value One kind of assessment of literature has caused considerable debate, arguably going back to the ancient Greeks, concerning literature’s ethical content. The fact that literary works often—­though not always—­have ethical content is not in dispute, nor even that they can be judged for the ethical stance they take. The disputed question concerns the precise relation between ethical value and literary value. This is sometimes formulated, by philosophers, more narrowly as the question whether aesthetic value ever encompasses ethical value such that “the moral defects and/or merits of a work may figure in the aesthetic evaluation of the work.”48 The issue is important for it demands a more precise delimitation of what we have called intrinsic and instrumental values and what it is to value a work “as literature.” In fact, two separate issues can be identified on the status of “ethical criticism”: the first might be termed the “edification” issue and the second the “ethical flaw” issue.

The Edification Issue The edification issue relates to the more general debate about cognitive values in literature: is it a key literary value to educate or impart knowledge? A debate between, on the one hand, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum and the literary critic Wayne Booth, and, on the other hand, Richard A. Posner, a Circuit Judge at the United States Court of Appeals, has focused on the edification issue, specifically in the context of ethics.49 For Nussbaum and Booth, one central and important function of criticism is to elicit clarity and enlightenment on moral questions from literary works. Nussbaum’s book Poetic Justice set out to “commend ... certain works of literature to citizens and public officials, as a valuable source of deliberative enrichment.”50 She explains: “[f]ocusing on the analysis of compassion and on the role of the imagination in promoting compassion, I argue that certain specific literary works develop these imaginative abilities in a valuable way and are therefore helpful to citizens.”51 There is no need to argue whether certain works can be valuable in this way: that is not in dispute. There might be agreement over which works are better or worse for this purpose. The issue is whether this is a genuine literary value or just an instrumental value, even a kind of appropriation. However, in the Nussbaum–Posner debate, there is a sharp political and moral edge worth remarking. The value judgments at stake are not merely abstract but involve, as was the case with Plato, which books should appear on a syllabus. First, Nussbaum is aware of the distinction between intrinsic and instrumental values: Our thesis about the effects of literature is only in part a causal thesis, a thesis about what reading literature does to the personality. It is also, clearly, a conceptual thesis. We claim that the activities of imagination and emotion that the involved reader performs during the time of reading are not just instrumental to moral conduct, they are also examples of moral conduct, in the sense that they are examples of the type of emotional and imaginative activity that good ethical conduct involves.52

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Moral edification can appear in the process of reading, not just as a result of it. On the other hand, if edification is the desired end, perhaps the distinction is not that important. Posner responds by claiming not only that “there is nothing morally improving in literature itself,”53 but also that even in the favorable cases “[e]thical readings of works of literature tend to be reductive—­and digressive.”54 He regards as “repugnant” a view of ­literature that invites “ideological screening” of works that have a “bad influence.”55 Furthermore, there is little evidence, he argues, that any significant edification occurs: “[m]oral philosophers, their students, literary critics, and English majors are no more moral in attitude or behavior than their peers in other fields.”56 For Posner, we only have to look at the acknowledged canon of works to see how unsuitable most are for moral edification and, indeed, how widespread, by our contemporary lights, are ethical blemishes: The classics are full of moral atrocities—­as they appear to us today, and sometimes as they appeared to the more enlightened members of the author’s own society—­that the author apparently approved of. Rape, pillage, murder, human and animal sacrifice, concubinage, and slavery in the Iliad; misogyny in the Oresteia and countless other works; ... anti-­Semitism in more works of literature than one can count, including works by Shakespeare and Dickens; racism and sexism likewise; homophobia (think only of Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Mann’s “Death in Venice”); ... colonialism, imperialism, religious obscurantism, militarism, gratuitous violence, torture (as of Iago in Othello), and criminality; ... The world of literature is a moral anarchy. 57

Such ethical failings, according to Posner, are no more than one might expect from works of earlier periods: “[m]ost readers accept the presence of obsolete ethics in literature with the same equanimity that they accept the presence of obsolete military technology or antiquated diction or customs.”58 He also makes the point that the rare books that do promote ethically sound views are not for that reason highly regarded. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, “has not survived as literature ... even though its author’s opposition to slavery now commands universal assent.”59 Dickens’s Hard Times, one of Nussbaum’s case studies for edification, “illustrates ... the ... banality of literary moralizing.”60 The idea that literature is and should be valued as a source of moral edification has a long history appealing to Puritans and Marxists, as well as cultural critics, such as Matthew Arnold or F. R. Leavis, and eccentrics, such as Leo Tolstoy. Few have been overly concerned with whether edification is an intrinsic literary value or merely a convenient instrumental one. Arguably, though, the weakness of the instrumental case reveals a weakness in the intrinsic value case. If the end result is hard to detect or uneven and if most literary works are unsuitable for this purpose, then there seems to be no strong case for promoting moral edification as a deep achievement of literature. Furthermore, if ethical criticism, in its more polemical manifestations, entails attending to a literary work primarily to see how far it endorses the reader’s own moral and political beliefs, valuing it just to the extent that it does so, and promoting it to others as part of a moral education with the aim of spreading those beliefs, then this does not fit any paradigmatic conception of reading literature as literature. It looks more like the appropriation of literature for some further end. If the ethical reading is presented as literary interpretation, then the possibility remains of other ways of construing the work. Construed in a different way, the work might reveal different values.



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The Ethical Flaw Issue It is notable that those who address the “ethical flaw” issue, to which we now turn, take care from the outset to focus on the connection between the ethical and the aesthetic. The point of “moralism” of this kind is to argue that an ethical blemish in a work—­perhaps akin to those in Posner’s list above—­can at least in some cases amount to an aesthetic blemish, therefore a flaw in the work as art. Two prominent arguments have been advanced in support of such moralism: an argument from “uptake” and an argument from “merited response.”

Moderate Moralism and The Failure of Uptake The uptake argument originates with Noël Carroll’s defense of “moderate moralism,” the view that “in some instances a moral defect in an artwork can be an aesthetic defect ... and sometimes a moral virtue can count as an aesthetic virtue.”61 Carroll points out that narratives are “incomplete” and invite audiences to fill in details imaginatively and to respond in ways that the work invites. Classical tragedy invites audiences to respond with pity and fear at the downfall of the tragic hero, but, as Aristotle noted, if the hero is of the wrong kind—­too perfect or too evil—­then the response becomes impossible and the tragedy fails on its own terms. Carroll comments, “Failure to elicit pity and fear is a failure of tragedy qua tragedy, an aesthetic failure, a failure in the design of the work.”62 Sometimes the failure to secure the invited uptake rests on moral factors. Carroll gives the example of Brett Easton Ellis’s novel American Psycho: The author intended it as a satire of the rapacious eighties in the USA. He presented a serial killer as the symbol of the vaunted securities marketeer of Reagonomics. However, the serial killings depicted in the novel are so graphically brutal that readers are not able morally to get past the gore in order to savour the parody. Certainly Ellis made an aesthetic error.... He failed to appreciate that the readers would not be able to secure uptake of his themes in the face of the unprecedented violence. He invited the audience to view the murders as political satire and that was an invitation that they could not morally abide. His moral understanding of the possible significance of murders, such as the ones he depicted, was flawed, and he was condemned for promoting it. But that defect was also an aesthetic defect, inasmuch as it compromised the novel on its own terms.63

The structure of Carroll’s argument for moderate moralism can be captured as follows: 1 The perspective of a work in question is immoral. 2 The immorality portrayed subverts the possibility of uptake by a morally sensitive audience. (In the parallel case of tragedy, the response of pity is precluded.) 3 Any work that subverts the possibility of uptake by a morally sensitive audience would subvert the work qua work of art and is aesthetically defective. 4 Therefore, the work in question is aesthetically defective.64 The argument is subtle and has generated much debate, but it is far from clear that it establishes the strong position that in some cases a moral defect actually is an aesthetic

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defect.65 After all, the aesthetic defect arises from a mismatch of aim and response, and the ethical defect arises from a flawed ethical stance, so the constituents of the two defects are distinct. In addition, by introducing the idea of a “morally sensitive audience,” Carroll makes the question of response normative. The suggestion seems to be that the right kind of audience ought not to pursue the uptake invited. Then, the question is what the standard should be for appropriate uptake. Might not the “right” audience be less one that is morally sensitive, and more one that is sensitive to literature? It would beg the question to presume that the ideal reader of literature, one best able to recognize literary value, must have a heightened moral sensibility. Perhaps, the ideal reader (like Hume’s “true judge”) is someone able to set aside his or her own moral beliefs to enter the world of the work, and someone who is not morally squeamish. According to a position termed “immoralism,” “there can be, and indeed are, works whose value as art is enhanced in virtue of, rather than despite of, their morally defective character.”66 Arguably, too much moral sensitivity might blunt a critic to the appreciation of such works. It has even been suggested that Carroll’s own example of a morally reprehensible and aesthetically flawed work, American Psycho, might be open to reappraisal. The critic Anthony Lane comments, “Now, at a distance, the book reads better than it did; it feels lit with a kind of cold hellfire, and Ellis has become our most assiduous tour guide ... to the netherworld of the nineteen-­eighties.” The hero of the novel “is a type taken to the limit, and, if his story did not offend us, then Ellis ... would not be doing [his] job.”67 It should be noted that Carroll’s moralism is similar to, but not identical with, Hume’s. Hume, we recall from a passage quoted earlier, holds that “where vicious manners are described, without being marked with the proper characters of blame and disapprobation; this must be allowed to disfigure the poem, and to be a real deformity” (emphasis added). It is not the “vicious manners” themselves that disfigure the poem but the fact that they are endorsed (or not disavowed) by the poet. However, in Carroll’s example, Brett Easton Ellis is not actively promoting serial murder, but only using it as a satirical device. Admittedly, he does not show obvious “disapprobation,” but that is not the focus for Carroll’s uptake argument, which highlights instead Ellis’s failure to elicit the required response in his aim that readers should view gruesome killing as somehow humorous in satirizing the excesses of Wall Street. In other respects, though, Carroll is close to Hume, who writes “I cannot, nor is it proper I should, enter into such sentiments.” The key to the uptake argument is that sometimes readers are unable or unwilling to engage imaginatively with an author’s project, and on such occasions, uptake fails and an aesthetic flaw results. Set in this context, though, it seems as if morality is not the crucial issue so much as imaginability. Any work that is implausible or fantastical to a degree that readers cannot engage with it is an artistic failure. That “vicious manners”—­rather than, say, a fantastical portrayal of a race of people or a weird kind of building—­should prompt such a failure does not change the character of the artistic failure. Arguably, there is nothing special about immorality in explaining failure of this kind. In fact, underlying this kind of failure is a criterion centrally associated with literary value, namely, coherence. A work might be simply incoherent if it portrays states of affairs, immoral or otherwise, that are unimaginable or utterly implausible.68 However, there is a debate closely related to Carroll’s that does seem to suggest there is something special about the immorality cases with respect to imaginability. This is the



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so-­called “puzzle of imaginative resistance.”69 Philosophers have been puzzled by what looks like an asymmetry between kinds of imagining: imagining physical variations in the world and imagining moral variations. While there is little difficulty in, and little resistance to, imagining widely bizarre and fantastical physical departures from reality (in sci fi, fantasy, etc.), it can sometimes seem more difficult, more open to resistance, to imagine extreme moral deviations from moral norms. Once again, Hume is thought to have noticed some such asymmetry: Whatever speculative errors may be found in the polite writings of any age or country, they detract but little from the value of those compositions. There needs but a certain turn of thought or imagination to make us enter into all the opinions, which then prevailed, and relish the sentiments or conclusions derived from them. But a very violent effort is requisite to change our judgment of manners, and excite sentiments of approbation or blame, love or hatred, different from those to which the mind from long custom has been familiarized. And where a man is confident of the rectitude of that moral standard, by which he judges, he is justly jealous of it, and will not pervert the sentiments of his heart for a moment, in complaisance to any writer whatsoever.70

This is an observation of what we are prepared to tolerate in literature from distant times and lands. For Hume, it can be harder to stomach alien morals than alien science. However, where exactly is the “puzzle”? If it rests just on the psychological fact that some people find some things more or less difficult to imagine, then it does not seem of much philosophical interest. It is sometimes taken to be an issue about the limits of imagination. Can we imagine what is logically impossible? It is often thought that the limits of imaginability are the limits of conceivability, although that is disputed.71 But does imagining a morally deviant world, a world in which all our cherished norms are abandoned or mocked, demand something inconceivable? For Hume, such imagining is not impossible but requires a “very violent effort.” Again, it is important to distinguish works that merely present morally repugnant characters—­ Posner reminds us how many there are in the literary tradition—­and those that approve their actions or endorse their attitudes. For Hume, only the latter are blameworthy. However, from a reader’s point of view, imagining endorsing disagreeable attitudes is not the same as actually doing so. Is there, though, anything special about the immorality cases? There are plenty of things that readers resist imagining, for all kinds of reasons: they are too improbable, incoherent, repulsive, absurd, boring, frightening, or badly expressed. There is no compelling evidence that resistance is always stronger on moral matters, and that “too immoral” will always stand out in such a list. A further question is whether resistance to morally deviant fictions rests on an inability to imagine or an unwillingness to do so. The latter is weaker. There might be many reasons why readers are unwilling to imagine what a work prescribes, by no means limited to immorality. Likewise, an inability to imagine what is prescribed might also have many sources, from incoherent content to a reader’s imaginative impoverishment. This brings us back to value considerations and the uptake argument. Clearly, a reader who refuses to go on reading—­for whatever reason—­is making an implicit (negative) value judgment. Readers who cannot imagine something because it exceeds the limits of their imagination also fail in uptake. We can, then, concede the

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presence of imaginative resistance, in some cases, and it can be connected to literary value, but its sources seem far more varied than suggested by any simple dichotomy between the physical and the moral.

Ethicism and Merited Response The “merited response” argument does rest crucially on the immoral viewpoint being endorsed or prescribed by the author. Berys Gaut uses the argument in defense of a view he calls “ethicism,” defined as follows: the ethical assessment of attitudes manifested by works of art is a legitimate aspect of the aesthetic evaluation of those works, such that, if a work manifests ethically reprehensible attitudes, it is to that extent aesthetically defective, and if a work manifests ethically commendable attitudes, it is to that extent aesthetically meritorious ...72

Here is a summarized version of Gaut’s argument: 1 Prescribed responses to art works are subject to evaluation. 2 Some of the evaluative criteria for prescribed responses are ethical ones. 3 If a work prescribes a response that is unmerited, then the work has to that extent failed qua work of art. 4 Any defect in a work of art qua work of art is an aesthetic defect. 5 Therefore, ethical defects are aesthetic defects.73 Merited responses take different forms: “tragedies which do not merit fear and pity, horror films which do not merit horror, comedies which do not merit amusement, and so on, all fail aesthetically.”74 An issue parallel to that of immoral art concerns jokes, notably whether offensive or vicious jokes can succeed as jokes. The merited response line suggests not.75 However, some would argue that a joke succeeds, as a joke, simply if it is funny and people are amused by it; whether they ought to be amused, whether the joke “merits” the response, is beside the point.76 On the specifically moral application of the merited response view, a work fails aesthetically if it prescribes a response that is immoral, e.g., being amused by sadistic cruelty.77 The trouble is there are genres of fiction that deliberately, and arguably innocently, make light of sadistic cruelty and we laugh at it. An obvious case would be cartoons: when Tom beats Jerry into the ground with a mallet until he disappears, we are intended to laugh, and do so. It would be absurd to think there was an aesthetic failure here because laughing at sadistic cruelty is unmerited. But it is not uncommon for fiction to suspend conventions of propriety that hold in the real world. When Bertie Wooster steals a silver jug from his Aunt Agatha to get out of a predicament, we urge him on imaginatively, as the author encourages us to do. Does that mean we are endorsing stealing and dishonesty? Is our gleeful response immoral and thus unmerited? Worse still, is there a flaw in the work? With these consequences, the argument itself seems flawed.



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Another objection sometimes raised to Gaut’s ethicism is that premise 4, “Any defect in a work of art qua work of art is an aesthetic defect,” is unsubstantiated.78 Aesthetic defects might seem better limited to formal or structural features of a work, among which prescribed unmerited responses would surely not be included. Gaut himself simply stipulates that he is using “aesthetic value” to encompass any value of an object qua work of art. Our interest is in the intrinsic values of literature qua literature, and even if we grant the broadening of aesthetic to include the artistic more generally, it is not obvious that a literary work fails as literature when it prescribes a response that is immoral. A work might deliberately set out to flout conventional morality and might gain its power as literature from its skillful use of imaginative resources to that end. The work might be “shocking” or “dangerous” but not obviously a literary failure in the way that, admittedly, a tragedy fails if it is not tragic, or a horror story if it is not horrific. These latter cases can be conceded as literary failures (on the assumption, of course, that the initial interpretive construal as “tragedy” and “horror” can be sustained). Ethicism is convincing only if moral propriety is already accepted as an overriding literary constraint, but of course that is hopelessly circular.

Moralism and Formalism The debate over versions of moralism has been extensively pursued. Although the argument has been focused on positions with labels such as “moderate moralism” and “moderate autonomism,” there is always a tendency to abandon moderation in favor of sharper divides. The divide between formalism on the one hand and species of moralism on the other hand can seem unbreachable, with two clear visions of literary value: The first insists that the preservation of literary value rests on the containment of literature as an autonomous and non-­cognitive discourse, made safe from the encroachments of political or moral or commercial interests and defended through a formalist criticism with its own rigorous methodologies. The second acknowledges that literary texts have ethical and cognitive values and effects in the world, and that they must therefore be defended through containment within a minority culture serviced by an appropriately trained clerisy.79

Thus, when Posner attacks ethical criticism, he seeks to replace it with “aestheticism” of a Wildean kind,80 asserting that “the moral content of ... a work of literature has little to do either with the value of the work ... or with the pleasure to be derived from the work.”81 However, we are not forced to choose between formalism and moralism. Posner’s claim that moral content has little to do with the value of literature is surely extraordinary if taken literally. The great works of literature are full of “moral content,” but it does not follow that they are engaged in moral education or that they must be valued for the lessons they impart. The great canonical works afford immense pleasure to those who know and love them. They are monuments to the enduring human effort at revealing and understanding our deepest concerns about what it is to be human. To value them in their own right, as literary

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not scientific or philosophic explorations of these concerns, is to recognize them first and foremost as works of art. Few cultures have not had their own literary traditions, oral or written; the storytelling or poetic traditions have helped sustain the identity of the cultures in question, not to mention the very possibility of their being cultures in the first place.82

Notes 1 F.  R.  Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967), p. 28. 2 Ibid., p. 55. 3 Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader, Second Series (1932) (London: Hogarth Press, 1932), p. 234. 4 The New York Times, March 22, 1998. 5 Elizabeth Rigby, “Vanity Fair—­ and Jane Eyre,” Quarterly Review, 84–167, December 1848. Quoted in Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, ed. Richard J. Dunn (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1977), p. 452. 6 W. J. Harvey, “The Double Narrative of Bleak House,” in Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. George Ford and Sylvère Monod (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 969. 7 See Stein Haugom Olsen, The Structure of Literary Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978); Stein Haugom Olsen, The End of Literary Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 8 For a more detailed account, see Peter Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), Chs. 2, 4. 9 Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poetical Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Norman H. Mackenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 144. 10 Jennifer A. Wagner, “The Allegory of Form in Hopkins’s Religious Sonnets,” Nineteenth-­ Century Literature, vol. 47, no. 1, June (1992), pp. 32–48 at p. 37. 11 Joseph Bristow, “‘Churlsgrace’: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Working-­ Class

12 13

14

15

16

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18 19

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Male Body,” ELH, vol. 59, no. 3, Autumn (1992), pp. 693–711 at p. 697. Ibid., p. 694. See, for example, Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New  York: W.  W.  Norton, 1997). John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, ed. Mary Warnock (London: Fontana Press, 1986), p. 258. The concept of extrinsic is not identical to that of instrumental, even though both are commonly contrasted with intrinsic: an extrinsic property is a relational property, involving a relation to something beyond the object itself, while an instrumental value is a value arising from an object’s use or consequences. Some relational properties—­ for example what a work represents, refers to, or is about—­should not be excluded without further argument from the work’s intrinsic value. For objections to this account of aesthetic experience, see Noël Carroll, “Four Concepts of Aesthetic Experience,” in his Beyond Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 41–62. Malcolm Budd, Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music (Harmondsworth: Penguin Press, 1995), pp. 4–5. Ibid., p. 7. This point is made by Robert Stecker in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: An Introduction (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), p. 189. Something like this ideal of objectivity is described by Thomas Nagel, e.g., in Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 208.



Literary Values

21 David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” in The Philosophical Works of David Hume, ed. T.  H.  Green and T.  H.  Grose (London: Longman, Green, 1874–1875), vol. 3, p. 269. 22 Ibid., p. 278. 23 Ibid., p. 281. 24 Ibid., p. 282 25 Ibid., p. 277. 26 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 11. 27 Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 11. 28 Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry, p. 95. 29 Robert Alter, Canon and Creativity: Modern Writing and the Authority of Scripture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 1. 30 Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value, p. 51. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Toril Moi, Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 78. 34 Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New  York: Riverhead Books, 1994), p. 21. 35 Ibid., pp. 9–10. 36 Ibid., pp. 23–24. 37 Frank Kermode, Pleasure and Change: The Aesthetics of Canon (New  York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 38 Stein Haugom Olsen offers a case study arguing that certain specific works count as “artistic failures” disqualifying them from canonical status: “The Canon and Artistic Failure,” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 41, no. 3 July (2001), pp. 261–278. 39 Willie van Peer, “Canon Formation: Ideology or Aesthetic Quality?” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 36, no. 2, April (1996), pp. 97–108 at p. 98.

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40 Ibid., p. 104. 41 Frank Sibley, Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Papers on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 42 The notion of “thick” and “thin” moral concepts comes from Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985). 43 The point is made by Jerrold Levinson in “Aesthetic Properties, Evaluative Force, and Differences of Sensibility,” in Aesthetic Concepts: Essays After Sibley, ed. Emily Brady and Jerrold Levinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 63. 44 David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. 266. 45 Stein Haugom Olsen, “Value Judgments in Criticism,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 42, no. 2 (1983), pp. 125–136 at p. 134. 46 J. Hillis Miller, “The World of Bleak House,” in Charles Dickens, Bleak House, ed. George Ford and Sylvère Monod (New  York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 955. 47 David Mattin, Review of William Boyd’s Restless, in The Independent on Sunday, September 10, 2006. 48 Noël Carroll, “Moderate Moralism,” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 36, no.  3 (1996), pp. 223–238 at p. 236. 49 Richard A.  Posner, Law and Literature (Boston, MA: Harvard University Press; rev. and updated ed., 1998); Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 21, no.  1 (1997), pp.  1–27; Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism: Part Two,” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 22, no.  2 (1998), pp. 394–412. Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston, MA: Beacon Books, 1997); Nussbaum, “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism,” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 22, no. 2 (1998), pp. 343– 365. Wayne C.  Booth, The Company

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We  Keep:  An Ethics of Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Booth, “Why Banning Ethical Criticism Is a Serious Mistake,” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 22, no. 2 (1998), pp. 366–393. 50 Nussbaum, “Exactly and Responsibly,” p. 350. 51 Ibid. 52 Ibid., p. 355. 53 Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism,” p. 16. 54 Ibid., p. 12. 55 Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism: Part Two,” p. 398. 56 Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism,” p. 12. 57 Ibid., p.  5. For a similar list, making the same point, see Bloom, Western Canon, p. 28. 58 Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism,” p. 7. 59 Ibid. 60 Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism: Part Two,” p. 412. 61 Noël Carroll, “Moderate Moralism versus Moderate Autonomism,” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 38, no. 4 (1998), pp. 419–424 at p. 419. 62 Ibid., p. 420. 63 Noël Carroll, “Moderate Moralism,” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 36, no.  3 (1996), pp. 223–238 at p. 232. 64 This version of the argument is derived from James Anderson and Jeffrey Dean, “Moderate Autonomism,” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 38, no.  2 (1998), pp.  150–166 at pp.  156–157, and George Dickie, “The Triumph in Triumph of the Will,” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 45, no.  2 (2005), pp. 151–156 at pp. 151–152. 65 This is the objection of Anderson and Dean in “Moderate Autonomism,” and Dickie in “The Triumph in Triumph of the Will.” 66 Matthew Kieran, “Forbidden Knowledge: The Challenge of Immoralism,” in Art and Morality, ed. J.  Bermudez and S.  Gardner (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 72. See also D. Jacobson, “In Praise of Immoral Art,” Philosophical Topics, vol. 25, no. 1 (1997), pp. 155–199.

67 Anthony Lane, “To the Limit,” The New Yorker, April 17, 2000. Quoted in Daniel Jacobson, “Ethical Criticism and the Vice of Moderation,” in Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, ed. M. Kieran(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), p. 353. 68 Matthew Kieran has proposed a criterion of “intelligibility”: “The quality of the imaginative experience afforded by a narrative concerns its value as art and is, in part, a function of how intelligible that experience is. Intelligibility is thus internal to the evaluation of a work as art.” See Matthew Kieran, “In Defence of the Ethical Evaluation of Narrative Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 41, no. 1 (2001), pp. 26–38 at p. 35. 69 Tamar Szabó Gendler, “The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 97, no. 2 (2000); Kendall Walton, “Morals in Fiction and Fictional Morality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, suppl. vol. LXVIII (1994); Richard Moran, “The Expression of Feeling in Imagination,” Philosophical Review, vol. 103, no. 1 (1994); Derek Matravers, “Fictional Assent and the (so-­called) ‘Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance,” in Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. M. Kieran and D. Lopes (London: Routledge, 2003). 70 Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste,” p. 283. 71 For a useful discussion, see Kathleen Stock, “The Tower of Goldbach and Other Impossible Tales,” in Imagination, Philosophy, and the Arts, ed. M. Kieran and D. Lopes (London: Routledge, 2003). 72 Berys Gaut, “The Ethical Criticism of Art,” in Aesthetics and Ethics, ed. Jerrold Levinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 182–203 at p. 182. 73 Taken from Anderson and Dean, “Moderate Autonomism,” p. 158. 74 Berys Gaut, “Art and Ethics,” in The Routledge Companion to Aesthetics, ed. B.  Gaut and D. Lopes (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 351. 75 Berys Gaut has explicitly applied ethicism to jokes, arguing that “ethically bad attitudes



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Literary Values tend to diminish or undercut the funniness of a joke: the joke is flawed,” in “Just Joking: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Humor,” Philosophy and Literature, vol. 22, no.  1 (1998), pp. 51–68 at p. 64. For a discussion of the morality of jokes, see Jacobson, “In Praise of Immoral Art”; and Ted Cohen, Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), ch. 6. Gaut, “The Ethical Criticism of Art,” p. 192. E.g., Dickie, “The Triumph in Triumph of the Will.” Patricia Waugh, “Value: Criticism, Canons, and Evaluation,” in Literary Theory and

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Criticism, ed. Patricia Waugh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 78. 80 He endorses Oscar Wilde’s provocative dictum from the Preface of Picture of Dorian Gray, that “there is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.” 81 Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism: Part Two,” p. 394. 82 This chapter is a moderately revised and edited version of Chapter 7 of my book The Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009). Its aim is to give a critical overview of some of the key debates about the values of literature as pursued by analytical philosophers.

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Complexity as a Criterion for the Evaluation of Literature Anja Müller-­Wood

Introduction It is commonly assumed that complexity is an important criterion to assess the quality of literature, and the term is liberally used in both academic and popular contexts, although often without prior definition. Usually, “complexity” is employed in the sense of “intricacy,” a meaning adopted in the late eighteenth century1, and applied in this way to content as well as character in fiction (although the latter is also sometimes assumed to be a matter of the beholder’s own “cognitive complexity”)2. Although my goal in this chapter is to make this evasive term more tangible, I have not done so by providing an inventory of dependable indicators of complexity in literature; in fact, my focus is less on the complexity of the text and more on the way a sense of complexity is elicited in the process of reception. Although I have used concrete examples to make my point, I have not aimed for their interpretation or prescriptive interpretive judgments of them3. These examples are intended to highlight generalizable insights about complexity which can then be transferred to any other text for the sake of evaluation. My interest is formal rather than thematic, which means that I will not be talking about “difficult” texts or those that deal with “hard” topics or troubling moral dilemmas. To define the complexity-­generating narrative principles I am interested in, I have used recent work in narratology that has not only addressed this concept, but has also taken inspiration from (or developed in ways compatible with) the amorphous interdisciplinary field that, since the middle of the twentieth century, has tried to understand, predict, and model complex systems, which is sometimes termed complexity science. Narratology is a productive methodological framework in principle because, as Mieke Bal writes, it is

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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“a  tool for making the complexity of literature visible” (2019: 147). What complexity means, however, is not always made clear even by narratologists who use the term, and its definition seems to depend on authors’ allegiance to particular narratological schools. Authors representing more traditional narratological approaches, whose focus is above all on the text as a linguistic entity, have associated complexity with authorial artistry (as something that manifests itself in a writer’s skillful interweaving of narrative points of view, for example)4. In contrast, those who consider narrative more in terms of a communicative interaction between author, reader, and text and whose processual understanding of narrative also attends to its cognitive–affective dimension are potentially more open to the ideas of complexity science (even though these confront narratologists with the limitations of their object of study). As it is apparent, from the perspective of this communicative, process-­oriented branch of narratology, complexity is not so much a tangible linguistic identity that can be described through systematic analysis but a more evasive, “emergent” presence: it is apprehended rather than comprehended, affective rather than reflective (Walsh 2018b: 49), and therefore also ephemeral and difficult to explain. There are good reasons why literary scholars should take into account the considerations of a narratology shaded by scientific notions of complexity. Given the decades-­long debates around complexity in the natural sciences and their indubitable contribution to our understanding of the phenomenon (all criticism notwithstanding), it is only appropriate to acknowledge this research by testing customary disciplinary notions of complexity against it. Furthermore, however, this perspective opens a connection between complexity and affect that has a long pedigree in literary theory. The earliest known discussion of complexity in narrative art is Aristotle’s Poetics, in which the philosopher associates the phenomenon with the experience of recognition or anagnorisis, which is a vital factor in tragedy’s task of emotional purgation. Anagnorisis in the sense of a “matter of fact” acknowledgment of the state of things as they are (Gray 2019: 86)5 combines the cognitive and affective dimensions in a way that chimes with the ideas of complexity science or the narratology inspired by it. At the very least, therefore, adopting this perspective might reactivate these still relevant Aristotelian aesthetic principles. By extension, however, it could contribute to a more differentiated and self-­reflective understanding of what makes fiction complex. It would separate the study of complexity from theme, genre, and indeed ethical impulse and provide more grounded as well as less tendentious criteria for its identification and evaluation. A refined understanding of complexity, I believe, inevitably points readers toward a more complex understanding of fiction.

Approaching Complexity To define complexity seems an impossible feat. Even representatives of the interdisciplinary field that studies complexity acknowledge that they cannot provide a “rigorous definition” of its objects of study, but only an understanding of “the features which a Complex System should have” (Johnson 2010: 25; capitals in original). According to this research, complex systems are self-­organizing entities of agents or elements interacting to form new manifestations spontaneously and without the guidance of an “invisible hand”; they are recursive and capable of adapting to their environment

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(Johnson 2010: 25–28; Mitchell 2011: 12–13). Such complex systems are omnipresent in the world, manifesting themselves in a variety of forms, from natural phenomena such as beehives and ant colonies to traffic jams and stock market crashes. What distinguishes a complex system from a merely complicated one is described by the term “emergence.” The interactions of a complex system’s individual parts bring about a new entity equipped with traits that its individual components do not have. One of complexity science’s mantras is that a complex system is more than the sum of its parts, and this “more” is defined by the system’s “emergent” qualities. This means that emergence also points to something of a blind spot in the scientific conceptualization of complexity. In Marie-­Laure Ryan’s words, emergence “is a property of phenomena that we do not fully understand: how the individual elements of a system organize themselves into larger functional patterns without the top-­down guidance of a controlling authority” (2019: 42). The emphasis here is on not understanding fully. A complex system can be comprehended up to a point; the realization that its comprehension is incomplete, however, is itself a token of complexity, opening up a “double perspective” in which a sense of understanding is coupled with the simultaneous awareness of the failure of comprehension (Walsh 2018b, 54-­55). That the self-­reflexive exploration of this double perspective is not only an element identifying complexity but can also itself produce it is a point to which I will return at the end of this chapter. This brief précis emphasizes not only how taxing and evasive a concept complexity is even within the scientific contexts dedicated to it (something pointed out by the critics of complexity science), but also that the parameters of complexity science cannot be directly applied to the study of fiction. Fictional texts are no complex systems emerging spontaneously from more basic components, potentially morphing organically into new and unexpected forms. Most obviously, fiction is created by the far-­from-­invisible hands of authors who determine the shape of texts from the top down. Fiction is also temporal—­ received as a linear sequence—­rather than spatial, like a complex system. It is closed-­off, unconnected to, and uninfluenced by the world outside (however much it might be inspired by reality and might in turn inspire the reality of the reader). Finally, fiction is typically not concerned with anonymous systems but with the actions and interactions of individuals who distinguish themselves from the uniform mass. However, since fiction seems to share with the science of complexity a fundamental interest in understanding complex situations and phenomena, considering them together is not only warranted but also might be expedient. For instance, the concerns of contemporary complexity researchers appear to restate those of the many nineteenth-­ century novelists attending to the radical changes of their societies with an almost sociological mindset. One such author is George Eliot, who not only frequently uses the term complexity in her fictional and non-­fictional writing to describe the world and the experience of it, but whose crowded novels can be seen as simulations of complex environments that dovetail with other, scientific attempts of her time to grapple with an increasingly intricate social world (McWeeny 2009: 538). The Mill on the Floss (1860), a novel dealing with a complex situation of social change and its impact on individual lives, illustrates both Eliot’s attempt at narrating complexity and its limitations. The struggle between modernity and tradition that it depicts manifests itself in the intergenerational conflicts between its young protagonists Maggie and Tom Tulliver and



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their world. In an important passage, the narrator contrasts “the onward tendency of human things” with the “oppressive narrowness” of the provincial environment of close-­knit relations in which the novel is set. The protagonists incarnate this inevitable change—­they are individuals who “have risen above the mental level of the generation before them”—­but they are nevertheless unable to free themselves from their background, as they are “tied [to this world] by the strongest fibres of their hearts” (all quotes Eliot 2015: 252). The narrator’s gloss on the plot illustrates the problems with which the narrative representation of this complex reality is beset and testifies to what Walsh calls “the tendentiousness of narrative representation” (2018b: 50): the way narrative imposes an inevitably sequential order on the convoluted reality of human experience. In the example in question, this tendentiousness can be seen in the way Eliot establishes a contrastive constellation between past and present, young and old, and open and closed by way of explanation.6 This contrast is elaborated with the aid of a historical analogy comparing the ruined “heroic” castles on the Rhine and the dilapidated villages on the Rhône—­ presumably symbols of romantic heroism and self-­ inflicted paralysis respectively—­with the latter epitomizing the environment in which the protagonists grow up. The allegory underlines how the description of complexity almost inevitably leads to fictionalization, here marked by metonymic displacement. In reimagining a complex situation in an explanatory story, Eliot misses what is complex about the moment of transformation she aims to capture. In that, the passage reveals an apparently inevitable tendency in fictional attempts to depict complex systems: they typically result in descriptive “narrative[s] of emergence” rather than presenting “emergent narrative[s]” (Ryan 2019: 42). In that, this passage is at odds with Eliot’s obvious interest in making the ephemeral aspects of complexity tangible. She often associates the term “complexity” with inconceivable but meaningful emotional experiences—­ what she called “the truth of feeling” (Eliot quoted in Levine  1965: 402). In The Mill on the Floss, for instance, she remarks on “the mysterious complexity of our life” (2015: 461), mockingly refers to “the complexity introduced into the emotions by a high state of civilisation” (2015: 53) and defines truth as a “complex, fragmentary, doubt-­provoking knowledge” (2015: 422). Such associations of complexity with mysteriousness, emotion, and doubt foreground Eliot’s affective aesthetics and her interest in reader responses: in the case of The Mill on the Floss to “the suffering, whether of martyr or victim, which belongs to every historical advance of mankind” (2015: 253). For Eliot, art’s ability to precisely capture this indescribable dimension of social reality is what makes it infinitely superior to social theory7; in whichever mode, art is a simulation of life (“a picture of human life”) capable of generating empathic responses. In that, it fulfils the ethical task of “exten[ding] [...] our sympathies” and gives “attention to what is a part from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment” (Eliot 1990: 110). I propose that the empathic responses to the “picture of human life” presented by an artwork can be taken as markers of emergence, arising from the artwork without being identical with it. This “raw material of moral sentiment” manifests itself outside of the text, in readers’ reactions to it. Whether or not Eliot herself generates such reactions in her own writing is beside the point; her propositions can nevertheless serve as a springboard for the discussion of complexity in general.

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If fiction generates affective responses, how can these be conceptualized without jeopardizing the complexity that brings them about? As a first step, it would seem necessary to abandon an exclusive focus on the text and its inherent meaning and develop a recipient-­ oriented perspective. This might also require the use of a more basic terminology for the investigation of fiction rather than conventionalized categories, such as “stories” or “fiction.” Writing from a broadly cognitive perspective, Richard Walsh suggests that the term “narrative” is more helpful as it presents a “primary mode of thought” or “basic cognitive mode of sensemaking that creates meaningful form with a specific temporal logic” (2018a: 12). Narrative is thus not—­or not only—­a form created by authors as text but the ubiquitous “linear logic” of making sense of the world (Walsh 2018a: 16–17). This assumption is the basis of Walsh’s pared-­down definition of narrative that can be productive for the discussion of complexity: “narrative is the semiotic articulation of linear temporal sequence” (Walsh 2018a: 12). While the term “articulation” emphasizes his interest in a general “sense-­making process,” rather than one limited to linguistic expression, the term “semiotic” underlines that this sense-­ making process manifests itself in any kind of sign making, including drama and film. The term “sequence” serves to capture a very fundamental “bare transition from formlessness to a specific (total) order” (Walsh  2018a: 13), in contradistinction to an already causal category such as “event.” Now it might seem that even in this definition narrative retains the ordering element of linearity that would appear to limit its potential to be complex. However, when placed within Walsh’s pragmatic and processual framework, narrative thus defined becomes a helpful basic unit to understand the communicative exchange that is literature. It also provides a productive basis for the recognition and exploration of the inherent potential for complexity in narratives, which are in fact “themselves instances of the non-­linear dynamic systems that they are so ill-­equipped to represent” (Walsh 2018a: 17). Narratives are breeding grounds for a proliferation of meaning not least because the language that constitutes them is non-­linear itself (Ryan 2019: 43)8; in them, meaning is contextual and implicit rather than essential and explicit, every denotation potentially launching a string of unruly and personal connotations that in turn have a bearing on recipients’ affective responses. Although all narratives are in the end the products of an author whose intention delimits their connotational scope, they nevertheless always contain the potential to mean more than they say—­and in that sense to become complex themselves. The measure of a narrative’s complexity, and therefore its value, lies somewhere in between these poles of restriction and plenitude. Keeping Walsh’s parameters in mind, I now turn to explore complexity in two ostensibly very different texts: Thomas Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606) and Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907). Walsh’s open definition allows me to consider them both as “narratives” despite their different genres. These sources are compatible and mutually illuminating insofar as they not only depict complexity but also create the basis for affective responses that might be considered symptomatic of a genuine narrative complexity. My discussion will single out two features of narrative in which such symptoms of complexity can emerge—­its perspectival quality and its linearity—­with the aim of demonstrating not only how authors attempt to exploit these principles to create complexity, but also how this might be the basis for other, less tangible forms of complexity, which in turn might provide criteria for the evaluation of these texts.



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Complexity in Fictional Narratives Complexity and Perspective One might be led to think that the complexity of a narrative has to do with its volume: the bigger the book, the more complex it must be. What generates complexity in narrative, however, is not the sheer bulk of a text or the quality (or difficulty) of the information contained in it, but the intricateness of its presentation. One reason why narrative can be intricate at all is that any narration is always intrinsically “spatiotemporally perspectival” (Walsh  2018a: 20). Even in the presence of narrative omniscience (or in apparently narratorless texts), readers are likely to assume a concrete, inevitably anthropomorphic point of view (Walsh  2018a: 21–22). Furthermore, narratives are rarely completely monoperspectival but typically consist of a fabric of interwoven points of view, sometimes also on more than one temporal level (say, in a frame narrative or a narrative told in retrospect). One implication of this interplay between character perspectives and the resulting impression of complexity is that it distributes information differently among characters; this information imbalance within the plot is a powerful, affect-­generating device beyond the limits of a narrative, raising expectations on the part of recipients and inviting speculation about the development of the plot. In other words, the perspective nature of narrative creates opportunities for narrative effects predicated on the reader’s informational advantage: suspense and dramatic/narrative irony. However, even multiperspectivity does not inevitably mean complexity, as Marie-­Laure Ryan points out: “The complexity of a plot is not a function of the number of characters or of events, but a matter of interconnection” (2019: 37). Narratives consisting of different plot strands running alongside each other might be complicated, even united by themes, motifs, and vocabulary, but they are not complex if these strands are not related by causal connections. Plots that are interconnected, however, can be taken as simulations of “dynamic networks of human (or humanlike) relations” (Ryan 2019: 33)—­in other words, as complex systems. To support her point, Ryan draws an analogy between fictional narratives and complex systems as described by the complexity scientist Melanie Mitchell. Accordingly, in fiction as in a real complex system, characters are equipped with motivations and goals, circulate information among themselves, and respond to altered circumstances within the storyworld (Ryan 2019: 33). Plays are better suited to an analysis in light of these “systemic” parameters than other narratives, as drama is pure action, that is, perspective unmediated by a narrator (Pfister 1974: 18–21). My example, The Revenger’s Tragedy by Thomas Middleton, one play from the canon of revenge tragedies so popular during the English Renaissance, can be considered as a complex system in the way proposed by Ryan, as in it a basic conflict associated with the protagonist comes under the influence of other characters’ perspectives, resulting in further apparently random character constellations as the plot proceeds. The play opens with a lengthy speech in which its protagonist, the revenger Vindice, announces his vendetta against the Duke of the nameless Italian city state in which the play is set for the murder of Vindice’s betrothed Gloriana nine years prior to the plot. However, the vendetta is hardly off the ground when it is crossed by the interests of another character, the Duke’s son and heir Lussurioso, to whom Vindice has recommended himself under a

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false identity (he calls himself “Piato”). For Vindice, Lussurioso is the ticket into court society, where he expects opportunities to kill the Duke. Lussurioso, by contrast, unaware of the real identity of “Piato,” plans to use his hireling to gain access to Castiza, Vindice’s virtuous sister. Finding himself suddenly confronted with another enemy, Vindice ingeniously manages to play the Duke and his son off against one another without their being aware of it, causing first Lussurioso’s imprisonment and then the death of the Duke, until Lussurioso, disappointed with “Piato’s” failings, recruits Vindice to assassinate his lackey. The play was treated as a narrative system already some time ago by Thomas S. Pavel, who singled it out as an example to illustrate what he called the “plot grammar” of Renaissance drama. One task of this grammar is to elucidate plot advancement, that is, “the simple and obvious fact that narrative structures link together actions performed by characters” (Pavel 1982: 32). The most fundamental component of this grammar is what Pavel calls “a move,” which he defines as “an action” that “brings about another move” (1982: 33). This interaction can either result in a solution of sorts or cause further actions, depending on whether and how moves bring about solutions to problems. Accordingly, for Pavel, a plot is “a structure of Moves characterized by a constant number of actors and by the exhaustion of the Problem load via successful or unsuccessful Solutions” (1982: 35–36). In addition to a plot’s clearly defined antagonists, Renaissance plays—­especially those that exploit the multiple-­plot structure typical for the drama of the time—­contain secondary characters that Pavel calls “auxiliaries.” Although their interests are not causally related to another character’s move, nevertheless, their actions inadvertently interfere with it, exacerbating problems and potentially deferring solutions. This category is crucial to The Revenger’s Tragedy, whose plot is dominated by auxiliaries interacting inadvertently and without bringing about solutions. This is a covertly conflictual world, in which there is “no conflict in the narrow sense of ‘open confrontation’,” so that “each group pursues its own interests, usually without any awareness of the other’s purposes” (Pavel 1982: 42). For instance, when Lussurioso asks “Piato” to procure Castiza for him, he is entirely unaware of the other man’s identity, let alone of the moral quandary generated by his assignment and its implications for himself. The inadvertence of interactions still makes for an elaborate plot, but it is one in which “everything happens rather by chance and each Move is related to some unwise Move of another character” (Pavel  1982: 42). The element of chance makes the world of The Revenger’s Tragedy a “narratively chaotic universe” in which a sense of “instability and unpredictability” (Pavel 1982: 42) prevails. In that sense, it can be described as a complex system. The complexity of Middleton’s volatile world is in the end of course orchestrated by the playwright: the play depicts complexity rather than being complex itself. However, it contains elements of complexity on another level which, importantly, help to highlight the second, ultimate aim of Pavel’s plot grammar, namely, to address the question of whether a play’s formal features are related to its perceived aesthetic qualities, more precisely, whether something as evanescent as “style” can be linked back to concrete, structural properties. With regard to The Revenger’s Tragedy, it could indeed be argued that the play’s idiosyncratic style is an emergent feature of its structural organization. Symptomatic of this complexity is the repeated eruption of the comic in what is nominally a tragedy. The fact that The Revenger’s Tragedy oscillates between tragedy and comedy has long been



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acknowledged by scholars (e.g., Brooke 1979). Its comic quality is established from the start by the disguise Vindice dons at the outset, which also entails a confusion of fiction and reality (the “real” protagonist is given the name of a stock character, whereas that of his alter ego is ordinary and realistic). This comic effect is directly related to Middleton’s crafty exploitation of the communicative situation of drama, more specifically the omniscience of spectators, which places them in a position of cognitive superiority over the characters from the outset. Vindice’s opening speech already puts them in a state of anticipation, and each complication of his vendetta impacts their expectations further. Although readers’ responses can never be predicted, if their conjectures are confirmed, this might result in gleeful triumph, as it would affirm their superior perspective on the action. Particularly poignant in this regard is a farcical sequence of the subplot toward the end of the play, in which the Duke’s sons from his second marriage contrive to avail themselves of their half-­brother Lussurioso by plotting to have him executed instead of their youngest sibling, currently in prison for rape. This plan ultimately fails, for, unbeknownst to the brothers, Lussurioso has in the meantime been released from prison. This section consists of short consecutive scenes alternating between the brothers’ perspective and that of Lussurioso, which exploit the information gap between the characters for the benefit of the all-­knowing spectators. In the climactic moment, the younger brother’s siblings fail to recognize that the “yet bleeding head” (3.6.34) presented to them by the prison warden, which they take to be Lussurioso’s, is actually that of the brother they had tried to rescue. Their incongruous response when Lussurioso suddenly appears on stage (and the two divergent perspectives are finally united), a sheepish “O!” (3.6.45), marks a woefully inappropriate moment of anagnorisis which the audience had half anticipated. Even if we cannot predict audience responses, death here presents an occasion for laughter. A sense of complexity arises not only in the way the scene violates standards of genre identity9 but also more so in the unsettling recognition this aesthetic infringement has in store for spectators: if the plotting is right, even a deadly serious incident can make them laugh.

Complexity and Linearity What The Revenger’s Tragedy also reveals is that even a thoroughly multiperspectival play such as Middleton’s is subject to the unavoidable linearity of narrative representation. The comic sequence just described depicts events that actually take place simultaneously in different places but which have to be presented one after the other; narrative linearity inevitably delimits its theatrical effect. However, even when authors tamper with linearity, their strategies only affirm “that narrative logic itself is always doggedly linear, requiring an inexorable progression from point to point, one by one, even when the narrative is structured in a way that exposes how pedestrian or inadequate this is” (Walsh 2018a: 16). Plays known for their disrupted chronologies, such as J.B. Priestley’s Time and the Conways (1937) and Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993), both of which are inspired by complex notions of time discussed in quantum physics (Priestley’s less so than Stoppard’s), are ultimately caught in the linear chronology they technically dislocate and in that assert their authors’ dominance over their texts.10 A similar point could be made about Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), which, far from being the “simple tale” presaged by its subtitle, addresses the abstract topic of time

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both formally and thematically (Stallman 1959: passim). This interest is expressed most pertinently by the novel’s manifestly dislocated plot. Its three expository chapters set the scene: Mr Verloc, the eponymous “secret agent,” is ordered by the representative of the unidentified eastern European state he serves as an agent provocateur to arrange a gratuitous “dynamite outrage” (Conrad  2017a: 27) that would shock the British government into stepping up their measures against the alien anarchists living in London. Also introduced at this early point are the incompatible worlds of the anarchists and Verloc’s domestic environment: his wife Winnie and her mentally handicapped brother Stevie. Chapters IV to VII then flash forward to the time after a fatal explosion in London’s Greenwich Park and depict the responses of anarchists and police to the event. Chapter VIII returns to the original chronology, presenting the events leading up to the blast and fleshing out characters who up to this point had been only sketchily drawn, not least Stevie, who eventually is identified as the victim of the explosion, and setting off the violent denouement that follows Mrs Verloc’s realization that her husband is responsible for her own brother’s death. This glaring disturbance of linearity entails a second temporal principle whose prototypes are the circles obsessively drawn by Verloc’s brother-­in-­law Stevie (Conrad 2017a: 32; Stallman 1959: 103). Circularity is evident on the level of plot: the aforementioned flashforward, for instance, could be said to be encircled by the original plotline, and in other instances too, the narrative appears to return to prior events even as it proceeds in a linear fashion; on a smaller scale, most of the chapters depict events and encounters that are geographically clearly demarcated, that is, encircled (Stallmann 1959: 113). This structural circularity is echoed by recurring tropes and motifs: characters prowling the city of London on journeys that lead them back to where they started or literally embodying circles themselves (Mr Verloc is described as corpulent and the anarchist Michaelis as “round like a distended balloon” (Conrad 2017a: 35)), small but significant circular props such as Mrs Verloc’s wedding ring gleaming in the darkness of her husband’s seedy shop and Mr Verloc’s Bowler hat. This elaborate and highly symbolic architecture produces the impression of “spatialization,” seemingly “freezing” (Eagleton  2017: 292) the narrative and creating a “sense of time suspended” (Stallman 1959: 115). However, once again, these are complicating strategies that ultimately draw attention to the author’s skill (and that of scholars painstakingly retracing them); the source of the novel’s complexity lies not in the plot’s architecture but elsewhere, in the way it is told. Conrad’s fictional London comes across as “a reified world drained of dynamism” (Eagleton 2017: 292) not (or not only) because of its retarding structural circularity, as the narrative prevents comprehension of what is actually going on. Characters are largely unaware of each other’s motivations and intentions, let alone of what connects them with one another, in fact, most of them appear to resist illumination: Winnie Verloc’s motto that “things do not stand much looking into” (Conrad 2017a: 115) applies to almost every character in the book (cf. Stallman  1959: 103). Until the explosion, the members of the anarchist cell are blissfully unaware of the government spy in their midst (while the members of the upper-­class sheltering the anarchist Michaelis are in denial about the danger that he and others pose to Britain), and it takes Chief Inspector Heat some time to understand that his humble professional aspiration to solve the case is fundamentally at odds with his superior’s different, very personal perspective on it, and Mr and Mrs Verloc are strangers to each other despite sharing a bed. Nevertheless, their lives are connected,



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and to the extent that individual characters’ actions inadvertently come to bear on others, Conrad’s novel is not dissimilar from the chaotic world of Middleton’s play. Where novel and play differ is that in The Secret Agent the reader shares this lack of awareness in relevant aspects. As several scholars have remarked, the novel lacks a central point of view that would provide an explanatory and evaluative instance (Stallman 1959: 102). More mundanely, the novel’s unintrusive narrative means that readers simply do not always know what is going on. Terry Eagleton observes that the “resolute objectivity” of the novel relies on Conrad’s strategy of not depicting “events which lie beyond its scope” (2017a: 288). This contention needs to be qualified, however, for apart from the one thing that is really beyond the novel’s scope, the explosion, and characters are described in some detail and with notable irony. What is not made overt, however, are the causal links that connect different characters with one another. Like Mrs Verloc, who is unable to see the link between the explosion and her husband’s professional activities when quizzed about them by Chief Inspector Heat, readers fail to see the “connection” (Conrad 2017a: 134) between individual facets of the plot. On the one hand, this is of course related to the fact that The Secret Agent is a spy novel and makes mystery its ontological principle. While Conrad’s novel resembles The Revenger’s Tragedy in how character action appears to be random and unguided, the two texts differ in the way information is distributed in them. In the play, readers are in a state of anticipation, whereas in the novel they find themselves fettered to a plot in which understanding emerges incrementally and belatedly. This is illustrated by Conrad’s strategy to place (or hide) essential facts in seemingly spurious contexts. For example, the information that a fatal explosion has taken place is embedded in a drawn-­ out conversation between the anarchist “Comrade” Ossipon and the bomb maker known as “the Professor,” in which the former seeks to find out about the person who contrived the blast. Whatever knowledge about the explosion emerges in this exchange is second hand, taken from a news report from an afternoon paper and released drop-­by-­drop in the course of the conversation. At the first mention, the explosion is merely called “it” and “the thing” (Conrad  2017a: 44). Somewhat later, after a self-­ aggrandizing monologue by the Professor detailing his bomb-­making expertise, Ossipon summarizes the content of a newspaper report about the incident in telegraph style: “Bomb in Greenwich Park. There isn’t much so far. Half-­past eleven. Foggy morning. Effects of explosion felt as far as Romney Road and Park Place. Enormous hole in the ground under a tree filled with smashed roots and broken branches. All round fragments of a man blown to pieces” (Conrad 2017a: 48). That is all characters and reader know about the blast at this point. Furthermore, however, it seems that such information is less relevant to the novel than the question of how that information is processed. What readers learn from events is not so much that something has happened, but how understanding creeps up on characters and thus on themselves. Readers have almost no superior knowledge of the events and learn about them fitfully and in step with the characters. Therefore, the characteristic kind of response made possible by the novel is surprise at the unveiling of new facts. While such moments of surprise establish reassuring narrative closure, they are also frustrating in hindsight, as they are based on a prior thwarting of reader expectations. Thus someone who reads the novel for the first time cannot understand that Mrs Verloc’s assertion, made

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before the explosion, that “[Stevie] would go through fire” for her husband (Conrad 2017a: 119), ironically foreshadows Stevie’s violent end.11 There are instances in the novel that go against the predominance of surprise, however, especially as it moves toward its revelatory climax and readers are granted cognitive superiority over characters. For example, in the crucial Chapter IX, Mrs Verloc finds herself confronted, in her husband’s shop, with a stranger whom she suspects to be a foreigner somehow related to her husband’s mysterious trips to the continent. The attentive reader, however, will know that the “dark” man with a “long, bony face” and “his moustaches twisted up” (Conrad  2017a: 128) is the Assistant Commissioner of Police, who had been identified by his long face already in Chapter VII; equipped with this information, the reader is encouraged to develop hunches about the significance of the Assistant Commissioner’s appearance, which in turn entail gaining an advantage over Mrs Verloc, who never discovers the real identity of the moustachioed man and the purpose of his visit. The reader’s superior knowledge also shapes the most intricately orchestrated passage in the chapter in question, in which Mrs Verloc learns about the violent death or her brother and is confronted with the fact of her husband’s guilt. This information emerges in a conversation with Chief Inspector Heat in which the policeman—­and with him the reader—­is always a step ahead of Mrs Verloc, who at this point in the novel has not even heard about the explosion. Unbeknownst to herself, she identifies the victim of the blast by confirming that an overcoat allegedly found at the scene of the explosion, containing an address label that had led Heat to the shop, belongs to her brother. The reader, who knows that no such coat had been found among the remains at the bomb site, will understand the significance of this piece of information for the policeman. When Heat subsequently confronts Mrs Verloc with what remains of the coat—­a fragment on which the address of the Verloc’s shop is written in marking ink—­the reader is presented a cue for a complex emotional response: he finally knows the identity of the object Heat had taken from the scene of the explosion much earlier in the plot, now described as “the piece of cloth fate had presented him with” (Conrad  2017a: 134) by Heat, and this potentially results in a rewarding moment of surprise. Because this surprise also gives the reader a very slight cognitive advantage over Mrs Verloc, however, it does not lead to a sense of closure but generates a state of heightened anticipation as to how the woman will respond. Her reaction bespeaks a “boundless astonishment” that might well have been predicted by the reader: “She took [the piece of cloth] mechanically in both her hands. Her eyes seemed to grow bigger as she looked. ‘Yes,’ she whispered, then raised her head, and staggered backward a little. ‘Whatever for is it torn out like this?’” (Conrad 2017a: 134). In this moment, linearity is finally radically disrupted, as the narrative appears to fold back on itself, returning to the reader’s expectations and, possibly, reactions. In that, the passage constitutes a perfect example of suspense, which is the audience’s affective response to a situation with an uncertain outcome that importantly precedes the resolution of this uncertainty. Suspense “assumes a disparity of knowledge between the current uncertain prospect and a future retrospect of what will have happened” (Walsh 2018b: 53). Furthermore, suspense here breeds further suspense, especially about Mrs Verloc’s future dealings with her husband. When the reader subsequently witnesses—­“alongside” Mrs Verloc, as it were—­the



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secret agent’s outrageously tactless comments on Stevie’s death, he might even presciently experience the fury of the bereaved woman whom Conrad himself saw as the actual protagonist of his novel (Conrad 2017b: 236–238).

Conclusion: Reflecting on Complexity I hope that is has become apparent that narrative complexity is not merely a structural but also an affective issue; that it emerges less in tangible, static features of narratives than in the ephemeral responses occasioned by them. If one accepts these propositions, then complexity manifests itself by opening a “double perspective” on one’s own comprehension of texts in a way that also comes to bear on their evaluation. This can result in the kind of reflexive perspective that would discourage facile notions of what makes a narrative complex and instead draws attention to precisely those aspects that escape the reader’s grasp (cf. Walsh 2018b: 53–54)—­even if in the end this means that a narrative’s complexity cannot be determined absolutely. That impossibility might just be a sign of its value, however. Fiction is almost inherently reflexive in this way: from the early novel onward, writers have used their narratives to draw attention to how they are written (Bradford 2015: 228–229), and numerous scholars have discussed how in fiction the results of mimesis are inevitably entwined with a reflection on the mimetic process (see Bradford 2015: 219–242; Phelan 2022: passim; Ryan 2009: 72). Indeed, this reflexive foregrounding of a narrative’s mechanisms and means can be seen as “the first principle of complexification in literary fictions” (Walsh  2022: 295)—­allowing authors to celebrate their own inventiveness, generate tension between content and form, and test the limits not only of verisimilitude but also of reality itself, for example. Given the manifold ways in which narrative reflexivity can be utilized, however, how can it be helpful in the evaluation of fictional texts? It has been pointed out that the value of a narrative may lie in the “right balance” an author strikes between its mimetic and the ­reflective dimensions (see Bradford 2015: 229; Ryan 2009: 72), and I briefly return to the examples discussed before to consider this point, yet without the intention to pit them off against one another. The Revenger’s Tragedy seems dominated by the reflexive mode, which manifests itself in the play’s various metatheatrical references reminding viewers that they are watching a play: its direct invocations of the performance context, the repeated construction of play-­ within-­the-­play situations, and the motif of disguise. Through such signals of reflexiveness, the already confused plot is raised on to another level: the play is not only chaotic but also disconnected from the real world. In The Revenger’s Tragedy, everything, including murder, seems to be theatre. In the end, this radical non-­referentiality is tamed by an incongruously moralistic conclusion: the as yet undisclosed revenger Vindice triumphantly admits to the murder of the Duke as if the deed were no more than another of his theatrical pranks (“’twas somewhat witty carried, though we say it” [5.3.97]) and is duly sent “to speedy execution” (5.3.102) for his crime. In this instance, the play’s “reality” appears to have vanquished its farcical self-­reflexivity by identifying a “real,” somber substratum underneath all the play. Nevertheless, Vindice’s closing speech, which seems to confirm this moral closure by wrapping his sanctimonious acceptance of his punishment in equally

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sanctimonious couplets, might just be a mocking recourse to tragic conventions the play had shown to be feeble, affirming the irony generated by its reflexive mode. Narrative self-­reflection is used to a different end in The Secret Agent, in which Conrad draws attention to the fictionality of the text when Mrs Verloc is about to stab her husband—­a recognition that is creeping up on Mr Verloc in a scene that appears to be taking place in slow motion. In an almost fantastic moment, Mrs Verloc’s face is described, apparently from Mr Verloc’s perspective, as morphing into that of her brother: “As if the homeless soul of Stevie had flown for shelter straight to the breast of his sister, guardian and protector, the resemblance of her face with that of her brother grew at every step, even to the droop of the lower lip, even to the slight divergence of the eyes” (Conrad 2017a: 168). Conrad immediately revokes this depiction, however, by drawing attention to what the reader might have known anyway, namely, that Mr Verloc did not—­in fact could not—­ see this mysterious metamorphosis. Lying on his back on the sofa, he knows about his wife’s approach toward him only indirectly, through the shadow of a hand holding a knife that is cast on the wall. Conrad’s self-­referential erasure of his narrative points back to the unreal conditional “as if” at the beginning of the description and suggests that it had only ever been the narrator’s conjecture anyway. On the one hand, Conrad thereby draws attention to the kinds of states and experiences narrative cannot capture, such as the intimate symbiosis that had existed between sister and brother before Stevie’s death, here recast in terms of a supernatural amalgamation. In that, he also invokes another ephemeral phenomenon that the narrative does not even attempt to describe directly, the immensity of Winnie Verloc’s anguish, and leaves it to the reader to imagine her rage. Nevertheless, as Conrad’s doubts about narrative’s ability to represent emotional and psychological states inevitably take a narrative form, his skepticism affirms what it questions in the end. This oscillation between mimesis and its reflection is a token of the novel’s complexity and as such also an indicator of its quality.

Notes 1 See https://www.etymonline.com/word/ ­complexity in a predominantly ethical sense, complexity one example being Moss-­Wellington (2019). 2 The idea that “complexity” means 3 I am here in agreement with other scholars’ “­complexity of character” features prominently writing about the evaluation of literary texts, in websites explaining to would-­ be writers such as Bradford (2015: 4) and von Heydebrand the  tricks of the trade (e.g., https://www.­ and Winko (1996: 325). helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/for-­writers-­ 4 This is illustrated by Mieke Bal’s discussion of on-­t he-­v erge-­o f-­w riting-­s pectacularly-­ the stylistic complexity of Flaubert’s Madame complex-­ characters/). The notion that Bovary (2019). complexity of character is due to the cognitive 5 Following Gray, I disagree with the convencomplexity of the reader, i.e., a matter of the tional association between anagnorisis and a latter’s interpretation of a text, can be found in character’s “tragic flaw” and the ethical or Hynds (1985). Similar ideas are reflected in didactic dimension thereby ascribed to the various recent publications that take Aristotelian concept.



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6 On a larger scale, this is underlined by the novel’s final radical closure, when brother and sister die in the moment when they are reunited after a period of separation ostensibly caused by Maggie Tulliver’s scandalous elopement with the wealthy Stephen Guest, who is engaged with her cousin and best female friend Lucy Deane. 7 In her review “The Natural History of German Life” (1856), Eliot distinguishes between “abstract social science” and “the Natural History of social bodies” (Eliot 1990: 131), championing the latter. This is echoed in her letter to Sarah Hennell written the following year, in which she describes her growing “disinclination for theories and arguments about the origins of things in the presence of all this mystery and beauty and pain and ugliness that floods one with conflicting emotion” (quoted in Esty 1996: 156). 8 Whether complexity is a universal feature of all narratives or one that is specific only to some is a matter of debate. From the perspective of complexity science, only systems in which complexity is distinctive can be considered genuinely complex (Ryan 2019: 51).

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9 Middleton’s play supports and extends Susan Snyder’s observation that tragedy is “shaped” by the comic, providing “the ground from which, or against which, tragedy develops” (1979: 4, 5). In fact, what the play suggests is that the one cannot even be thought without the other. 10 While Priestley’s three-­act play shifts from the year 1919 to 1937 and back, Stoppard’s consists of alternating scenes taking place in the same country house in the early nineteenth and late twentieth centuries respectively, with the seventh and last scene combining these temporal levels by having characters from past and present (unbeknownst to each other) together on stage. The chronological disorder thus established aims to suggest a lower-­level connection between past and present, despite their radical conceptual simultaneity. Ryan cites Arcadia as an example for a “narrative of emergence” (2019: 42). 11 My use of “surprise” (and, later, “suspense”) is based on Walsh (2018b: 52–54).

References Bal, M. 2019. “Narrative Here-­Now.” In Narrative Complexity: Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution, eds. Marina Grishakova and Maria Poulaki, 247–269. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Bradford, R. 2015. Is Shakespeare Any Good? Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Brooke, N. 1979. Horrid Laughter in Jacobean Tragedy. New York: Harper and Row. Conrad, J. 2017a. The Secret Agent, ed. Richard Niland. New York and London: Norton. Conrad, J. 2017b. “Author’s Note to The Secret Agent.” In The Secret Agent, ed. Richard Niland, 233–238. New York and London: Norton. Eagleton, T. 2017. “Form, Ideology and The Secret Agent’.” 1978. In The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, ed. Richard Niland, 286–294. New York and London: Norton.

Eliot, G. 1990. “The Natural History of German Life.” In George Eliot: Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, eds. A.S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren, 107–139. London: Penguin. Eliot, G. 2015 [1996]. The Mill on the Floss. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Esty, J. D. 1996. “‘Nationhood, Adulthood, and the Ruptures of ‘“Bildung’”: Arresting Development in The Mill on the Floss’.” Narrative 4 (2): 142–160. Gray, P. 2019. “Shakespeare versus Aristotle: Anagnorisis, Repentance, and Acknowledgment.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 49 (1): 85–111. Hynds, S. D. 1985. “Interpersonal Cognitive Complexity and the Literary Response Processes of Adolescent Readers.” Research in the Teaching of English 19 (4): 386–402.

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Johnson, N. 2010 [2007]. Simply Complexity. Oxford: Oneworld Publications. Levine, G. 1965. “Intelligence as Deception: The Mill on the Floss.” PMLA 80 (4): 402–409. McWeeny, G. 2009. “The Sociology of the Novel: George Eliot’s Strangers.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 42 (3): 538–45. Middleton, T. 1996. The Revenger’s Tragedy, ed. R.A. Foakes. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mitchell, M. 2011. Complexity: A Guided Tour. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Moss-­Wellington, W. 2019. Narrative Humanism: Kindness and Complexity in Fiction and Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Pavel, T. S. 1982. “Plot Structure and Style: Thoughts on an Unstable Relationship.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée 9 (1): 27–45. Pfister, M. 1974. Studien zum Wandel der Perspektivenstruktur in elisabethanischen und ­jakobäischen Komödien. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. Phelan, J. 2022. “Character as Rhetorical Resource: Mimetic, Thematic, and Synthetic in Fiction and Non-­Fiction.” Narrative 30 (2): 256–263. Ryan, M.-­ L. 2019. “Narrative as/and Complex System/s.” In Narrative Complexity: Cognition, Embodiment, Evolution, eds. Marina Grishakova

and Maria Poulaki, 29–55. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Ryan, M.-­L. 2009. “Cheap Plot Tricks, Plot Holes, and Narrative Design.” Narrative 17 (1): 56–75. Snyder, S. 1979. The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Stallman, R. W. 1959. “Time and The Secret Agent.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 1 (1): 101–122. von Heidenbrand, R. and S. Winko 1996. Einführung in die Wertung von Literatur: Systematik, Geschichte, Legitimation. Paderborn et  al.: Ferdinand Schöningh. Walsh, R. 2018a. “Narrative Theory for Complexity Scientists.” In Narrating Complexity, eds. Richard Walsh and Susan Stepney, 11–25. Heidelberg: Springer Nature. Walsh, R. 2018b. “Sense and Wonder: Complexity and the Limits of Narrative Understanding.” In Narrating Complexity, eds. Richard Walsh and Susan Stepney, 49–60. Heidelberg: Springer Nature. Walsh, R. 2022. “Eventuality in Fiction: Contingency, Complexity and Narrative.” Narrative 30 (3): 287–303.

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Schooled Aesthetic Asymmetries: (Back)firing the Canon in Secondary Education D.J. Howells

Early on in the film Dead Poets Society (1989), English teacher John Keating tells his class to open their textbooks on Understanding Poetry by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, and a student reads out the first words of the introduction: “To fully understand poetry, we must first be fluent with its meter, rhyme and figures of speech ...” What follows is a comedic satire on the book’s po-­faced injunctions as Keating rises from his seat and sarcastically draws a graph on the blackboard as he asks what evaluative questions must be asked when reading verse: have a poem’s aims been artfully rendered—­its perfection—­and how important are those aims—­its importance? The resulting mathematical diagram, with the horizontal axis (P) measuring the score for perfection and the vertical axis (I) charting its importance, will reveal, according to Evans Pritchard, “the measure of its greatness.” Keating’s pithy response to this—­ “excrement”—­and his exhortation to all the students to tear out the offending page (and indeed all the book’s introduction)—­“rip it out”—­are framed in such a way as to show the electrifying effect on a class of the inspirational teacher’s unconventional methods. His impassioned apologia for poetry after he points out that they are not talking about “laying pipe” involves dismissing “armies of academics,” inculcating a taste for language, and fostering an ability in his students to think for themselves. Ultimately, he says, although the “noble” ambitions they may have to become lawyers, doctors, and engineers are all necessary to “sustain life,” it is “poetry, beauty, love, romance.... these are what we stay alive for.” This position on the “life-­enhancing” powers of literature is standard among many practitioners of English teaching in secondary schools today with both the Kantian veneration of the aesthetic object allied to the Arnoldian legacy of art’s moral improvement holding sway in various methodologies. The Keating-­like figure of pedagogic inspiration resisting the challenges of such enemies as the bureaucratic deadening of academic theories

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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(usually more nuanced than Evans Pritchard’s), examination board requirements, and school routines is ubiquitous on many training courses and classrooms as well as in the popular imagination. But, as in Keating’s case, Wordsworth’s injunction to avoid evaluating clumsily—­“we murder to dissect”—­does not involve a finely tuned alternative. The literature that is studied in schools is self-­evidently worthy by its being at the deepest level in accord with principles that have persisted since Kant’s proposal of a “supersensible substrate of nature.” Writers of genius offer us texts of quasi-­religious aesthetic value, and these, by virtue of their literary qualities and simply as a matter of assertion, cause us to think differently about ethics, justice, history, and politics. This idealistic mysterious realm to which great poetry and fiction is a conduit (but which, rather revealingly, evaded Kant’s ability to give “determinate thought” to—­he said in Critique of Judgement that “this presentation of the imagination ... has no language [that] can express it completely”) still has no rational language in much of the pedagogical writing from the past few decades, as we shall see. Indeed, the Leavisite project of the mid-­twentieth century, which carried the torch on from Kant, Wordsworth, and Arnold (and strongly influenced the notion of the inspirational teacher that we find in Dead Poets Society), relied on the same numinous terms to describe literature’s worth. The “vital capacity for life, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity” allied to a “perfection of form,” which Leavis mentions early on in The Great Tradition (1948), were a kind of catechism for how neophyte English teachers in the 1980s and 1990s were supposed to approach texts, and this uplifting mantra was often averred by educational writers. The vague aesthetic underlying this project and its antithetical stance to rational analysis are further developed by Leavis in an essay in The Common Pursuit (“Literary Criticism and Philosophy”), where he states that “words in poetry invite us, not to ‘think about’ and judge but to ‘feel into’ or ‘become’.” This refusal to accept a logical evaluation has had an influence on educators and has often resulted in mumbo jumbo concerning the beneficial effects on students exposed to the canon. D.H. Lawrence, promoted by Leavis into this august company of the venerated—­and frequently referenced by child-­centered approaches to teaching—­argues in Fantasia of the Unconscious (1921 “Education and Sex in Man, Woman and Child”) that “we must not strain the sympathies of the child in any direction ... a child’s sagacity is better than adult understanding anyhow,” and he adds that “a child’s dynamic understanding is far deeper and more penetrating than our sophisticated interpretation.” The sensitivities required of the critic before the sacred text, avoiding above all, Leavis says, “a system determined by abstract consideration,” are similar to those needed in teaching, and Lawrence’s view of the corrupting influence of “adult mental modes” has clearly fed into this approach. The legacies of both Lawrence and Leavis have lasted not just in regard to a denigration of abstract thinking but also in their insistence on an aesthetic which values only “organic” “life-­affirming” literature.

Nurturing the Poetic Spirit This aesthetic was made evident to me first on my teacher training course in the 1980s with its emphasis on authors already mentioned (D.H. Lawrence, whose literary star had started to dwindle possibly a decade earlier, was always referenced with awe) as well as



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others, such as Blake, Tolstoy, and Brecht. And then as a newly qualified teacher I attended numerous after-­school seminars and lectures with a similar bias (this was before the days of in-­service training) and became friendly with one of the lecturers and his wife. He had been to Leavis’ Cambridge college and she (now an acclaimed novelist) had also had a Cambridge education. In an informal discussion after one of these lectures, which at one point had dwelt on the merits of learning poetry by heart, I recited Philip Larkin’s “Talking in Bed,” which I had just come across. Both of them visibly froze. This response (there was no discussion about whether it was any good or not as might have been expected in such circumstances) had nothing to do with the poem’s subject matter (relationship inertia and the problems of truth and generosity) hitting a nerve—­they were a vibrant couple. It was more to do with a distaste for any focus on life’s less spiritually nourishing experiences: why would anyone take the trouble to learn something so negative? Responses of this kind have a long tradition. In Preface to Poems 1853, Matthew Arnold expounds his reasons for omitting his earlier poem Empedocles on Etna from the selection on the grounds of its misguided attempt to present “the state of one’s own mind” in a way that does not “also (my italics) inspirit and rejoice the reader.” Presenting “mental distress ... unrelieved by hope or resistance ... in which there is ... nothing to be done” should not be the aim of poetry. Sadness and neuroses need to be banished and poetry’s “disinterested objectivity” should dispense “what is best and noblest.” Arnold believed that he was living in an age “wanting in moral grandeur” and that providing such verse would restore our “spiritual health.” This somewhat skewed aesthetic manifested itself in much of the educational writing of the 1980s. Although there was a laudable aim behind this—­to engage students (particularly younger ones) with texts that offered “imaginative sympathy” and even to “liberate the artist” in them—­it was always apparent (although never logically explained) that certain authors, particularly those with a Romantic lineage, were the right ones for the job. In terms of evaluating why this should be there was little recourse to theory, and reasoned/abstract counterarguments never appeared. Emphasis on such literature as would creatively enrich students has its roots in post-­war educational reaction to the deadening effects of formal teaching methods in English classes that had dominated in the first half of the twentieth century. One of the seminal books of the time—­The Education of the Poetic Spirit (1949) by Marjorie Hourd—­argued that the contribution English teachers could make “toward nourishment, which is another name for education,” would be a “growth through literature” based on a “psychologized” approach where a significant relationship pertains between the teacher and the child. Her model was heavily influenced by Wordsworth with the latter’s insistence on the “unity ... [of] the first/Poetic spirit of our human life,” and just as The Prelude charts the development of the poet’s mind so Hourd’s aim is to grow the young student’s personality and “ultimately to inculcate a standard of literary taste.” She also quotes Herbert Read from his Education through Art on teaching’s moral aim “to provide ‘better persons and better societies’ rather than more works of art.” Far from being theoretical or mystical, though, her book provides practical techniques whereby this is possible, often by way of student dramatizations based on Homer and Shakespeare texts. These are ways of exploring the experiences of other characters and situations while at the same time “the means by which [the student] draws these back as symbols into the person of [theirself].” Throughout the students’ exposure to these works, Hourd wants them to put “meaning and appreciation”

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before “words and explanation” and not be pressurized into giving expression to “half-­ born” analytical thoughts which, she feels, is the demand of many teachers. Each needs to be “the active participant in a creative process [rather] than the passive recipient of meanings interpreted directly by the teacher.” Agency and spontaneity are what is required in the paradox of losing oneself in drama in order to gain oneself as well as the touchstones of Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and Coleridge to measure whether these improvisations “pass through the particularities of [Shakespeare’s] characters to a value which is beyond them and yet is contained in them.” How this is done is not explicated though there are many passages devoted to how the teacher’s “integrative integrity” will be an “educating force” if she reads aloud these highbrow texts with “an imaginative intensity” in order to reach the child’s unconscious understanding. Hourd’s guiding principle is similar to Polonius’ instruction in Hamlet—­ “By indirections find directions out”—­ and she advocates “a technique of knowing and yet appearing not to know, of consciousness in unconsciousness.” While this is all very worthy in terms of eliciting students’ apprehending something of “the canon” (for Hourd a very Romantic one), it is never very clear what. Her approach proposes to walk the middle ground between practice and theory but in its aversion to “rigidly controlled” dialectics avoids evaluation, and beyond asserting an organic relationship between human perception and nature says little about the intrinsic qualities of the literature which is vaunted. The philosophical/rational/analytical, it seems, is to be shunned following the Wordsworthian dismissal (which Hourd quotes) of that False secondary power By which we multiply distinctions, then Deem that our puny boundaries are things That we perceive, and not what we have made.

Three and a half decades after Educating the Poetic Spirit was published, the educational series Teaching Matters was keeping English teachers abreast of “new developments” and aiming to counteract “the deadening reliance on commercially produced materials.” However, the way that rational understanding in these discussions is subsumed into students’ making “meaning actively and expressively” when reading canonical texts is based precisely on the aesthetic model advocated by Hourd in opposition to the “deadening” formalism of exploring them via their literary features. In explaining the “new” methodology in a discussion of “the function of poetry ... in the classroom,” one book in the series states, rather contentiously, “there can be few better places to start ... than this passage from The Rainbow” which describes Tom Brangwen’s reaction to Shelley’s poetry. In the piece quoted, Lawrence imbues his own ideology into the boy’s response: “his heart filled with bursting passion and incompetence  ...  his mind had no fixed habits to go by  ...  for him there was nothing palpable  ...  that he could apply to learning  ...  he was helpless when it came to deliberate understanding.” After explaining that this kind of disorientation is “common” in students, we are told that it is the result of the classroom’s insistence on “meaning,” which is dismissed as “glibness and the mechanization of response.” “Deliberate understanding” is anathema and, as with Hourd’s “indirect” methods of responding to texts, what is advocated in Teaching Matters is “inconspicuous” learning. As most learning in schools, it is argued, is learning to forget, so students’



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understanding of poems can be facilitated by moving the emphasis from an interpretive act to an expressive act. Following the practical examples of dramatization in Educating the Poetic Spirit, it is suggested that students illustrate or mime their responses to texts as this “allows [them] to forget themselves and to concentrate on the subject matter” and so to avoid Tom Brangwen’s consternation. The spontaneous rather than the calculated, the inconspicuous rather than the deliberate are the features valued in this methodology, and once again, Wordsworth and other Romantic texts are the touchstones to measure against. The approaches promoted by Teaching Matters certainly found support among young teachers who still experienced the dead hand of formulaic methods on their shoulders in training institutions and advisory courses. Often told to arm themselves with as much literary paraphernalia/annotation as it was possible to fit onto a page of any text studied in order to better their instruction, many were relieved to find a release into more exploratory and collaborative activities than those offered by “deliberate” learning. To replace the saturated color-­coded opening pages of The Tempest (to take a common example from personal experience) with their reference to character, theme, language, literary devices, etc., with a clean (unannotated) page of text was something of an adventure. Too regularly what was promulgated was a kind of pseudo-­botanical system of classification, whereby the identification of features was the sine qua non of the classroom endeavor and evaluation of how the texts created their meanings was reduced to the self-­defining presence of these features. Of course, there was always the caveat that the significance of these was to be expatiated on but that ultimately resided in a blanket praising of the author’s exquisite skill. A rigorously reasoned counterview was never invited (for instance, to take issue with the fact that Shakespeare’s presentation of the characters’ disintegration under pressure at the opening of The Tempest is not psychologically realistic), and it was assumed that the diet of received wisdoms (even delivered in such a stale fashion) was ultimately what A level English teaching should be about.

Theory: Muffled and Distorted Readings The “immanentist” theory of value inherent in this had already come under attack in universities in the vanguard of new theoretical approaches in the 1970s and 1980s. However, theory’s impact in secondary education was much less marked, partly owing to its polemical diffuseness having a similar effect to a feather falling on a rhinoceros’ back. Although many teachers were interested in what was being said by Derrida, Barthes, and Eagleton (and their ilk), how that related to the average sixth-­former’s reading of the set texts was made problematic by the calculated abstruseness of theory’s seminal texts. Eagleton’s Criticism and Ideology battles hard to rescue a provisional Marxist aesthetic from the “bourgeois aestheticians” who have stifled debate about the canon’s ahistorical transcendence being self-­ evidently of value. Its prescience in dismissing historical reductionism, in critiquing literature as more than simply documents of class consciousness of certain epochs, foresees the pitfalls evident in some more recent educational writing which moves away from the text in a demonstration of other abstract considerations. Drawing on Trotsky’s Literature and Revolution, Eagleton seeks to “preserve the relative autonomy of the aesthetic from abstract dogmatism.” And just as Trotsky insists there on

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artistic creation being a “deflection, a changing and a transformation of reality,” Eagleton builds on this idea that the aesthetic and the historical are never balanced and straightforwardly linked. Literary works survive their contemporary circumstances not by virtue of their “aesthetic level” or by rising to the “universal” but by being somehow “creased and haunted by the aesthetic and ideological ambiguities of [their] moment,” which their formal ideology forces them to censor. While this theoretical musing tends to drift laterally (and thus gains less purchase when transferred to the secondary school curriculum), when its focus is on individual authors and how their works relate to the prevailing historical circumstances and ideology, its relevance to textual study at A level is much clearer. Discussing Matthew Arnold’s apologia for poetry in its mission to replace religion and philosophy and his insistence that mankind will discover that it has “to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us,” Eagleton trenchantly comments after some clear analysis of Arnold’s “theoretical nullity”: “Poetry, that is to say, is the final resort of a society in dire ideological crisis, replacing criticism with consolation, the analytic with the affective, and the subversive with the sustaining.” This is manifestly related to the issue that we have been observing in the Romantic-­influenced teaching methodologies outlined earlier, particularly in their avoidance of analysis and subversion. The trouble is that this kind of specific comprehensible focus tends to be lost in a fog of discursive vagueness (ironically of a kind that has been the target of its criticism). Here is Eagleton “clinching” his argument toward the end of the book: “The text is a theatre, which doubles, prolongs, compacts and variegates its signs, shaking them free from single determinants, merging them and eliding them with a freedom unknown to history, in order to draw the reader into deeper experiential entry into the space thereby created.” One can imagine the teenage mind boggling here: are they reading books or are they facing the prospect of an astronomical release, escaping earth and history’s gravitational “determinants” and journeying into the multiverse with Doctor Strange? Eagleton’s critique of the asymmetries that are evident not only in the traditional Kantian aesthetic but also in the reductive old-­fashioned Marxist historicism, though, is still pertinent in approaches taken to texts in much recent writing aimed at the study of A level English Literature. In The English Review, many canonical texts have had new life breathed into them by being viewed through the lenses of historicism, feminism, cultural studies, queer theory, etc. However, the slanted aesthetic of these newer methodologies has a similarly distorting effect to the neo-­Romantic-­based ones promoted by Hourd and Teaching Matters. Whereas the latter insisted on “inspiration” and “nourishment” at the expense of rational analysis and contrarianism, the former manifest a partiality that is “creased and haunted” by early twenty-­first-­century ideological preoccupations, with reasoned counterviews often similarly absent. In The English Review’s most recent edition (at the time of writing, April 2022), one of the most popular Shakespeare texts at A level, Othello, is re-­evaluated as a text which probes uncomfortable (because unresolved) questions concerning race and gender. Taking as its starting point a textual variation between the Quarto and the first Folio, it first examines how, mainly through the character of Desdemona, women’s behavior is “policed” both within the play and by critical responses outside it. Then, through the character of Othello, it demonstrates how the same white patriarchy controls black lives, how “the play’s metaphorical knee is on his neck: he can’t breathe.”



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In Othello’s famous account of his wooing of Desdemona, he describes her response to his adventurous past: “she gave me for my pains a world of sighs” (1.3.184-­85). According to the article, this Quarto-­derived version has found favor in most editions of the play because it is more in keeping with a chaste interpretation of Desdemona than the Folio variant: “she gave me for my pains a world of kisses.” Whether Desdemona dashes back to Othello from her “house affairs” (1.3.171) to lavish kisses on him instead of girlishly sighing will make a difference to how we see her, particularly with regard to an illicit relationship with Cassio. Apparently, a number of editors prefer “a world of sighs” because they want to avoid making her “into the kind of woman that some twentieth-­and twenty-­ first-­century scholars have taken pleasure in attacking, saying that she asked for what she got when he killed her” (have they?). However, this supportive view of an innocent Desdemona reinforces, rather ironically, the implicitly sexist trope that female sexual agency is morally suspect because it is ‘‘compelled to police her conduct to make sure she is beyond suspicion.” The line of argument goes that “kisses” involve making Desdemona “the equivalent of a short skirt inviting rape” rather than “the pure angel.” Of course, it is precisely the tension between these, between “a maiden never bold; Of spirit so still and quiet” (1.3.94)—­according to Brabantio—­and “that cunning whore of Venice”—­according to Othello (4.2.104)—­that Shakespeare creates his drama out of, particularly in the misogynistic innuendo-­ridden sexual language of the Quarto version (despite the greater number of racial slurs in the Folio version, the Quarto’s profanities had been cleaned up by the second rendering of the plays following the Act to Restrain the Abuses of the Players). The small textual variation of sighs/kisses does indeed “open up” issues attending the play’s contemporary relevance, but to claim that this suggests “that what is urgently needed is more feminist criticism of Othello which understands  ...  and calls out the imbalances between the sexes ... within the play and in the critical discourse around it” is ultimately banal. Shakespeare clearly understood these imbalances as have most of his audiences since. The article’s creation of a feminist and anti-­racist aesthetic enlists support from the End Violence Against Women project, which aims for “a society where women and girls can live their lives free from violence and the threat of violence” and emphasizes aspects of the play which are “about how men control women’s bodies.” It also makes links to the aims of Black Lives Matter in focusing on Othello’s position as being symptomatic of “how a white world controls Black bodies, and in particular Black masculinity” in the wake of the George Floyd murder. Like the latter, Othello is seen as belonging to a world where Black lives are “systematically targeted for demise” and points out how his character is “unsustainably fractured” by his role as “The Moor of Venice” as the play’s subtitle has it. As a Moor (and in the sixteenth/seventeenth century, the term was synonymous with Muslim) defending the Venetian Christian state, he is assailed on all sides, being seen as much a threat to it as its champion. The end of the play, where he moves swiftly from violent perpetrator against women (in common with Iago) to victim of racial prejudice, clearly shows this. His final speech relates how his encounter with ‘a malignant and a turbaned Turk” in Aleppo ended with him taking “by th’ throat the circumcised dog/And [smiting] him, thus.” The fact that the “circumcised dog” is indeed no other than Othello, who wields the dagger against himself, is patently obvious and manifestly signals his status as racist casualty. The view, though, “troublingly relevant” as it is, that “the

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characters of Othello and Desdemona are sites of cultural conflict for those societies, like Shakespeare’s and our own, engaged with the work of policing racialized and gendered behaviors and expectations” runs the risk of diminishing the play by making it an adjunct of contemporary polemics at the expense of so much else. Class consciousness, jealousy, the language of sexual disgust (and how that influences Othello’s and Desdemona’s lexicons), the rich portrayal of Iago’s psychology, the characterization of supporting parts ... the list could go on, doesn‘t really get connected to twenty-­first century concerns with gender and race. The resultant slewing of interpretation might not be as pronounced as the nineteenth century bowdlerising of Shakespeare, but it certainly feels like something is being missed out. And to worry that we might have difficulty with the incompatibility” of “call[ing] out masculinist violence while [at the same time] recognising that Othello is himself the victim of Venetian white supremacy” seems faintly ludicrous. There is clearly no difficulty apart from what might be perceived as a distortion in our reading in order to explore the “policing” of behavior with regard to contemporary ideas of race and gender.

Practicality: Performance and the Classroom Of course, such approaches will hit a chord with many sixth-­formers in schools, their incipient hunger for relevance leading them willingly to explore these unavoidable concerns. And from the 1980s onward, external political and social conjunctures have often had their literary correlates highlighted in the sexist/racist/postcolonial/hegemonic subtexts of canonical works. For the secondary teacher, the ways into texts which involve these trendy topical issues are often very helpful, crass as some of the “marketing” ploys may be. Elaine Showalter, in her pedagogical survey Teaching Literature, writes about the promotional methods employed by her American and British university colleagues to beguile students with the fares on offer within the world of literature. One of these related to a course called “American Psychos: Killers, Psychotics and the Unstable in American Literature,” which studied the canonical authors from Melville to Salinger, where to make an impact at the commencement of the class, the teacher was “wheeled into [his] class standing on a hand truck wearing a Hannibal Lecter mask.” (Her observation is: “Let him who is without sin amongst us, let him first cast the stone.”) As a way into the neo-­ Gothic—­a very popular genre in secondary schools as well as in universities—­this has the obvious advantage of being an unforgettable “hook” as well as being representational of the more sensationalist aspect of melodrama, which can then be explored against the subtler subtexts of the genre. A student of mine once performed similar theatricals entering a darkened classroom dressed as Frankenstein before flashing upon a screen (with appropriate organ accompaniment) historically contemporary images of the Creature together with more modern ones. Her subsequent sequence of lessons involved fascinating historicist readings charting the ebb and flow of audience sympathy with the two main protagonists culminating in a detailed consideration of the political writings of Mary Shelley’s father, William Godwin, as well as those of her husband, Percy Bysshe. Memorably, her focus on Percy Shelley’s posthumous book review of Frankenstein—­where he states: “Treat a person ill, and he will become wicked ... divide him, a social being, from society, and you impose upon him the irresistible obligations—­malevolence and selfishness”—­remained with that



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class for a long time. Other ostensibly meretricious openings—­a banged fist striking a desk before a reciting of George Herbert’s “The Collar” (“I struck the board ...”) and a collection of “cheap tin trays” drumming out the rhythm in John Masefield’s “Cargoes”—­ have been productive entries into texts and ultimately how to address questions of judgment and evaluation. Such practical considerations for new teachers (as in these introductions) of how to teach texts and genres tend to be much more prominent than the theoretical nature of what exactly constitutes literature when it comes to questions of what to do in the classroom. There are sometimes ambitious attempts to inculcate sophisticated readings generated by recently experienced university theory courses, but these can fall on deaf ears not so much by the welter of abstract concepts overwhelming youthful understanding as by their lack of immediate relevance to the text being studied, the critical digressions muting the impact of the primary literature. The nature of these attempts often involves lecture-­style methods, complicated smartboard presentations, and erudite handouts, which even at university level can have an alienating effect. The secondary school classroom is more conducive to active approaches with an emphasis on the exploration and enjoyment of texts. Teachers try to integrate creativity and interpretation in much the same manner as proposed by Marjorie Hourd, particularly with regard to the teaching of drama. Most prominently, as might be expected, this can be seen in the way that Shakespeare plays are usually approached through performance. Influential in achieving this modus operandi has been the Cambridge School Shakespeare series published by Cambridge University Press, which suggests a myriad of different activities for school students to involve themselves in creatively. Originally started in the 1990s, the editions of the plays are arranged with the text on one page and well-­constructed tasks and intelligently worded and engaging questions on the opposite page. Scholarly annotations are few, but salient features often hidden in footnotes in some respected editions are transformed into piquant pointers for students’ active participation. The series’ general editor Rex Gibson states in Teaching Shakespeare that the simple principle is that “Shakespeare wrote his plays for performance, and that his scripts are completed by enactment of some kind.” To counteract the influence of generations of scholars transforming plays into literary texts for individual perusal, lectures, or even class discussion, he argues that it is only in the “context of dramatic realisation that the plays are most appropriately understood and experienced.” In practice, this means that each teacher’s view of Shakespeare will matter in terms of their students’ perceptions of the political, aesthetic, linguistic, historical, gendered, psychoanalytical, etc., aspects of character, themes, and stagecraft. The active engagement of all students (a persistent teacherly anxiety) in classes of up to 30 (and sometimes more) is one of the pressing practical concerns in each classroom theatre/workshop, and the evidence is that the pleasure found in individual and group achievement when reconstructing the familial relations and human passions found in Shakespeare on both domestic and political levels not only touch “emotional capacities that every student possesses” but also encourage reflection on their relevance to the modern world. As Gibson points out, classes that study Measure for Measure, for example, “are never slow in finding contemporary parallels to Antonio’s hypocrisy and Vienna’s corruption.” The clash between the public facade and private behavior prompts students to recognize “similar disjunctions” today: the “sleaze” that hides behind the appearance of an “ordered society easily find[s] modern reflections.”

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Performance teaching, though, has not driven out lecture-­style explication de texte but not because of hide-­bound conventions such as those mentioned above in examining character disintegration through tedious classification in The Tempest’s opening. While the techniques involved in the former desanctify Shakespeare to a certain extent by allowing students to measure their own cultures and experiences against those found in the text, there is still pressure to kowtow to an authoritative critical or politically correct reading. Habits of submission and passivity instituted in the pattern of the teacher as dominant “authorial” voice with the final answer on matters of interpretation and evaluation still persist however, despite educational practitioners getting bored with the role of (reliable) pedagogical “narrator.” And even when students have an awareness of opposing critical views (as exam board A level criteria demand that they do), ultimately what they are doing is evaluating and judging among interpretations generated elsewhere rather than evolving their own. Ideally, what one would like to see is classes actively probing the different possibilities of dramatic scenes before encountering critical essays, video clips, and handouts. Still, ridding students of the notion of finding a single key or final answer to the text through the privileged teacher with access to arcane knowledge has been hard to achieve and is part of the problem of the asymmetrical aesthetic by which literature in schools is measured and valued that has already been discussed. Instilling a sense that what should be developed above all is an independent and self-­created response is easier said than done, despite some more recent ideas of using the twentieth-­century literary metaphor of the unreliable narrator as a pedagogical principle or technique. The refusal of the teacher to take on the role of comforting nineteenth-­century realist narrator whose omniscience is never doubted has resulted in some bizarre classroom outcomes in my experience. Insisting that students come to terms with incoherence or ambiguity in the text and accept their own uncertainties as the exam looms can result in an exasperated, even aggrieved, class. Some kind of balance is required. Although the teacher wants to break through preconceived interpretations (often their own) and probe language that continues to puzzle, a sure footing is needed before two equally plausible readings of a text can be entertained. The legacy of New Criticism’s close reading from the mid-­twentieth century has been influential in this respect.

The Evaluative Legacy of New Criticism: Examination Criteria and the Avoidance of Passivity Despite being pilloried by theoreticians as being too hazy and imprecise in describing interpretive strategies, the movement starting with I.A. Richards’ Principles of Practical Criticism (1924) and continuing with Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry (1938) (probably the butt of Keating’s joke in Dead Poets Society above) has had more traction in schools than the variously partisan branches of Theory because, as Richard Bradford states in Is Shakespeare Any Good?, “in their somewhat disorganised, idiosyncratic way  ...  [the New Critics] perceived literature as being characterised by intrinsic defining features, which set it apart from other linguistic practices and which made it art.” While Terry Eagleton’s joke in Literary Theory that close reading “seemed to imply that every previous school of criticism had read only an average of three words per line” is apposite, as a neutral way into the linguistic peculiarities of poems, plays, and novels it is a good starting point.



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Foucault and Barthes may have exposed the author and reader as ideological constructs created out of specific historical conditions decades ago, but sixth-­formers are keen first of all to understand the mechanics of a text, its verbal, formal, and structural constituents, and to have the context of both texts and authors presented to them in a comprehensible way. The aim of New Criticism to focus on how the aesthetic qualities of poems, plays, and novels achieve their effects endures in how A level English Literature specifications are framed. But while Brooks, Empson et  al. abjured extrinsic factors mentioned in these syllabi (such as “the significance and influence of the context in which literary texts are written and received” and “informed, personal and creative responses” to them) in their desire to keep the literary artifact unpolluted by the actual world, their concomitant aesthetic purpose in almost robotically insisting on the application of “literary concepts and terminology,” another key area of study, still persists in what students are expected to do at this level. In terms of helpful models, close reading is still felt by secondary teachers to be a sound practical start in getting to grips with literature. Noticing what’s there in a text is not something that comes naturally or intuitively for students and equipping them with text-­specific literary and linguistic terminology and concepts enables them to register and interpret what otherwise they would not have seen. However, the high mindedness of New Criticism’s insistence on maintaining the “purity” of the literary object in excluding connections with the real world has been less influential. While the primacy of critical interpretation via the mechanics of literary and linguistic approaches is emphasized, the exclusion of authorial intention and affective reader response is not part of the A level English literature project. Indeed, assessment grids to gauge candidate performance provided by exam boards highlight the importance of their recognizing “how attitudes and values are expressed in texts” and how they will be rewarded for “perceptive, sophisticated analysis and evaluation of writers’ use of [linguistic] techniques to create meaning” (Welsh Joint Education Committee A Level English Literature Specification). But even though “creative” and “individual” responses are nominally encouraged, exam regulation and various political strictures about the part that coursework should play in the study of literature have tended historically to elicit the rehearsed commonplaces of received opinion rather than a practical and reasoned application of personal response, a central tenet of the study of English literature. During the 1980s and 1990s, there were A level syllabuses which attempted to counteract this recapitulation of orthodoxies via strategies involving “open-­book” examination and “student-­centered” coursework. One of the principles behind the latter was that in providing “critical” and “creative” assignments that were assessed by the students’ own teachers and then moderated by the assessment authority, responses were far less likely to be inauthentic. Similarly, open-­book questions, where candidates used texts taken into the examination room to support their answers with textual reference, also encouraged authenticity, in particular if the questions involved directed students to their more contentious features. The autonomous readings thus generated, the argument went, necessarily engaged an evaluative critical exploration of linguistic and literary features that obviated the predictable commentaries evinced in stale examination topics on canonical works—­ typically, a quotation of authoritative provenance followed by the injunction “discuss.” “Alternative” syllabuses using these methods to assess the study of literature gained in popularity up until the 2000s when, it was felt, coursework was somehow open to malpractice, despite

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its being internally assessed and externally moderated by the examining bodies. Taking texts into exams was deemed too undemanding—­especially in the era when annotations were allowed and there was no requirement to use only “clean copies” (i.e., unannotated ones). Ofqual (the examinations regulator), in its various reviews of the A level English literature qualification, criticized open-­ book questions as often providing too much structure and thus taking away some of “the extent to which the candidates must devise a strategy [of their own] for responding to the questions.” There was certainly a case to be answered. For example, exams set by AQA, one of the awarding authorities, aimed to provide candidates “with prompts, for appropriate answers.” Additionally, there were questions that “directed candidates to particular pages of the text and suggested discourse features that the candidate ‘might like to consider’.” Ofqual found that such “explicit guidance” did not allow the candidates “much opportunity to shape or structure their own response” and therefore reduced “their independence.” Coursework, the other main “alternative” element in syllabuses, also had major issues for the regulator stemming from the perceived autonomy of schools and colleges in wording tasks themselves, with only optional recourse to the qualification-­awarding body to check on their appropriateness. However, this independence was precisely the purpose for advocates of these “alternative” approaches as the school-­and college-­guided exploration of texts linked by period, author, or theme was the closest A level students were going to get to individual scholarship. “Backfiring” discussion of canonical texts with exam-­regurgitated conventional pieties needed addressing as evaluative skills were being attenuated by “a retrogressive system” which was externally assessed. And many of these coursework essays showed great innovation and flair—­for example, one singled out in an article in Forum on “Authenticity, Validity and Reliability in A-­level English Literature” by an experienced teacher, and coursework innovator “compared narrative technique in At-­Swim-­Two-­Birds, Tristram Shandy and If On A Winter’s Night A Traveler—­which started to unpick the form of the extended essay as it went along (the conclusion was in the middle).” Clearly the candidate had taken on board the French Nouvelle Vague director Jean-­Luc Godard’s famous advice that “a story should have a beginning, middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.” The point was, it was argued, that a critical interpretation of authorial intention in such textual exploration was more authentic. Genuinely affective reader response was also encouraged in these coursework tasks by allowing students to compose parodies and pastiches as critiques of original texts. However, for all the robustly independent work that emerged, there were also pieces of coursework that were internet generated and most emphatically unoriginal. This type of “research,” too, instead of focusing on candidates’ responses to the ideas and language of primary texts, often encouraged derivative arguments from fashionable orthodoxies. There was a feeling among teachers that, for all its drawbacks, the memorizing that closed-­text exams demanded at least meant that some literature would become part of students’ inner resources for life instead of an evanescent computer download. The late twentieth-­century discrediting of “learning by heart” has robbed students of the gift of great poetry they once carried around with them in their heads. It has left some of them in awe of a previous generation, among whom even those who had to leave school early to earn a living could recite from memory many complete poems. Ironically, this method of learning stemmed from a passive conception of how art could improve the



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quality of children’s lives by immersion in the glory of the aesthetic object, in this case poetry. Canonical works, often drawn from the evolving editions of Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, were required to be memorized by many early-­and mid-­twentieth-­century school pupils. However, once this rote-­learning had embedded itself, far from being a passivity-­ encouraging glorification of poetry, it became a part of their active minds. Remembered, rediscovered, and re-­examined at any time when the mind was free, it was a creation of their imagination—­which might seem an unusual claim, given that one would think that the writer had done the imagining. But the thought content and richly suggestive language of these gobbets of verse only came to fruition by being creatively reconstructed in a multiplicity of minds, ways, and differing circumstances. Some teaching in schools in the twenty-­ first century recognizes this: the special, individual imagining we all do is cultivated in approaches that recognize other authentic readings and do not rely on prevailing orthodoxies (although these too at one time might have been particular and novel interpretations). One approach that a colleague of mine took, albeit not initially involving poetry, explored how film adaptations of novels often provoke flabbergasted reactions to the liberties taken with character and plot. Most of us have been bemused by the casting of ill-­suited actors or the omissions of key incidents, but these are just the equally authentic and creative readings of scriptwriters and directors. Discussion of such contentiously loose interpretations then built up to a consideration of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” a poem widely known to non-­aficionados of verse (sometimes even by heart), where conflicting analyses seem to be dependent on what different individual readers consider important.

Questioning and Evaluative Subjectivity Robert Pinsky, America’s poet laureate at the turn of the millennium, launched a campaign to find the nation’s favorite poem and, perhaps not unsurprisingly, turned up this characteristically meditative and solitary piece. Its closing lines have almost become part of the popular consciousness in their seeming insistence on individual self-­determination and adventurous choice: I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -­ I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference.

Originally called “Two Roads” before its renaming, a more earnest reading about our capacity to shape our own destiny is the one that the majority of readers take as its moral. Just as with the choice of Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” on the BBC’s longest-­running radio program Desert Island Discs—­the most popular selection of non-­classical music, along with Edith Piaf’s “Je ne regrette rien”—­the belief that we forge singular unconventional paths is one that comes most naturally, it appears. However, all readings of texts prompt a host of questions and that is particularly true of this one, given the ironies planted at regular

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intervals. Thinking about it logically, how can we measure the possible outcomes of the two divergent roads (and Frost points out that he “could not travel both/And be one traveler”)? Would not choosing the more-­traveled road have made “all the difference” too? Additionally, he seems to be undermining any straightforward interpretation with details that subtly run counter to purposeful decision-­making: if the two roads are “as just as fair” as each other on what basis is he deciding? And when he says his choice was prompted by the fact that “it was grassy and wanted wear,” why does he state a couple of lines later that they had been “worn ... really about the same”? And why too, if the poem is insisting on the importance of choice, are the roads described as lying “equally ... in leaves no step had trodden back”? Ambiguities, too, make the ending fuzzier than may be evident at first sight. The repetition of “I” could be taken as resolution or, alternatively, hesitation. The “sigh” can also be taken in two ways: as a gesture of satisfaction or its opposite. Interestingly, Frost said to his walking companion, the poet Edward Thomas, “No matter which road you take, you’ll always sigh, and wish you’d taken another.” That detail might be behind the way he intended the poem to be read. At any rate, a reading of it as being emblematic of the dauntless individual also needs to take into account his warning to audiences: “You have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem—­very tricky.” Of course, the fallacy of intentionalism as a way of evaluating this poem—­or any literary work—­is one that theorists discarded several decades ago. Whatever Frost wanted us to take away from our encounter with the poem does not preclude our reading it differently. The strategy used in my colleague’s lessons deliberately addressed this by offering up for discussion four very different interpretations ranging from the more popular view of it as an assertion of independence and free will to the more ironic one seemingly intended by the author about how our ability to choose is compromised. Interestingly, the responses subverted the aesthetic asymmetry of measuring the success of the poem within its intentionalist framework as the reasoned arguments put forward by students for its perceived expression of bold individuality were as nuanced as those put forward for its wry ambiguities. The idea that we settle on any one meaning is in any case a problematic one as the indistinctness and questionable status of literature and indeed works of art in general frequently testify to. A striking example put forward by the American philosopher of aesthetics Arthur C. Danto from The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art involves a hypothetical consideration of two neckties which have been painted blue using exactly the same shade and brand, their only difference being that one is by Picasso and one is by a boy as a gift to his father. They are identical in every way, even down to an equal smoothness of texture. What differentiates them for Danto, though, is that the boy’s work does not have meaning as it has not been created as a critique of abstract expressionism’s formula of drips and coarse brushstrokes but simply to please his father, thereby disqualifying it from being significant art. For Danto, only the cognoscenti of the art world can supply the right meaning as others might simply find “an unanticipated aesthetic dimension” not originally intended. This concept of a correct interpretation is suspect, not least because the meanings are not inherent in art objects but are created by those who view them. This was exactly what the exercise around the Frost poem set out to highlight: there is no transcendent meaning which trumps all personal and subjective interpretations. The same intentionalist evaluative criterion is invoked in the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume’s treatise on aesthetics “Of the Standard of Taste,” where he states “Every work of art has also a certain end or purpose, for which it is calculated; and is



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to be deemed to be more or less perfect, as it is more or less fitted to attain this end.” His rationalist project to establish a true standard of taste has as its premise that despite human epochs, cultures, and individuals being very different, there are artistic objects that have “been universally found to please in all countries and in all ages.” He concedes that there are instances of what Danto calls “unexpected aesthetic dimensions,” for example, when considering painting “the coarsest daubing ... would affect the mind of a peasant or Indian with the highest admiration” or when “the most vulgar ballads” display “harmony and nature.” However, the ultimate arbiters in these matters of appreciation of “genius” are likewise rare people of “delicate taste” who are “easily to be distinguished in society by the soundness of their faculties and the superiority of their faculties above the rest of mankind.” The exclusivity of this is somewhat undercut by Hume’s observation that beauty “is no quality in things themselves ... [existing] merely in the mind which contemplates them,” which would suggest that peasants’ and Indians’ minds can appreciate it equally. Yet throughout the essay, he tries to avoid this democratic aesthetic enfranchisement by advocating a superior, reasoned and finely tempered mind which is “free from all prejudice” as the real arbiter of worth. In experiments such as that conducted on the Frost poem, what is needed for this unbiased judge is “a perfect serenity of mind,” “a careful eye,” and a “delicacy of the imagination” capable of perceiving the minutest detail and then placing its function within the whole work—­a kind of evaluative electron microscope. And this will set the standard of taste. So while our judgment of writers alters over time, certain tastes established in such a way are immutable. Thus, Hume is able to state that it would be impossible to assert “an equality of genius and elegance between  ...  Bunyan and Addison”: that “sentiment” would be “absurd and ridiculous” as the former is clearly inferior. However, most students of English literature today would demur. Addison is very much the minor figure. Whether they are also able to demur in a more general sense that objectively “true” judgments of the kind proposed by Hume are possible is more debatable. Although the type of questioning prompted in the Frost exercise is not uncommon in schools, it is less clear how widespread the acknowledgment of the subjectiveness of value judgments is. My suspicion is that the ghost of intentionalism persists together with the influential notion of the superior judgment of those with “delicate taste.” Combating both the asymmetry of “correct” answers and the veneration of canonical “life-­enhancing” literature can be seen in recent classroom activities in schools that emphasize how literature gives us ideas to think about—­as in the exercise on different interpretations of films. Instead of indoctrinating with received opinions from eminent authorities, these approaches stress its function to constantly re-­appraise, to counter, and to alter judgment. The way poetry and literature as a whole encourages questioning and self-­questioning is at its heart and, at a time when (tele)visual media and cultural studies are increasingly dominant, the way that particular words in a particular order can give us insight into the way people’s minds work needs to be nurtured. And how much of ourselves we actively bring to our interpretations of these ordered words is vital to their authenticity. Developing an active agency in school students’ ability to imagine and evaluate has been part of most approaches to how they are taught to read. Finding one’s own voice and being aware of the voices of others, for example, is central to Herbert Kohl’s argument in his influential book for teachers Reading, How To. A similar openness to how the skills of reading and writing can be acquired is also manifest in Jean-­Paul Sartre’s What Is Literature?,

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where he discusses the existential freedom of the reader. This freedom can be alienated by the writer trying to address the reader’s “passiveness” while attempting to “affect” them via “a state of passion.” In his view, the reader needs to be able to make a “certain aesthetic withdrawal.” He goes on: the characteristic of aesthetic consciousness is ... a perpetually renewed choice to believe. I can awaken at every moment, and I know it; but I do not want to; reading is a free dream. So that all feelings which are exacted on the basis of this imaginary belief are like particular modulations of my freedom  ...  [Dostoevsky’s] Raskolnikov  ...  would only be a shadow, without the mixture of repulsion and friendship which I feel for him and which makes him live. But, by a reversal which is characteristic of the imaginary object, it is not his behaviour which excites my indignation or esteem, but my indignation and esteem which give consistency and objectivity to his behaviour.

The reader’s subjectivity is what animates their encounter with the text and what gives literature its impetus. Their individual motives and beliefs, their character, their background, and various other determining factors of how their imagination works are what count. And in terms of evaluation too, these are the crucial factors. Elsewhere, though, in his philosophical musings on what is involved in literature, Sartre is not so sure about the purpose of all these textual interactions. At one point, he launches into a satire on the pointlessness of literature by making his reader/critic enter a library full of books written by dead men about dead things. In the critic’s reanimation of “ink spots on musty paper,” what he creates is “passions he does not feel.” Literature of the past has nothing to tell us that is relevant. This rejection of writing is not unusual—­literature is full of it, including these well-­known examples: Milton’s Jesus telling us in Paradise Lost that being “deep versed in books” is futile if our reading is not imbued with “a spirit or judgment equal or superior” to the texts; the Wordsworthian “barren leaves” of “Science and Art” which “murder to dissect” in The Lyrical Ballads (which endorsed Marjorie Hourd’s post-­war project to invigorate the poetic sprit in children); and Philip Larkin’s rather more terse dismissal of literature in “A Study of Reading Habits”—­“books are a load of crap.” The persistent reappraisal, the (self-­) doubting, and the contending with what has already been said is what makes literature stand out from other old art forms and from newer, often visual, ones. Avoidance of passivity is at its core. It is important, I believe, that this kind of critical intelligence which is able to subvert literary (and other) shibboleths is fostered through the study of literature rather than other (possibly more spurious) areas of study. The rational capacity of imaginative writing to create and criticize not only spheres of human behavior but even itself is possibly unique. The teaching of English in schools needs to recognize this at a time when literature courses are being attenuated and set-­text lists for examinations narrowed.

“Persistent Contentiousness” Current ways in which students are schooled in evaluation sometimes foster this independent thinking, for example, in the practice of “flipped learning.” Occasionally defined as “school work at home and home work at school,” the pedagogical method moves direct instruction from the classroom to the individual at home or in the library and



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stresses the importance of exploring concepts rather than gleaning a kernel of ideas from a text. Ideally, the classroom is transformed into a more dynamic, interactive learning environment where there is more choice for students in terms of presentations, debates, seminars, or even independent study. This can be concurrent with the more traditional lecture style—­or even replace it. As experience teaches us that different readers will interpret and evaluate in innumerable different ways and that the activity of literary criticism would be meaningless if this were not so, such an emphasis is welcome (although some might feel that preparatory reading of this sort with accompanying questioning has always been the way literary study has been approached). For one thing, it moves the focus away from theories of objective literary value (still held to an extent today), such as that advocated by Arnold in his famous definition of the function of criticism and its key component of “disinterestedness”: “the endeavour, in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is” (my italics). This assumes that the work really is something in itself (as opposed to how we read it) and that it is only one thing (the problem of aesthetic asymmetries once more). Even in Arnold’s time, there were dissident voices from this view of the passive glorification of works of high art. In What is Art?, Tolstoy says there can be “no objective definition of beauty” as we will never fully understand why our responses to things vary so much. Instead, his view is that art does not reside in what Rousseau called “monuments to the glory of the human mind,” the concert halls, art galleries, and “great” literature but can be found everywhere: “All human life is filled with works of art of every kind, from cradle song, jest, the ornamentation of houses, dresses and utensils, all the way up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions.” Tolstoy, indeed, can be seen as emblematic of counterbalancing the aesthetic asymmetries discussed here. His famous evaluation of Shakespeare argued for the inferiority of King Lear to the primitive chronicle play which is its source material, and this dissent from received opinion about the “world’s greatest dramatist” is precisely the kind of independent interpretation possible when canonical works are not “fired” with such certainty about their value. The rational and subjective reading which this chapter argues that schools should be aiming for has a stylish polemicist in John Carey whose What Good Are the Arts? puts forward the case for literature (in contradistinction to other arts) as an engine of thought content and disagreement and also, because of its indistinctness, as a powerful stimulus to the imagination. He submits that just as in the discipline of ethics where “disagreement is ... a necessary condition for [its] existence” there being no “correct” answers such as are found in science, so literature fosters a critical intelligence because “it gives you ideas to think with” (interestingly he does not say “to think about”). It stocks your mind. It does not indoctrinate, because diversity, counter-­argument, reappraisal and qualification are its essence. But it supplies the material for thought. Also, because it is the only art capable of criticism, it encourages questioning and self-­questioning.

Literature’s indistinctness is also highlighted as vital to reading. Taking examples, often from Shakespeare’s rich figurative language, he demonstrates how the reader’s imagination has to “keep fitting things together that rational thought would keep apart.” In exploring how this works in the soliloquy where Macbeth is thinking about assassinating Duncan,

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Carey shows how the audience’s thoughts will go in all sorts of directions when confronted in this speech with its welter of imagery concerning angels, trumpets, cherubims, and naked babies—­all blasted by the wind as they go about riding some unplaced realm of the sky on horseback. (“And Pity like a naked newborn babe/Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubims, horsed/Upon the sightless couriers of the air ...”) He points out one absurdity in that couriers are horsemen, so the cherubim would be on the shoulders of “airy” warriors who themselves are on the backs of horses. But this is not meant to be comical as what we are witnessing is a mind disintegrating. Of course, though dogged analysis may make it laughable, usually our interior senses will make some sort of accommodation and fit it into what we know is happening to Macbeth in the context of the play as a whole. Audiences, students, teachers, and readers of literature in general will have their own distinctive latitude when it comes to responding to Macbeth (and other texts), but the “persistent contentiousness” (as Carey puts it) of their readings should be at the heart of how literature is taught in schools. While there has been some recognition of this in attempts to teach students to be active in the creative process of reading (Hourd), in efforts to establish alternative coursework at A level and in the inventive individual queries that can subvert “correct” interpretations, there is still too much emphasis on the orthodox. The policing of our readings from contemporary polemical standpoints, the quasi-­ Romantic veneration of “life-­enhancing” writing, and theory’s relegation of the primary text to an ideological adjunct, all detract from our individual endeavor to think authentically and evaluate for ourselves. When John Keating says in Dead Poets Society that what “we stay alive for” is the imagination’s beauty and its ability to create, he was on the right track concerning the lawlessness of human intelligence: literature cannot be approached like “laying pipe.” The rational questioning that its imaginative constructs prompt should be beyond policing and, most importantly, is limitless.

References Arnold, M. 1972a. “Preface to Poems (1853).” In Selected Criticism of Mathew Arnold ed. Christopher Ricks, 28–29. New York: Signet Classics. Arnold, M. ‘The Function of Criticism in the Present Time (1864).” In Selected Criticism of Mathew Arnold, ed. Christopher Ricks, 95. New York: Signet Classics. Bradford, R. 2015. Is Shakespeare Any Good? 132 (on New Critics). Oxford: Wiley Blackwell. Carey, J. 2005. What Good Are The Arts? 208 (­ literature and questioning), 216 & 222–223 (indistinctness), 259 (persistent contentiousness). London: Faber and Faber. Danto, A. C. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art, 40 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Dead Poets Society (1989). Director Peter Weir, Screenplay Tom Schulman: see pp. 11–14 https://www.filminstitutet.se/globalassets/2.-­fa-­ kunskap-­o m-­f ilm/filmpedagogik/boken-­p a-­ duken/dodapoeters-­manus.pdf Eagleton, T. 1978. Criticism and Ideology, 108 (on Arnold), 170 (avoiding dogmatism), 185 (text as theatre), 187 (creased aesthetic ambiguity). London: Verso. Eagleton, T. 1996. Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd edition, 38 (close reading). Oxford: Blackwell. FORUM (2017), 59 (2): 186. https://journals. lwbooks.co.uk/forum/vol-­5 9-­i ssue-­2 /article­6345/ Gibson, R. 1998. Teaching Shakespeare, xii (on writing for performance), 3 (on contemporary



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relevance). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hadley, E. 1985. Teaching Matters: English in the Middle Years, 78–82 (inconspicuous learning). London: Edward Arnold. Hourd, M. 1949. The Education of the Poetic Spirit, see 13–14 (growth through literature), 23 (moral aims), 34–37 (spontaneity), 58–62 (­liberating the artist through improvisation), 19 & 119 (indirection). London: Heinemann. Hume, D. 2020. “Of the Standard of Taste (1777).” In What Is Literature? A Critical Anthology, ed. Mark Robson, 34 (Bunyan and Addison), 39 (on minds of Indians and peasants), 41 (on men of delicate taste). Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. Kant, I. 2020. Critique of Judgement. In What Is Literature? A Critical Anthology, ed. Mark Robson, 60. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. Lawrence, D. H. 1991. Fantasia of the Unconscious, 115–116. London: Penguin Classics. Leavis, F. R. 1948. The Great Tradition, 9. London: Chatto and Windus. Leavis, F. R. 1952/1976. The Common Pursuit, 212–213. London: Chatto and Windus, and reissued in Pelican Books. Lawrence, D. H. 1915/1973. The Rainbow, 16–17 (deliberate learning). London: Methuen and reissued in Penguin.

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Ofqual 2011. Review of Standards in GCE A Level English Literature, 16. https://ccea.org.uk/­ downloads/docs/regulation-­asset/Monitoring% 20Qualifications/Review%20of% 20Standards%20in%20GCE%20A%20 level%20English%20Literature%2C%20 2005%20and%202009_1.pdf Sartre, J.-­P. 2020. “What Is Literature? (1949)”. In What Is Literature? A Critical Anthology, ed. Mark Robson, 312. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell. Shelley, P. B. 1832. “On Frankenstein.” In The Athenaeum, 730, November 10. Showalter, E. 2003. Teaching Literature, 42 (on marketing literature). Oxford: Blackwell. The English Review April 2022. “Race and Gender: Othello’s Troubling Relevance.” 2–5. Hodder and Stoughton. Tolstoy, L. 1995. What Is Art? trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 41. London: Penguin Classics. Welsh Joint Education Committee (WJEC), 2019. A Level English Literature Specification (version 3), 21.https://www.wjec.co.uk/media/rwdp2iff/wjec­gce-­english-­lit-­spec-­from-­2015-­e-­18-­12-­2019. pdf (context of literary texts and personal response) Wordsworth, W. 1970 The Prelude, Book II, ll. 216–220.Oxford: Oxford University Press.

4

Defining Literature: The Route to Aesthetic Evaluation Paolo Euron

Introduction This study aims to define literature on the basis of the self-­reflective character of the literary text. From this perspective, the literary work presents a definition that is, to different degrees and forms, part of its essence. Such peculiarity of the work of art began at least with Aristotle. With him, knowledge became a constitutive part of the work of art, and the awareness of its specific essence became a condition of the aesthetic fruition. Conversely, and consistently with these cognitive premises, Plato banned poetry from his Republic and separated knowledge from art. The German Early Romantic poets and philosophers defined the essence of poetry by its self-­reflective character. The literary work, according to the transcendental poetics (based on the Kantian critical philosophy), “should represent the producer with the product.” Reflection on the poetic character of a work became a constitutive part of modern poetic creation, and it also became a constitutive element of the literary work. From the romantic perspective, a well-­formed piece of criticism is a poem, and works of art are possible because they are connected in a system that encompasses creativity and criticism. Self-­reflection of the work itself is the main literary mechanism. This essay highlights a few pivotal cases and, in doing so, it shows a hidden continuity between independent positions. As a matter of fact, modern literary theory has adopted similar ideas. Formalists such as Viktor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson proposed analogous perspectives. The literary language proves to be different from everyday language as the literary work is different from everyday life. Paradoxically, starting from these differences, the literary work can display life and tell something about existence. Without

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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an external, strong normative principle (such as the mimetic one), the cognitive aspect (the self-­reflection of the work on its own structure) becomes a recurring feature of literary works. We can refer to examples from modern authors, from Oscar Wilde to Rainer Maria Rilke, from Jorge-­Luis Borges to Italo Calvino: supported by a philosophical background, their reflection on the definition of the literary work becomes a reflection on the sense of existence. It is interesting to see how the philosophical approach, in the form of a self-­ reflection of the work on itself, permeates the literary work as opposed to everyday life and as what presents the meaning of this life.

Aristotle In his Poetics, Aristotle states that art is imitation and that our instinct for imitation can be found in human nature. A human being “is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation” (1995: 1448b). We enjoy the realistic depiction of objects, even if they are not pleasant in themselves and we would not like them in real life. Actually, we know that we are watching an imitation, and this fact has consequences. Knowledge is an essential part of our aesthetic experience and of its specific pleasure. In the aesthetic pleasure of the work of art, we know that we are dealing with an imitation and not with real life, and we know that the work of art does not belong to real life. We know that we are experiencing a work of art and that the imitated object does not affect us as a real thing and that such knowledge is constitutive of the aesthetic experience. This cognitive experience is part of the pleasure of the work of art as such. I enjoy it only if I know that it is an imitation of reality. As Arthur Danto wrote (1981: 15), until today, knowledge is a constitutive part of aesthetic pleasure. Consequently, poetry is more relatable to philosophy than to history. On the one hand, poetry is concerned with universal facts that may happen; on the other hand, history is concerned with singular events that have been. For this reason, poetry describes “a kind of thing that might happen, i.e. what is possible as being probable or necessary. [...] Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since his statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singular” (Aristotle 1995: 1451b 4–5). As we can state, the work of art presents a general model of reality rather than an effect or an imitation of a given, real thing. A work of art deals with something that might happen (possible) or that, in a given context, must happen (necessary). According to Aristotle, art does not just imitate a natural thing in order to deceive us (as Plato put it). In a work of art, we experience the imitation of events and persons in an order and clearness that we do not see in real life. This is the meaning of necessity as a quality of the work of art. When we experience a literary work (e.g., when we enjoy a tragedy), we do not experience well-­represented single portions of reality but the whole of human existence in its necessary form. The work of art presents the world in a new light, according to probability and necessity, as in itself consistent whole. The work of art is not real life, and the rules of poetics are not those of politics or morals. Nevertheless, art is about the structures or reality. Art presents reality from a perspective and under a light that we cannot find in our chaotic, random, everyday life.

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In this way, Aristotle makes a clear distinction between art and life. In doing so, he points out the specific cognitive function of art. Unlike Plato, the kind of knowledge provided by the experience of the work of art is not the same knowledge mediated by philosophy, even if they share a common origin. According to Plato, immaterial forms are objects of intellectual knowledge. Material things are a copy of immaterial forms. Things we meet in our everyday experience are nothing but an imitation of the full reality of perfect, eternal, and immaterial forms. A work of art is an imitation of reality, which means that it is a copy of a copy, two times removed from reality, and it is therefore a deception. “The imitative artist [...] will go on imitating without knowing what makes a thing good or bad” (Plato 1964: Resp, X, 599). Moreover, the artist stresses and exaggerates extreme features and actions of the characters. Experiencing a work of art evokes feelings of unusual strength so that our emotional and spiritual balance is impaired. Plato has a moral blame for art. Conversely, according to Aristotle, art tells us something about our human world even if it is essentially different from everyday life which it imitates. At the same time, thanks to its specific distance, works of art tell about and present everyday life in a superior and refined form. They are different from everyday life, and they must be appreciated in their different essence. What remains of Aristotle’s Poetics basically concerns tragedy, the highest form of poetic expression. We can say that knowledge is a constitutive part of the tragedy. The tragedy is qualitatively different from the imitated reality of everyday life because it also entails a cognitive dimension, presents reality under a new light, and makes us reflect on things we took for granted. The work is evaluated in its specificity and not according to the moral or ontological issues that it may raise. To a certain degree, the Poetics anticipates the Hellenistic systematic and erudite approach to works of literature, an attempt to describe characteristics and codify rules. It offers a “technical treatise” upon art, as an activity different from politics or morals or any other kind of knowledge. A technical reflection and the understanding of the mechanisms of the tragedy help to evaluate the literary work and, consequently, the artist (1450a). Some poetic devices are better than others. For example, Aristotle explains that “the best of all discoveries, however, is that arising from the incidents themselves, when the great surprise comes about through a probable incident, like that in the Oedipus of Sophocles” (1455a 15). A good poet is not possessed by God (Euron 2019: 7–11) but has philosophical awareness and technical expertise, and the evaluation of the work is not based on its content or effects but on its intrinsic, formal characteristics.

Romanticism and Transcendental Poetry The German Early Romantic poets and philosophers offer a complex and influential definition of the essence and function of poetry. The critic Friedrich Schlegel and the poet Friedrich von Hardenberg, better known as Novalis, presented their literary and philosophical theory in the journal Athenaeum between 1797 and 1800. The literary work, according to the transcendental poetics, suggested by the Kantian critical philosophy,



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“should represent the producer with the product,” and the reflection on the poetic character of a literary work becomes a constitutive element of poetic creation. Schlegel reads Kant through Fichte: the reflection of the subject on itself, in other words, its self-­consciousness, is the principle of reality discovered by idealism. “Just as it is the nature of spirit to determine itself and in perennial alternation to expand and return to itself, and as every thought is nothing but the result of such an activity; so is the same process generally discernible in every form of idealism, which itself is but a recognition of this very law [die Anerkennung jenes Selbstgesetzes]” (Schlegel 1968: 83). The task of the poet, as well as the task of the critic, is the recognition of that law which the spirit imposes on itself. Poetry is used by romantic thinkers as a general term for artistic creation, encompassing all human spiritual creativity, from mythology to literary works. Poetry as art of words has an ontological priority in the romantic system so that “art is understood to indicate literature, in its central position among all the arts” (Benjamin 1996: 116). Poetry is an absolutely productive activity, which must follow only its own internal legality and does not end at all in the imitation of a preexisting model. There is a qualitative difference between everyday language and poetry, and this difference reflects the relationship between everyday life and art. The work of art presents the world by means of its structure and not by presenting its contents. Actually, the work of art does not display any determinate content. It displays itself and, in doing so, a relation of things or a system. This system presents the absolute. This pivotal romantic concept means reality in its highest, ultimate, and complete form. The absolute is the only reality, object and subject at once, infinite, so that finite things of our ordinary experience are nothing but determinations inside the absolute. The absolute is not any object of rational and objective knowledge. Only our creative faculty can grasp it and, in this way, enable us to experience the absolute by presenting absolute reality in its structure rather than in its content in the form of a work of art. “All the sacred plays of art are only a remote imitation of the sacred play of the universe, the work of art which eternally creates itself anew” (Schlegel 1968: 89). A work of art is a finite, conditioned event that refers, by means of its structure, to the infinite of its origin. Schlegel’s reference to mythology is not by chance. Mythology, as a work of art, is the way by which the absolute reveals itself in the finite, in history. “Mythology is such a work of art created by nature. In its texture the sublime is really formed; everything is relation and metamorphosis, conformed and transformed, and this conformation and transformation is its peculiar process, its inner life and method, if I may say so. [...] This is the beginning of all poetry, to cancel the progression and laws of rationally thinking reason, and to transplant us once again into the beautiful confusion of imagination, into the original chaos of human nature” (Schlegel  1968: 86). This creative attitude disguises a deeply critical intention. Poetry requires an essentially critical perspective, a specific consciousness. Poetry is which we are aware of as poetry. Since the essence of idealism is the recognition of that law which the spirit imposes on itself, poetry shows the spirit’s power of self-­determination, which is at the origin of reality. In a famous fragment Schlegel wrote: There is a poetry whose One and All is the relationship of the ideal and the real: it should thus be called transcendental poetry according to the analogy of the technical language of

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philosophy. [...] But we should not care for a transcendental philosophy unless it were critical, unless it portrayed the producer along with the product, unless it embraced in its system of transcendental thoughts a characterization of transcendental thinking: in the same way, that poetry which is not infrequently encountered in modern poets should combine those transcendental materials and preliminary exercises for a poetic theory of the creative power with the artistic reflection and beautiful self-­mirroring; [...] everywhere and at the same time, it should be poetry and the poetry of poetry (1968: 145).

Knowledge of the poetic nature of the literary work is the condition to evaluate it. As Schlegel pointed out in his writings, “Every work of art brings its frame to the world; it must make notice of the art” (Schlegel 1980: 80). The frame and the reflection of the work on its artificial nature (and our consciousness that the work is an artistic creation, the self-­ consciousness of our spiritual nature) are the first qualities of the literary work. Because of idealism, modern or romantic poetry is essentially different from ancient poetry. “In the ancients, one sees the accomplished letter of entire poetry: in the moderns, one has the presentiment of the spirit in becoming” (Schlegel 1968: 130). Schlegel thinks that ancient poetry can be considered a unitary and absolute work, consistent in its various manifestations, in which spirit and nature find their harmony. Modern or romantic poetry no longer expresses any harmony between nature and spirit; on the contrary, it reveals an irremediable laceration between intentions and results, and an inescapable dissonance between work and work. Modern poetry presents itself as a jumble of contrasting texts; in fact, modern poetry is not yet complete, it is becoming, and indeed becoming constitutes its very essence: “The Romantic type of poetry is still becoming; indeed, its peculiar essence is that it can never be completed. It cannot be exhausted by any theory, and only a divinatory criticism may dare to characterize its ideal. It alone is infinite, as it alone is free; and as its first law it recognizes that the arbitrariness of the poet endures no law above him. The Romantic genre of poetry is the only one which is more than a genre, and which is, as it were, poetry itself: for in a certain sense all poetry is or should be romantic” (Schlegel 1968: 141). Modern or Romantic poetry displays the very essence and the mechanism of spirit and human creativity. Since it is a “progressive universal poetry” (Schlegel 1968: 140), one can have a complete representation of modern poetry only if one knows how to grasp it in its becoming, therefore—­in critical terms—­not in its concrete and final manifestation but in its constitutive principle. On the one hand, one will never be able to find a definition of romantic poetry because it is constantly in becoming; on the other hand, romantic poetry will never be exhausted by criticism. However, if finite things have no actual reality and if the absolute is the only real, which shows itself only in the movement that tends to reach it and which never manages to grasp it in a final form, in a given work, in a specific configuration, how to grasp this infinite movement? Schlegel proposes the principle of the system: the system exists before and independently of the individual elements that are parts of it. The loss of the normative value of the principle of imitation makes nature work no longer as an absolute model for artistic production. For this reason, the reflection on the work becomes a guarantee of a new immediacy and a specific infinity of art. “The Romantics saw in the reflective nature of thinking a warrant for its intuitive character” (Benjamin 1996: 121), and in this way, “this concept guaranteed the immediacy of cognition [and] [...] a peculiar infinity in its



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process” (Benjamin 1996: 123). Poetry is an absolutely productive activity that must only follow its own internal legality and does not end at all in the mirroring of any external, preexisting datum. In modern or romantic poetry, the letter is no longer transparent to its own spirit, and the poetic word no longer disappears to reveal the univocal meaning it contains, to refer to a preexisting, “given reality”. In fact, the very “letter” of the work, its linguistic nature, its palpability, and its opacity that cannot be completely dissipated by the process of signification, becomes a condition for the representation not of an isolated and determined reality (the single work) but of a construct, of a poetic object, and—­in this object—­of a virtually unlimited principle of representation. Literary works precisely must refer to their own procedures, constitutive elements, and principles of internal self-­organization because of the lack or the weakness of an absolute external normativity. The problem of the legitimacy of the work is brought to the fore, and it is represented in the work itself. Every work deserves an individual evaluation. Every complete work should bring its evaluation in itself. “Poetry can be criticized only through poetry” (Schlegel 1968:132) and “should portray itself with each of its portrayals.” Schlegel uses the term Charakteristik to mean this critical work of art. “A critical sketch [Charakteristik] is a critical work of art [ein Kunstwerk der Kritik], a visum repertum of chemical philosophy” (Schlegel 1991: 91). Each work is an infinite reference to other works, and it is the weft of which the absolute is woven. Therefore, if, on the one hand, the system connects the works in a totality through references, cross-­references, quotations, and suggestions, on the other hand, every piece of criticism is inscribed in the system as a poetic work. Each poem is built on another poem. Creation is always the result of an act of reflection and critical work. For this reason, there is no substantial distinction between poetic and critical works; indeed, every successful critical work is a poetic work and every accomplished poem reflects itself and represents the principle of its own poetics, it is poetry of poetry, and it is the product of criticism. In a critical sketch or Charakteristik, “you can understand a work, a spirit, if you are able to reconstruct their path, their structure. This radical understanding [...] is the specific problem and the intimate essence of criticism” (Schlegel 1958–2006: II, 109). Basically, transcendental poetry provides a concrete indication for combining the rigor of the system with the lightness of irony, the methodology of the criticism with the freedom of poetic production. The idea that reality is a system is further developed by Novalis. As a system, poetry becomes a model of reality as well as a principle to know it. Actually, the essence of poetry is the reason of reality (ratio essendi) and the way to understand it (ratio cognoscendi). The function of our everyday language is to communicate and describe things. The poetic language is qualitatively different and presents things in a way that we are not used to seeing them. Novalis points out that poetry displays reality in its original, absolute form: as he writes, “Poetry is the genuine absolute reality. The more poetic, the truer.” Poetic language expresses reality because it is free and concerned with itself. Poetical words, such as mathematical formulae, “constitute a world for themselves—­they play only with themselves, express nothing but their miraculous nature, and just for that reason are they so expressive—­just for that reason does the strange interplay of the relations of things mirror itself in them. Only through their freedom are they members of nature [...]” (quoted in O’Brien 1995: 196). Novalis states that language is essentially poetic because it mirrors

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the “interplay” [Spiel] of relations between things. Poetical language is not an instrument. Poetry connects the individual with the totality since poetry is the essence of reality, or better it is reality in its secret essence. It should be highlighted how Novalis anticipates modern art, in which reflection on creativity becomes a constitutive element of the work. Novalis dispels visible things and moves away from everyday reality to reach the general and universal laws of reality that are captured by the literary work, as long as it is true poetry. The value of the literary work expresses the degree to which the work can make it understandable and even change reality. Poetry is reality and does not just tell or represent it. “The art of the poet is only the arbitrary, active and productive use of our organs, [...] an original, intentional and ideal random production” (Novalis  1960: II, 451 and 483). True poetry has an active and operative function. Seventy years later, Arthur Rimbaud expressed the value and superiority of the poetry of the future: “Poetry will no longer give rhythm to action; it will be in advance” (Rimbaud 2008: 117). Transcendental poetry is a conceptual and not a historical definition. “Dante’s prophetic poem is the only system of transcendental poetry and still the highest of its kind” (Schlegel 1968: 145). Other examples are Shakespeare and Goethe. How can we evaluate the literary value of these and other authors? How can we tell apart a good and a mediocre work? Schlegel answers with his criticism of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister Apprenticeship. An accomplished work has its criticism as a part of its essence.

The Romantic Evaluation of Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship Schlegel considers Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meister Apprenticeship as one of the greatest tendencies of his age, alongside the French Revolution and Fichte’s Theory of Knowledge (Schlegel  1968: 143). Tendency [Tendenz] expresses a principle not yet completed, a becoming. In 1798, Schlegel published a review in the “Athenäum” and declared the Meister as an accomplished example of a poem that represents itself (Schlegel 1958–2006: II, 131) to such an extent as to exempt the critic from his own work. In the Meister, criticism is an integral part of the novel. The novel recounts the artistic education and spiritual formation of the young Wilhelm and exposes, alongside the events of the theatrical company, the necessity and conditions of the artistic production itself. In this way, the Meister presents a reflection that is not so much about events as about the very possibility of telling, about the work itself. In the novel, the poetic moment cannot be separated from the critical moment. “Fortunately, it is precisely one of those books that judge themselves and that take on the fatigue that would be up to the judge. Yes, it not only judges itself, but it also represents itself” (Schlegel  1958–2006: II, 133–134). Therefore, the work contains its criterion of judgment or the indications that allow an evaluation. But this evaluation does not come from outside. The evaluation is internal to the system, that is, it is already contained in the work that is the most immediate manifestation of the system. On the one hand, criticism in the classical sense dissects and analyzes the work, isolates and classifies its constituent elements, and reconstructs its genesis, but in so doing, it destroys the unity of the work and its character as a living organism. Furthermore, since



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the whole can never become an object, the critic loses sight of the work’s relationship with the infinite, of its systemic character. On the other hand, the poetic criticism stresses the “personality and individuality of the work” (Schlegel 1958–2006: II, 134), and the critical point of view remains in the work: “The poet and artist will represent the representation again, he wants to give a form to what was already formed; he wants to complete the work, rejuvenate it, give it a new shape. He will divide the whole into members, masses and pieces, but he will not break it down into its original components” (Schlegel 1958–2006: II, 138). This criticism “must overcome the limits of the visible work by means of suppositions and assertions. This is the task of all criticism, because all excellent work, whatever kind it is, knows more than it says and wants more than it knows” (Schlegel 1958–2006: II, 137). Novalis’ evaluation of Goethe’s novel was different. A true and accomplished work should hint at the absolute of which it is a manifestation. This is the origin of its poetic value. According to Novalis, the Meister is an “economic” book, “unpoetic [undichterisch] in its spirit, though the representation is poetic [poetisch]” (Novalis 1960: II, 646). Goethe’s novel presents a program that is carried out with cold calculation, aimed at the triumph of an absolute value (the bourgeois life) that is substantially extra-­poetic. Novalis writes that “the garden of poetry is imitated with straw and rags” (1960: II, 646). The Meister is a dazzling mystification: its content is not poetry, but it could be any other theme. The novel must be an autonomous whole that reveals the poetry that is the very force animating and running through all of reality; it should not be a “conference” in which Goethe explains it. Poetry shows reality in its structure because reality has an essentially poetic structure, and if Schlegel’s conception appears complex and refers to elements such as reflection and system, Novalis’ perspective is more direct. Poetry—­the romantic one and therefore the poetry that knows its true essence—­shows itself spontaneously. The value of a work consists of its ability to reveal the poetic force of language and send the reader back to the absolute of which it is a part.

Beyond the Romanticism: Poets and Philosophers With Romantic philosophy, reflection becomes a constitutive feature of modern poetic creation and characterizes the modern literary experience. The reflection on the work of art, in fact, indicates the specificity of modern artistic practice compared to ancient practice and therefore guarantees the survival of art in a new form. As Hegel wrote: In all these respects art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past. Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place. What is now aroused in us by works of art is not just immediate enjoyment but our judgement also, since we are subject to our intellectual consideration (i) the content of art, and (ii) the work of art’s means of presentation, and the appropriateness or inappropriateness of both to one another. The philosophy of art is therefore a greater need in our day than it was in days when art by itself as art yielded full satisfaction. Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again, but for knowing philosophically what art is (Hegel 1975: 11).

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The poetic creation shows a new philosophical meaning and poses a more compelling cognitive task. The death of art foretold by Hegel is configured as the end of the immediacy of art. On the one hand, poetic practice seems to find its reason in a philosophical reflection, and criticism becomes an element of artistic creation. On the other hand, modern poetry ends up referring more and more to itself, reflecting on its own nature, exposing its conditions and possibilities, and introjecting the critical attitude, which turns out to be creative. In this way, poetry realizes the instances of transcendental poetry, even if this romantic term disappears from critical terminology. The movable horizon of the works takes the place and function of the stable horizon of nature. Literature imitates literature, and books imitate books, as a more refined, elaborated, self-­conscious nature. A work is a starting point for a new poetic or critical creation. A first perspective of this reflection on the literary work questions the possibility of absolute normativity but also the very value of truth of the work itself. The figure of Oscar Wilde is emblematic. Nature finds itself imitating art. “What Art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design, [...] her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out” (Wilde 1988: 970). Nature is imperfect, and for this reason, we have art. Thanks to the impressionists, we have wonderful brown fogs. Wilde offers a psychological remark and a metaphysical consequence: looking at things does not mean seeing things, and what we see depends on the arts that have influenced us. For this reason, “Nature is no great mother who has borne us. She is our creation” (986). Art is the creation of useless and beautiful things. The value of the work resides in its autonomy and freedom. “Life imitates Art, [...] Life in fact is the mirror, and Art the reality” (982). Unlike the system proposed by Novalis, the autonomy of the poetic word, revealing the specific truth of the poem, its artistic nature, reveals its negative freedom (from mimetic constraints) and, in the end, its emptiness. Accepting that truth is entrusted to style, Wilde unilaterally insists on the aspect of finitude. In short, the romantic premise of the absolute fails. Writing poetry becomes an activity for its own sake or leads to silence. On analogous philosophical premises, after reflecting on his work, Hugo von Hofmannsthal in his Letter of Lord Chandos denounces the crisis of the dominant mechanism of the concept and the fragmentation of reality into  elements that can no longer be named. Silence is the only possibility (von Hofmannstahl 2005: 100). However, we can identify another direction of development. Poetry, by making reflection a constitutive part of itself, can mediate a new and original experience of things. For example, Rainer Maria Rilke’s late production fits into this perspective. Both Duino’s Elegies and The Sonnets to Orpheus present a constant meta-­poetic reference. Indeed, since his first poetic attempts, Rilke had gone in search of the law, of the interplay of forces in which real things rest (Mathieu 1968: 137). Then, reflecting on the work of Rodin and Cézanne, he came to the conclusion that he must produce poem things, poems that are immediately reality (Rilke 1952: 7). These poems find their superior naturalness in the law of their own artificial construction, and this law is their poetic principle. They repeatedly take poetry as their theme, reflect on the procedure that brings them into being, and show it as the condition and origin of the “sayable” and the real, which now coincide.



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Poetry and Philosophy Poetry, reflecting (and knowing) itself, enunciates reality on a more original level than that of the simple representation of the existing. Reflection on what poetry is and how poetry works confers a superior literary value to the text that relates to reality on a deeper level. In some poems by Paul Valéry or Gottfried Benn, the meta-­poetic and self-­referential theme is the secret Leit-­Motiv of their writing (Euron 2002: 45). Consistently, from the philosophical perspective, Martin Heidegger highly evaluates poetry. Poetry is a language that does not depend on presence but which names what is not yet and, in this way, can inaugurate a new historical world. “Poetry is the primal language of a historical people. Thus, the essence of language must be understood out of the essence of poetry and not the other way around” (Heidegger 2000: 60). Heidegger points out the originality of the poetic word that never takes language as a material at its disposal but, rather, makes language possible and, in doing so, finds the Being itself. “Poetry is the founding of being in the word. [...] Because being and the essence of things can never be calculated and derived from what is present at hand, they must be freely created, posited, and bestowed. Such a free bestowal is a founding. [...] Poetry is a founding by the word and in the word” (Heidegger 2000: 59 and 58). In other words, only through language is man exposed to the disclosure of Being, and poetic language has the primacy in such a disclosure because of its originality: it names what was not named yet. Poets are highly considered or at least certain poets. Hölderlin is the first one. “I did not choose Hölderlin because his work, as one among many, realizes the universal essence of poetry, but rather because Hölderlin’s poetry is sustained by his whole poetic mission: to make poems solely about the essence of poetry. Hölderlin is for us in a preeminent sense the poets poet” (Heidegger 2000: 52). The reflection on poetry and the related cognitive elements determine the value of poetry. Poetry is not about objective knowledge but about the specific knowledge bestowed by its essence: the being. Literary works do not concern literature alone. They concern the truth itself. Heidegger, based on the Greek etymology of the word [aletheia], refers to truth as “unconcealedness.” Something is true because it appears in light of the Being. The unconcealedness of truth is not a normal state but an event. A work of art is a setting-­in-­work of truth, where “truth” is the unconcealedness in which different beings appear in light of Being. Poetry as the language of Being has a kind of primacy and is the condition of every kind of art: “Art, as the setting-­in-­work of truth, is poetry” (Heidegger  1976: 699). Accomplished poetry is an event of truth. This is a theoretical assumption that can only be verified a posteriori. We cannot draw precise critical guidelines for evaluating a true poem. Nevertheless, interpretation is a constitutive part of the potential of the poem. Poetry is an event of truth when it opens a “World.” On the one hand, World is the historical order in which we live, the culture we share, the words we are used to, a displayed system of meanings, things we name, and so on. World comes from Earth, but, on the other hand, Earth is impossible to name. Earth is the dark, deep, and unsayable ground from which worlds arise. The work of art reminds us of the deep essence of things, the abyss of Being from which things emerge and which cannot be exhausted. Earth cannot be explained once and for all. Earth is like a reservoir of infinite interpretations, of possibilities, of imaginable and

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never yet written poems. The relationship to Earth, which closes itself in front of World, sheltering the inexhaustibility of Being, means the value and inexhaustibility of the poem that inaugurates new works, new interpretations, and new worlds. Heidegger reflects on the abysmal origin of poetry. Poetry reflects on itself and gains a philosophical perspective. Jorge Luis Borges’s poems often show a self-­reflective character that insists more on the artificiality of the poem than on natural reality. References to the author and to the world disappear in an ironic game. His most famous short stories affirm the inevitability of the artificial and self-­reflective character of writing. As Paul de Man wrote, “their world is the representation, not of an actual experience, but of an intellectual proposition” (de Man 1989: 125). Literary and philosophical works generate an infinite system, such as the infinite books of the Library of Babel, generated by the possibilities of permutation of all the letters of the alphabet, including the book you are reading now. The short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius tells about literature and philosophy of a fictitious world, Tlön, totally invented and described in detail in an encyclopedia. In that literature, we find the romantic idea of the absolute book containing itself, its own conditions, and its own refutation. The metaphysicians of Tlön seek not truth, or even plausibility-­they seek to amaze, astound. In their view, metaphysics is a branch of the literature of fantasy. They know that a system is naught but the subordination of all the aspects of the universe to one of those aspects-­any one of them. [...] Within the sphere of literature, too, the idea of the single subject is all-­powerful. Books are rarely signed, nor does the concept of plagiarism exist: It has been decided that all books are the work of a single author who is timeless and anonymous. Literary criticism often invents authors. [...] Their books are also different from our own. Their fiction has but a single plot, with every imaginable permutation. Their works of a philosophical nature invariably contain both the thesis and the antithesis, the rigorous pro and contra of every argument. A book that does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete. (Borges 1998: 74 and 76–77)

However, this world consciously fictitious and conceived to respond only to its own internal laws cannot but affect reality: in contact with this carefully elaborated fiction, reality “caved in” at more than one point. The truth is, it wanted to cave in. Ten years ago, any symmetry, any system with an appearance of order-­dialectical materialism, anti-­Semitism, and Nazism could spellbind and hypnotize mankind. How could the world not fall under the sway of Tlön, and how could it not yield to the vast and minutely detailed evidence of an ordered planet? It would be futile to reply that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but orderly in accordance with divine laws (read: “inhuman laws”) that we can never quite manage to penetrate. Tlön may well be a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth forged by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men. Contact with Tlön, the habit of Tlön, has disintegrated this world (Borges 1998: 81).

The writer manages to weave an ordered image of the world, to represent a system that reveals, alongside the represented, also the representative instance, its possibilities, its refutations, and so on. The literary text reflects its own constitutive forces. All this does not happen through the use of an absolute metaphysical principle. It happens through a poetic



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procedure that has a cognitive significance. As de Man wrote, “the subject of the stories is the creation of style itself; [...] His main characters are prototypes for the writer, and his worlds are prototypes for a highly stylized kind of poetry or fiction. [...] His stories are about the style in which they are written” (de Man 1989: 125). Philosophy is an attitude required or, better, imposed by language itself. Hans-­Georg Gadamer takes Heidegger’s position to extremes: language is not a “tool” we can use as we like. Our tradition, our history, and our very existence are founded on language. This foundation is not based on our everyday language but on poetry [Dichtung]. Gadamer adopts the romantic assumption that poetry (encompassing lyrics, literature, and all art of the language) is the prominent form of art: all other artistic expressions are based on it. This happens because language is the “medium” on which interpretation is based. “Not only is the world only insofar as it comes into language, but language, too, has its real being only in the fact that the world is presented in it” (Gadamer 2001: 440). Empirical– historical reality and language are deeply intertwined in a mutually determining relationship. Language and world implicate each other. In this way, Gadamer’s interpretation of the literary work becomes the model of interpretation of any human experience of being, since “being, that can be understood, is language” (470). Poetry becomes the model of the experience of truth. What is truth? Gadamer writes that we have an experience of truth when we have a “true” experience, an actual experience that changes what we are and what we think, that provides something new and, in doing so, enriches us. This kind of truth is not the result of scientific objectification and calculation but rather the experience of poetry. Poetry (and other forms of art derived from this fundamental linguistic experience) is not a text with a given, complete, and final meaning. The literary experience of the poem becomes a model of the existential experience of truth. The experience of truth is basically an experience of interpretation. In the experience of the literary work you do not consider it from outside, as a given object, defined once and for all, and complete in itself. By means of interpretation, you make it your own work, and you make it living according to your own rules. For this reason, a poem will have different meanings for different readers and for the poet. In this way, the poem becomes part of your life and reflects your feelings and your personal experience. Gadamer proposed the analogy of the play: “all playing is a being-­played” (106). The player cannot consider the game as an object and cannot control it. The real subject of the game is the game itself and not the player. Unlike most games, the literary work represents something repeatable and permanent, independent from the representing activity of the players, a consistent whole complete in itself. This is what Gadamer calls the “transformation into structure.” The structure of this autonomous totality cannot be compared to the external reality. “The transformation [into structure] is a transformation into the true” (112). According to this perspective, the truth we experience in the literary work is not the result of some content that the work communicates to us but is rather a structure, a form that the work (and the work alone) can deliver and that exists in the mediation (and in the mediation alone) between the work and the reader. Now, how can we evaluate literary work? Are all interpretations equally valid? No, of course. On the one hand, a good work should present a strong, consistent, and identifiable structure that can mediate the truth in the process of interpretation. On the other hand, usual language and objects appear as they have never appeared before in our everyday

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e­xperience. They emerge new and different. They offer a new horizon, and our world appears different. In the process of interpretation, the literary work and the reader melt together and share a new, unique horizon. This is what Gadamer calls the “fusion of ­horizons,” which is actually our usual experience of truth. In this experience, our horizon is the result of a fusion with the horizon of the work. Some works open new horizons, and some works do not. Real poetry awakens a new meaning in words that had seemed worn out. Our existential dimension is at stake because understanding is always the fusion of horizons we supposed to exist by themselves. There is a further element that expresses the value of a work. A literary work is always its own “history of effects” [Wirkungsgeschichte]. Somehow, as Schlegel put it, a work is nothing in itself: it is always in a relationship with other works, and it is a system. A literary work is the history of its interpretations and the effects of such interpretations. The criticism of a literary work is part of the same system and can be considered an independent work that contributes to the history of effects.

Philosophy: Linguistics and Poetry First linguistics and then structuralism find an unrecognized antecedent in the spirit of Schlegel’s philosophical system. It is a system in which the signifier and signified arise from the articulation within a continuum, an oppositional system, which is constituted starting from differences rather than from presences. As de Saussure wrote, “philosophers and linguists have always agreed in recognizing that without the help of signs we would be unable to make a clear-­cut, consistent distinction between two ideas. Without language, thought is a vague, uncharted nebula” (de Saussure  1996: 111–112). Linguistics offers strategies for understanding the human world, and many creations and activities can be explained like language or as a system of differences. As the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein stated, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world” (1961: §5.6). Gadamer wrote that poetry opens a new horizon in which our world appears different. Nevertheless, literary works do not present “new” contents. Their specific philosophical meanings (in terms of ideas, thoughts, feelings, emotions, new perspectives and horizons, and so on) are the result of formal devices. Philosophy and reflection on language discover a new closeness. The linguist Viktor Shklovsky starts from a psychological remark: on the one hand, our ordinary language makes the perception of the world habitual and automatic. On the other hand, poetry is a technique of defamiliarization that removes the usual objects from the mechanism of automatized perception. Poetical language makes the world appear new and unusual; familiar things become strange and different. The experience of the form (not of the content) of the poem makes us enjoy a new and authentic experience of reality. The linguist Roman Jakobson read Novalis’s Fragments with special attention (Menninghaus 1987: 8) and, in his famous essay Linguistics and poetics, defined the poetic function as the stress on the message. This is essentially a mechanism of self-­reflection of the language on itself: a poem is a message that stresses its internal sign organization. Poetry is concerned with itself and its linguistic dimension. However, poetry also refers to the external world and allows an experience that ordinary language does not allow. The medium of poetry is words, the same words that constitute our existence. Again, language



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and world implicate each other. Unlike abstract art, “poetry is tied to the medium that does not merely reconstruct perceived reality; it is part of perceived, and lived, reality” (Bradford 2015: 173). The poetic function, “by promoting the palpability of signs, deepens the fundamental dichotomy of signs and objects” (Jakobson  1960: 356). Poetry’s focus shifts from the external world (referential function) to the reflection on the work and the organization of the message itself (poetic function). In doing so, the world is not deleted: poet and reader become like “Siamese twins” and poetry “involves the individual in a process of personal, emotional, and intellectual transformation,” so that poetry is “not simply as a separate linguistic genre, but [...] an expressive, indeed an existential, condition that is structurally and functionally unique” (Bradford  1994: 21). The linguistic and prelinguistic worlds are at stake in the palpability of signs.

Literature and Philosophy Schlegel redefined the literary work as a production that has its main trait precisely in the impossibility of finding fulfillment in the absolute identity with itself, which characterizes the natural object. Such heterogeneity between poetical language and empirical reality is the essence of the literary work. “The self-­reflecting mirror-­effect by means of which a work of fiction asserts, by its very existence, its separation from empirical reality, its divergence, as a sign, from a meaning that depends for its existence on the constitutive activity of this sign, characterized the work of literature in its essence. It is always against the explicit assertion of the writer that readers degrade the fiction by confusing it with a reality from which it has forever taken leave” (de Man 1971: 17). From a philosophical point of view, the irreducibility of empirical reality to language is the permanent issue of literary works. The solution proposed by philosophy is not to resolve the conflict but to abide in this permanent struggle. Self-­reflection is a possible definition of and, at the same time, a way to deal with literary work. As Aristotle stated at the beginning of the Western tradition, the distinctive character of the work of art is the fact that I know that it is a work of art. I know what it is and, in this way, my literary experience entails a cognitive factor. Reflection on the work means: I know it is fiction, and I can enjoy it. At the same time, I know that, by experiencing a work, I look at a whole and not at a part of reality and this entails, again, a cognitive dimension. I experience reality under a new light that I cannot find in my chaotic, random, ordinary life. The philosophical experience of the literary work is not any simple, carefree activity. In the interpretation of a work of art, we try to find a sense. We try to find strategies of meaning. Actually, what we call a world has a sense not because it is a world. As Wittgenstein wrote, “The sense of the world must lie outside the world” (§ 6.41). Since we recognize a sense in it, we understand it as a world. Paradoxically, the world exists starting from a sense, but in itself, it does not express any sense. In a similar way, we cannot understand literary work starting from the assumption that it is the expression of the sense of the world. There is a referential relation between the work and the world, but it is not what constitutes the literary work as such. As Heidegger and Gadamer put it, the former deals with Earth and the latter with interpretation; only when we pose the question of the sense, then the world exists. Even in a very partial and non-­philosophical perspective, the world

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arises when we call for a sense. For example, hunting an animal in order to survive is not yet the bestowal of a sense. Depicting or telling the hunt is a way to give a sense to the world, and it is already the principle of a narrative. (On its turn, the animal has a complex subjective world, but it does not pose the question of the sense of it and, consequently, the animal does not need to write nor interpret any narrative. Animals do not have literature, not because they do not have a world but because they are not looking for the sense of the world.) Only if you pose the question of the sense, the world exists. We look for a sense, and we meet a world. The world, as we know it, is a consequence of the need for sense. If we want to follow (and carry to its extreme consequences) a tradition that dates back to the romantic philosophers, the world is a byproduct of poetry. This tradition was found in Novalis and Wilde, two poets who developed a similar philosophical assumption with diverging results. As we stated at the beginning of this chapter, the literary language is different from everyday language as the literary work is different from everyday life. Paradoxically, starting from these differences, poetry can display life and tell something about existence. If making sense of a poem is essentially an evaluative procedure (Bradford 2015: 196), this procedure starts from and entails a philosophical reflection and existential consequences. In this ancipital nature of poetry, straddled between empirical reality and language, lies the philosophical relevance of literature and the intrinsic value of the literary work. Umberto Eco, outlining our postmodern situation, remembers that “books always speak of other books” (2004: 568) and that they are more related to other works than to the empirical world. In this way, literature rediscovers its meta-­poetic and self-­reflective nature. The literary work “is a machine for generating interpretations” (Eco 2004: 560) so that criticism cannot exhaust the possibilities of creativity. A poem can elicit infinite meanings because a poem (and only a good one) offers a defined structure, a form, a by-­ itself-­consisting whole, and, in doing so, a meaning. The meaning of the work is the result of its poetic strategies. The meaning of a poem is not (or not only and not primarily) its referential function or the author’s intentions. The act of writing (not the intention) completes the creation of meaning. Philosophers reflecting on poetry and poets with philosophical endowment always stressed the creative act of writing. In this act, ordinary ideas and confused individual facts reach universality, necessity, and sharpness. Only in this way, the work becomes recognizable and engaging. Writing becomes an existential action, an issue related to the understanding of ourselves and of the world. As Italo Calvino wrote, in the literary work, the formless crystallizes into a form and the chaos acquires a meaning, not as its content but as a living whole: “not fixed, not definitive, [...] but alive as an organism” (1988: 69–70). The literary work presents our world with a form, an order, and a sharpness that we cannot find in our ordinary life. Our everyday communication simplifies things and flattens differences. “The function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language” (45). The heterogeneity between poetic language and empirical reality hinted at (and never fully exhausted by) concepts, such as “self-­ reflection,” “Earth,” “transformation into form,” or “palpability of the signs” and their apparent contradictoriness, are not limits and inaccuracies of poetic language but the philosophical essence of the literary work.



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References Aristotle 1995. The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. J. Barnes. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Benjamin, W. 1996. “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism.” In Selected Writings 1 (1913–1926), ed. M. Bullock and M. W. Jennings. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press. Borges, J. L. 1998. “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” In Collected Fictions, trans. A. Hurley, New York: Penguin. Bradford, R. 1994. Roman Jakobson. Life, Language and Art. London and New York: Routledge. Bradford, R. 2015. Is Shakespeare Any Good? And Other Questions on How to Evaluate Literature. Oxford: Wiley-­Blackwell. Calvino, I. 1988. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University. Danto, A. 1981. The transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge Mass: Harvard University Press. de Man, P. 1971. “Criticism and Crisis.” In Blindness and Insight. New York: Oxford University Press. de Man, P. (1989). “A Modern Master: Jorge Luis Borges.” In Critical Writings 1953–1978, ed. L. Waters. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. de Saussure, F. 1996. Cours in General Linguistics. New York-­Toronto-­London: McGraw-­Hill Book. Eco, U. 2004. “Postscript to The Name of the Rose.” In The Name of the Rose, trans. W. Weaver. London: Vintage Books. Euron, P. 2002. “La poesia trascendentale.” In Strumenti critici, Il Mulino, n° 98. Euron, P. 2019. Aesthetics, Theory and Interpretation of the Literary Work. Boston/Leiden: Brill. Gadamer, H.-­G. 2001. Truth and Method, trans. J.  Weinsheimer and D. G. Marsgall. London: Sheed and Ward. Hegel 1975. Hegel’s Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox. New York: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, M. 1976. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Philosophies of Art and Beauty. Selected Readings in Aesthetics from Plato to Heidegger, trans.

A. Hofstadter, ed. A. Hofstadter, R. Kuhns. Chicago: The University Of Chicago Press. Heidegger, M. 2000. “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry.” In Elucidation of Hölderlin’s Poetry, trans. K. Hoeller. New York: Humanity Books. Jakobson, R. 1960. “Linguistic and Poetics.” In Style in Language, ed. T. Sebeok. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. Mathieu, V. 1968. Dio nel “Libro d’ore” di R. M. Rilke. Florence: Olschki. Menninghaus, W. 1987. Unendliche Verdopplung. Die frühromantische Grundlegung der Kunstheorie im Begriff absoluter Selbstreflexion. Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp. Novalis 1960. Schriften. Die Werke Friedrich von Hardenbergs, ed. P. Kluckhohn et  al. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. O’Brien, W. A. 1995. Novalis: Signs of Revolution. Durham, NC/London: Duke University Press. Plato 1964. The Works of Plato, trans. B. Jowett. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Rilke, R. M. 1952. Briefe über Cézanne, ed. C. Rilke. Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag. Rimbaud, A. 2008. Complete Works, trans. P. Schmidt. New York: Harper. Schlegel, F. 1958–2006. Kritische Fr.-­Schlegel-­ Ausgabe, ed. E. Behler, J.-­ J. Anstett and E. Eichner. München: Schöningh. Schlegel, F. 1968. Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms, ed. Ernest Behler and Roman Struc. London: Pennsylvania State University Press. Schlegel, F. 1980. Literarische Notizen 1797–1801—­Literary Notebooks, ed. H. Eichner. Frankfurt a/M.-­Berlin-­Wien: Ullstein. Schlegel, F. 1991. Philosophical Fragments, ed. P. Firchow. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press. von Hofmannstahl, H. 2005. The Lord Chandos Letter, trans. J. Rotenberg. New  York: The New  York Review. Wilde, O. 1988. “The Decay of Lying.” In The Complete Works. London: Collins. Wittgenstein, L. 1961. Tractatus Logico-­ Philosophicus. London: Routledge and Kegan.

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Kathleen Raine: The Less Received Andrew Keanie

The Voice That Speaks to None For almost three quarters of a century that so often talked about culture and politics in faddish and fashionable literature, Blake’s secretary—­as Kathleen Raine (1908–2003) referred to herself—­instinctively and insistently spoke to “none” in the hope of being heard ultimately by “all.” To those who speak to the many deaf ears attend. To those who speak to one, In poet’s song and voice of bird, Many listen; but the voice that speaks to none By all is heard: Sound of the wind, music of the stars, prophetic word. (“Triad,” Collected Poems 137)

Raine was not interested in politics. Although she was present as a writer in the “Friable paper world humming with hate” (“Childhood,” Collected Poems 158), she never involved in pamphleteering terms. There is no Marxism to be found in her poetry, no “solutions” to economic or social problems, and therefore no antisemitic, nationalistic, republican, or other such agitation. In affirming experience and vision as sacred (“Inviolate in leaves ensphered”), Raine often situated herself (or, rather, the speakers of her poems) among the fine details of the non-­human world. “I am bird-­world, leaf-­life, I am wasp-­world hung/Under low berry-­branch of hidden thorn” (“Childhood,” Collected Poems 158).

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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Raine learned a lot from her study of natural sciences, including botany and zoology, at Cambridge University during the 1920s. She also learned a lot from the Orcadian poet, Edwin Muir (1887–1959), whose friendship and influence she treasured and whose work she looked to as a guiding light. Muir’s poem, “The Animals,” uncovers the non-­human world as a freshly and richly relatable realm. They do not live in the world, Are not in time and space. From birth to death hurled No word do they have, not one To plant a foot upon, Were never in any place.

It is only when overbearing human beings—­political animals thick with initiatives, industriousness, taxonomizing, and territoriality—­arrive on the scene that the great mystery begins to be “with names ... called,” “walled,” “Snatched,” and further degraded into the confusion of exploitable and destroyable things. For with names the world was called Out of the empty air, With names was built and walled, Line and circle and square, Dust and emerald; Snatched from deceiving death By the articulate breath. (Edwin Muir: Selected Poems 73)

The human breath in the above instance may well be articulating something admirably humane. However, it has to be said that human heads are so often set in thickets of language leaning toward inhumanity and liable to restructure society for the worse. As P.H. Butter has put it, “Communism seemed to him [Muir] to display in more extreme form all that he had most disliked in Calvinism.” (Edwin Muir: Writers and Critics 15). Raine saw in Muir’s attitude and approach an inspiring alternative to the de rigueur disequilibrium discouraging the contemporary poet from living for a higher goal than him/ herself. She saw in Muir that poetry is knowledge, and that beauty is a form of cognition. She saw that when beauty is debased from cognition to sensation, the further decline that follows usually presents polemics, therapeutic self-­ expression, or other symptoms of non-­visionariness. If one thinks of twentieth-­century literature as a spectrum with Bertolt Brecht at one end, Raine (with Muir) could be said to be situated at the other. Brecht cannot even mention, say, trees unaccompanied by anxiety about letting the side down: Ah, what an age it is When to speak of trees is almost a crime For it is a kind of silence about injustice! “To Posterity” (1939) translated by H.R. Hays (1947)

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Raine’s trees—­like William Cowper’s Yardley Oak and William Wordsworth’s yew tree of Lorton Vale—­come to us without interference or supervision. They have not had to be planted and watered by the right sort of men in the right sort of worker’s clothes, and they have not had to be vetted by the Communist Party. They come, rather, with their rather incoherent and inconvenient news of their active participation in unfathomable reality. They are to be lived with and meditated over. Raine practices her craft and exercises her sensibility with no self-­censorship and without having to apologize for reaching beyond concerns relating to social justice. Little laurel trees, your roots can find No mountain, yet your leaves extend Beyond your own world, into mine Perennial wands, unfolding in my thought The budding evergreen of time. (“The Trees in Tubs,” Complete Poems 30)

Brecht buzzes from line to line micromanaging himself and his reader as he goes. Raine presents the frank and naive responsiveness of the remote outcast, the girl from a close-­knit community, the Northumbrian hamlet known as Bavington, who found herself fallen into the sordid modern world of the metropolis of London. Another thing that sets Raine apart from some of her eminent contemporaries is that there is no trace in her work of autobiographical theatricality (with, say, Sylvia Plath at the opposite end of the scale), social realism (say, Philip Larkin), feminism (say, Adrienne Rich), or any other literary behaviors in the broadening Freudian daylight into which twentieth-­century poets were forever being nudged and nudging others. Raine’s commitment to something higher made a mere “world of shadows” for her of the anxieties and enthusiasms with which twentieth-­century literature is littered. Our words, our concepts, only name A world of shadows; for the truth is plain ... (“The Speech of Birds,” Collected Poems 21).

Reject of the Waste Land Having (by 1922) rhythmically grumbled into consciousness the spiritual condition of England as a waste land, and having (by 1925) been recruited by Geoffrey Faber as a literary editor and director of Faber and Gwyer (later Faber and Faber), T.S. Eliot would for many years find himself indifferent to Raine’s poetry submissions and would have no interest in publishing her work. Raine’s poetry was not of the kind which Eliot was trying to write himself, and it was not until he felt that his own lines of development had become well established that Raine began to appeal to him. How much of this late appeal was due to the maturing of Raine’s power, and how much to the maturing of Eliot’s own taste, in the final balance of these things who can say? At any rate, the rejection was a blow to young Raine at the time, as she would concede much later. “I would above all else have wished to be accepted by T.S. Eliot for his list of Faber poets; his was the imprimatur.” (India Seen Afar 13)



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The writers who were accepted by Eliot for publication, such as W.H. Auden and William Empson, had the inclination and intellectual force to define themselves as more sharply relevant than Raine amid the fog of politics and war. Politics are what verse should Not fly from, or it all goes wrong. (Empson, “Aubade”)

The Faber poets seemed to have in common something of a distaste for exertion in any arena other than the “cerebral and political and mundane” (India Seen Afar 12), as Raine would put it. Hence, Raine was regarded with a blend of condescension and fondness that her more august contemporaries seemed to have reserved especially for their beautiful, talented, misguided, and (alas) irretrievably unserious female acquaintance (to whom, nevertheless, some consideration had still to be shown as a matter of course). Empson (to his credit a courteous and loyal friend to Raine, as she remembers warmly in her Autobiographies) and Auden were highly renowned, unlike Raine, for their cutting-­edge cleverness. In his poetry, Empson frequently reminds us just how puny we are, and how pent up we are within our physiological restrictions. “The heart of standing is you cannot fly,” says Empson in “Aubade” (The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, 386). Often, Empson’s lines look more like applied psychology than poetry. “And now she cleans her teeth into the lake” (“Camping Out”) is the opening line of what is supposed to be a love poem. In the thickened Darwinian daylight of the twentieth century, poets and baboons look practically the same, and so Empson with impunity can level love to merely physical activity and animal function. There is no need for the poet to express emotional, let alone spiritual, needs. The natural world is all about the unfolding of organic processes. The natural scientists have been saying so for quite some time. We animals can lay claim to no special place. We make sex, not love. With our ideas above our station, we are, above all, unwell. Slowly the poison the whole blood stream fills. It is not the effort nor the failure tires. The waste remains, the waste remains and kills. (Empson, “Missing Dates,” The Harvill Book of Twentieth Century Poetry in English, 219)

Furthermore, we, like the rest of the world and the other animals in it, are made exclusively of atoms. The physicists have been saying so. If the world is not actually collapsing around us, it may as well be. We have no idea what the world is doing, but it feels rather as if it is degenerating into chaos. Perhaps some new idea of divinity might eventually materialize. In the meantime, the poet is left to express the problems of the ego trapped in identification with time. There is the tastelessness by which poetry is not relished. In chewing over such auxiliary philosophical issues as the meaning of meaning, literature has become simultaneously more ludic and joyless. Heisenberg’s principle is the law of the land, at least from where each of us is situated. Writers such as Auden and Empson can seem distinct and streetwise in the general deterioration. Raine describes how she found herself as an impressionable undergraduate at Cambridge mesmerized by “Empson’s tone of despair contained by intellectual stoicism.” Admiring

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Empson’s attitude and wanting for a time to take her bearings from it, Raine repudiated herself (including her “immature” enthusiasm for Keats and Shelley)—­“I too was under the spell of the new scientific universe”—­by speaking in the “flat clever voice” of her lecturers and classmates at college. William Empson’s “tracer-­photon with a rocket’s life-­line” plunged into a strange cosmos, accessible only to intellect, and yet exercising upon our young emotions a terrible negative attraction, like a whirlpool or the edge of a cliff. Intellectual honesty seemed to demand that we throw ourselves over, and the rocket’s life-­line offered little hope of rescue (Autobiographies 140–141).

Auden’s Gee Force Auden’s reason for writing poetry was to focus readers’ attention on society’s need for improvement. There is no shortage of disease, dread, fear, remorse, and shock in Auden’s poetry. Miss Gee, the buttoned up spinster with the squint and the vague sexual longings and uneasiness, lives her hackneyed, haunted little life until she eventually has to go to the doctor with a pain inside her (which turns out to be cancer), and then she gets passed from doctor to surgeon before dying, and then being cut in half and hung from the ceiling for dissection by a bunch of Oxford groupers. They took Miss Gee to the hospital, She lay there a total wreck, Lay in the ward for women With her bedclothes right up to her neck. They lay her on the table, The students began to laugh; And Mr. Rose the surgeon He cut Miss Gee in half. Mr. Rose he turned to his students, Said, “Gentlemen if you please, We seldom see a sarcoma As far advanced as this.” They took her off the table, They wheeled away Miss Gee Down to another department Where they study Anatomy. They hung her from the ceiling Yes, they hung up Miss Gee; And a couple of Oxford Groupers Carefully dissected her knee. (“Miss Gee,” The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, 416–417)

If you read this and do not like it, that’s your problem. However, if you are as clever and serious and hardhearted as one needs to be when capitalism is at large (and, as Brecht has it,



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fascism is capitalism writ largest), you will twig that the unpleasantness is necessary. It might be good for you, like electroconvulsive therapy. No one should have the right to refuse to be reframed. Everyone is expected to repent. Such is the shape of the cultural crisis and such is its inimical shine left by busy intellectuals. No one is exempt from exertion. Raine wrote feelingly about what it is like to find oneself assimilated with the consensus. Not to be a Marxist then was held to be a mark either of incorrigible selfishness or lack of seriousness. I felt, no less than the Marxists among us, that the current of history which flows in one direction only, flowed the way that they were going; and much of the sense of god-­like, invincible power that then possessed us came from this sense of flowing with the tide. To move with that tide seemed even to be a kind of virtue in itself, an implicit faith in the purpose of whatever hidden power conducts the world, even though that power was at the same time denied mind or purpose. Many of us who would not use the word God nevertheless lived by faith in the life-­force itself, and to that life-­force abandoned ourselves (Autobiographies 176).

It was not simply that Raine could not accept the bogus view of life she was expected to buy into or the lowering of her spiritual horizons by self-­made adjudicators of cultural relevance. She also had difficulty in accepting loafing Baudelaire’s bitterly reductive representation of the world (inherited so eagerly by Auden) to a hospital in which human beings are either administering (or about to administer) or suffering (or about to suffer) terrible torments. She wanted to provide readers with something spiritually recognizable, something profoundly hoped for, something instructive and sustaining, and something real albeit not material. She found much of her inspiration for doing this (much to the supercilious amusement of her consensus-­ conscious contemporaries) in the previous century’s Romanticism and in the Romantics’—­and especially Blake’s—­long-­outmoded outbreaks of elemental discourse. After Cambridge, her faith in what Coleridge called “facts of mind” seemed to return to her and help Raine settle into an attitude (to the tortured, fleeting, and dreamlike experience of being alive and in the world) that made more sense to her and that she could actually believe in, despite the snares and wiles in the materialistic discourse of the day. For Raine, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (for example) was—­is—­an experience, a flash, and a totality not to be outshone or switched off by an Auden or an Empson. For Raine, Wordsworth’s “joy of elevated thoughts,” his “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused,” was a subtle disturbance worth inheriting and cherishing in a century whose arts seemed to have become slavish statements of artists’ merely personal likes and dislikes and piquantly preludial to some conclusive chaos. Blake—­Raine’s “Master” (Collected Poems vi)—­had left a body of work amounting to the fullest and most uncompromising rejection of the predominant materialist premises (humanity’s monstrous self-­ destruction, embryonic in the amnion of the European Enlightenment) traceable to Bacon, Newton, and Locke. As Blake’s explicator, Raine is second to none: Joy—­delight—­is the essence of life, and all life seeks joy as its natural state. For him [Blake], the mechanistic view of the universe—­the popular mentality of the Enlightenment under the guise of Deism (‘natural religion’), the philosophy of Bacon, Newton and Locke—­was the enemy of life; life which is immeasurable, not to be captured or contained within the

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quantitative ‘laws of nature’—­a view which Bergson was later to develop in more strictly philosophical terms (William Blake 50).

It was Raine’s deep study of Blake that led her far past her contemporaries’ dismissiveness of him (and far past their dismissiveness of the biggest truth that the idea of personal happiness is an illusion and that real happiness comes in fulfilling one’s cosmic purpose). She came to realize that Blake was neither an ignorant working class dissenter (as the countercultural commentators of the 1960s had it) nor a fantasist who had made it all up (as all the rest had it). He was, rather, as Raine would make clear in her major work of scholarship, Blake and Tradition (1968), profoundly knowledgeable in “the learning of the imagination”—­a perennial wisdom going back through Milton, Shakespeare, Ficino, Dante, and further still to Plotinus, and all the way back to Plato (Autobiographies 352). For Raine, this sacred tradition has been dis-­acknowledged and pushed down beneath the scrutiny of mainstream culture and academia. It is a tradition that includes Thomas Taylor the Platonist, Swedenborg, Hermes Trismegistus, and Boehme (Autobiographies 258). For Raine, the more one is informed and nourished by this tradition, the less convincing appear the amusements, excitements, horrors, neuroses, and vexations of the twentieth century, and the more empty and evil are the ideologies generating the hallucinations. For Auden, poetry makes nothing happen; for Raine, even the nightmare of the Second World War will not stop her knowing that if she finds herself with nothing to live for higher than herself, she may as well die. She will keep obeying her frantic and obscure compulsion to write, even though it is far from clear “to what end.” Stairways into space, and windows into sky, And the tear-­wet streets, with cloud-­torn moonlight shining, Ways underground are open, and the trains are running Oh to what end, in this dream-­entangled city? (“New Year 1943,” Collected Poems 23)

Raine can be counted among the few who found what they were looking for—­an explanation of personal unhappiness in the twentieth century—­in the work of the French metaphysician René Guénon. Guénon and Raine have both been almost completely ignored by the official academic world. Even a cursory look at Guénon’s Crisis of the Modern World, first published in French (which Raine was able to read) in 1927, is a reminder about the spiritual knowledge that was at the heart of all traditional civilizations but that the modern Western world had lost sight of. It is really an extraordinary epoch in which so many men can be made to believe that a people is being given happiness by being reduced to subjection, by being robbed of all that is most precious to it, that is to say of its own civilization ... and by being constrained to the most distasteful kinds of work, in order to make it acquire things for which it has not the slightest use. For that is what is taking place: the modern West cannot tolerate that men should prefer to work less and be content to live on little; as it is only quantity that counts, and as everything that escapes the senses is held to be non-­existent, it is taken for granted that anyone who is not in a state of agitation and does not produce much in a material way must be an ‘idler’. (The Crisis of the Modern World 113–114).



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Like Guénon’s philosophy, Raine’s poetry has not been analyzed by many critics. Hence, it continues to be present on the page pristine and unchallenged, which can look complacent—­contemptible even, like Guénon’s “idler”—­to our more piously agitated pursuers of the material needs of the people: surely art claiming to be “Fired by Blake’s angel-­peopled sun” (“Ninfa Revisited,” Collected Poems 155) needs to be brought down to earth and put to the test somehow before being taken seriously? Surely art bold enough to make its appeal to posterity from its own supposedly sacred space should be supposed merely preposterous until it has been put through the third degree by someone suitably grounded and suitably established? The sort of ready-­tongued egalitarians that tended to predominate in Cambridge in the 1920s and 1930s would quickly have declared it quixotic, if not flat out cracked and rambling, to liaise again with those little feathered idlers of the sky: Shelley’s skylark, Keats’s nightingale, and Blake’s robin. However, Raine boldly revisited the Romantics because she realized that, for them, the birds were not so much birds as symbols of blessedness. Raine wanted birds, trees, and everything to be revealed by the ancient light for which the Romantics had cultivated such unaffected appreciation, and beside which the shocks, sparks, and surfaces of modern poetry could seem so tawdry, unrevealing, and unprogressive. Is not our material Paradise Blake’s desert where the soul finds nothing to eat or drink? Technology works the miracle refused by Jesus in the wilderness (so Blake, in his illustrations to Paradise Regained, presents it) and makes bread out of stone. “Real, taxed, substantial money-­bought bread,” Blake called it. But such merely quantitative prosperity offers but dust and ashes to the soul ... (“Blake and England” 16).

Raine would remain rapt by antiquity. The deeper she got into it, the further back in time she was drawn, all the way to Plato. She undertook this scholarly poetical pursuit with moral enthusiasm, immense curiosity, and her formidable knowledge of science and literature. She also did it with pride of intellect and, as her chief distinction, her perception that spiritual truth must be put across indirectly and by allusions. These images seem put into our hands like clues which we are invited to follow back and back ... By their numinous nature we recognize them; and not with academic curiosity do we pursue them to their mysterious source, but as we follow the beloved person, unable to keep away ... We live under the power of their compulsion: for they do not present themselves, like academic problems, from outside, as tasks to be taken up by will-­power ... They arise, rather, as living impulses, urges of our own being and therefore compelling. We cannot rest until we have followed them to their source, as far as our understanding allows (That Wondrous Pattern 130).

Like her trees, Raine’s birds (like Keats’s, Shelley’s, and Blake’s) in ancient days were contemplated thus. It is not birds that speak, but men learn silence; They know and need no language; leaf-­wise In shadowy flight, threading the leafy trees, Expressive only of the world’s long thoughts, Absolute rises their one-­pointed song, Not from a heart divided, and in pain (“The Speech of Birds,” Collected Poems 21).

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A Doubting Thomas More recently, the muted bitchiness of the academy has attended Raine’s rising star from time to time. Until her death in 2003, she seemed to have protected herself from cross-­ examination as well as any writer ever did. However, there have since been some pundits trying to edge her into the witness stand and corner her. Reviewing Raine’s Collected Poems in The Guardian (4 October 2008)—­the big Saturday edition back in The Guardian’s last days of broadsheet seriousness—­Professor M. Wynn Thomas seems to be seizing the opportunity to get back at the woman who had no chemistry with him, although she otherwise burned so bright. “My one fleeting meeting with her, more than 30 years ago, left an impression of high seriousness, iron will, and gimlet eyes.” Professor Thomas begins his review (of the collection of poems brought out by Golgonooza Press in 2008 to commemorate the centenary of the poet’s birth) by telling his Saturday Guardian readers that Raine was “Favoured poet of the Prince of Wales.” Favored, not favorite poet. A dog whistle if ever there was one for floppy liberalism to flinch over its glass of chardonnay, consider reasserting some attitude from its attitudinizing youth (perhaps royalty and iniquity are really and actually cognate) and point itself that bit more firmly in the direction of righteousness. Continuing with his doubting, Thomas represents Raine as an ineffectual angel beating her ludicrous wings in vain. Raine’s work “seems like an attempt to tie the unruly monster of human being down with gossamer strings.” Raine is “a severe supervisor of the dress code of the human imagination, a Beau Brummell of the human spirit.” Professor Thomas gauges that Guardian readers might be pleased with themselves for remembering that Beau Brummell, too, had been favored by a hated Prince Regent. Readers might also relish inferring that Brummell was a rather pointless arbiter of fashion. All this might accord karmically with the fact that Brummell ended up dying penniless and insane from syphilis in his early sixties. However, just as Kathleen Raine was not Miss Gee, neither was she a Mr. Brummell. She lived well, and she lived well into her nineties. Professor Thomas’s aptitude for equivalence arousal is doubtless part of a reflexive habit in his mode of academic journalism; thus, the dandiacal posturing of a Brummell is indistinguishable from Raine’s passionate and exacting eloquence and her hard-­earned knowledge of the perennial tradition accessed before her by some of the greatest writers who ever lived. “Willing to keep company only with the immortals (Dante, Milton, Shelley, Proust, Yeats, and of course her darling Blake), she is ever anxious to keep up the appropriate stylistic appearances.” If Raine was, as Professor Thomas puts it, “trying to tie the unruly monster of human being down with gossamer strings,” perhaps Professor Thomas has been speaking down to all of us here in Lilliput with a fondness for fashionable distraction and crumply literary newspapers. However, despite our little life being rounded with a weekend read, Raine is not weakened by a critique that would mechanically impose preconceived ideas onto its subject. In taking Dylan Thomas’s disapproval of Vernon Watkins and applying it to Kathleen Raine, Professor Thomas has done nothing more than make use of another man’s winches and pulleys with which he would pull down any monument he deems too grand for the royally bigged-­up bluestocking who did not take to him:



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the verdict passed in future on her [Raine’s] poetry may resemble Dylan Thomas’s comment on the work of his friend Vernon Watkins. “All the words are lovely,” Thomas wrote, “but they seem so chosen, not struck out. I can see the sensitive picking of words, but none of the strong, inevitable pulling that makes a poem an event, a happening, an action perhaps, not a still life ... They seem ... to come out of the nostalgia of literature.” (“Called Back to Earth,” The Guardian, 4 October 2008)

The professor is a commanding intelligence, albeit only in the Wonderland of academia accessible through Alice-­like drinking and shrinking. One need not be concerned with higher vision, the past, or indeed with anything beyond words describing daily boredom, daily chores, and the car not starting: in comparing some lines of Raine’s poetry to some lines of A.R. Ammons’s poetry and pronouncing them similarly ordinary, Thomas would call Raine “back to earth” and bend her to his own will. However, what about generosity and geniality? What about the perspicacity and intuition to meet a poet on her own terms? “He who tells me that there are defects in a new work,” said Coleridge, “tells me nothing which I should not have taken for granted without his information. But he who points out and elucidates the beauties of an original work, does indeed give me interesting information, such as experience would not have authorized me in anticipating ...” (Biographia Literaria, I. 62).

Beyond Auden’s Gee Force, Beyond Thomas’s Doubt Raine’s poetry has no allegiance to the nineteenth century, twentieth century, or any century. It is never a reaction to the news or a description of the environment: Element that utters doves, angels and cleft flames, The bees of Helicon and the cloudy houses, Impulse of music and the world’s equipoise, Dancer that never wearies of the dance That prints in the brown dust eternal wisdom Or carves its abstract sculptures in the snow, The wind unhindered passes beyond its trace. (“Air,” Collected Poems 41)

It seems rather to have been uttered by the hills and clouds themselves. But from a high fell on a summer day Sometimes below you may see the air like water, The dazzle of the light upon its waves That flow unbroken to the end of the world. The bird of god descends between two moments Like silence into music, opening a way through time. (“Air,” Collected Poems 41)

Raine’s poetry often has the aura of exile. She knew its validity because she had intimate knowledge of its emotional cost. In her Autobiographies (198), she is insightful and self-­ lacerating about her neglect of her parents and her children for the sake of her calling as a

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poet. There is the fierceness of the wounded in her work. There is also a richness of skiey grain and a freedom from admixture with the duller things of earth, especially in the poems that Raine wrote in isolation in the Lake District and Scotland. There is a poem on the way, There is a poem all round me, The poem is in the near future, The poem is in the upper air Above the foggy atmosphere It hovers like a spirit That I would make incarnate. Let my body sweat Let snakes torment my breast My eyes be blind, ears deaf, hands distraught Mouth parched, uterus cut out, Belly slashed, back lashed, Tongue slivered into thongs of leather Rain stones inserted in my breasts, Head severed, If only the lips may speak, If only the god will come. (“Invocation,” Collected Poems 4)

These are the words of a poet prepared to interrogate, shake, and sharpen herself so harshly and remorselessly that she will either wield a liberated perspective or perish in the attempt. It might of course be argued that she is posturing. Is not she just being tameless and swift and proud, and ever so literarily falling upon the thorns of life and bleeding? The physical suffering she invokes—­involving snakes, sweating, blindness, deafness, distress, thirst, slashing, lashing, slivering, and decapitation—­does not feel like nostalgia. The heroic intransigence is convincing because it is conveyed viscerally. Who other than Kathleen Raine would even say that she would have such a thing done to her tongue or uterus for the sake of receiving a visit from the inspiration required to write a poem? Just as Shelley had written out of a liberation of spirit having left cold, gray, low-­ skied England to live in Italy, so Raine required release from London’s bricks, claustrophobia, and the sense of one’s humanity being routinely disregarded or downgraded. The beautiful rain falls, the unheeded angel Lies in the street, spreadeagled under the footfall That from the divine face wears away the smile Whose tears run in the gutter, melting where The stationary cars wait for departure; The letter that says Ave is passed over, For at the ever-­present place the angel waits, Passes through walls and hoardings, in dark porches His face, wounded by us, for us and over us watches. (“In Time,” Collected Poems 11)



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The walls that have been put in place are not just builders’ walls but also the perceptual barriers set down and reinforced daily by journalists (the patriotic or political twaddle served up in the papers every morning). Mundanely, the usual bricks and newspapers are all around because of the exertions of clever and conscientious workers. For Raine, whether or not they have been built with bad intent, they beat all the blackouts you can invent. In such a world, higher things are strictly for the birds. London air dims Blue of a cold spring sky, Bricks as usual, and the morning news; But rook and robin tell other things (“Short Poems,” Collected Poems 263).

Raine is the rook and the robin, and her counterculture—­“Certainly my work throws out a challenge ...” (These Bright Shadows 19)—­is not just genteel rebellion or self-­destruction. It is rooted in the same tradition as Romanticism, which is far from mere nostalgia for Romanticism. What we did not know thirty years ago was how extreme would be the isolation of those who hold to tradition. It then seemed that there were at least some values that were agreed upon between the profane positivist world and the world of the “ancient springs” ... We can no longer deceive ourselves. It seems that there no longer exist any common terms or values; beyond a certain point of divergence communication becomes impossible ... Tradition, which recognizes a difference between knowledge and ignorance, cannot come to terms with a world in which there are no longer any standards by which the falsehood may be measured (That Wondrous Pattern 17).

Wonderfully aloft from the fray of politicking, gossiping, and gatekeeping, Raine seemed to some critics to be making assertions at an unmerited altitude. She never lost her assurance about her attitude. For Raine, a lot of pointless goings-­on involving spying and speeding seem related somehow to Establishment values: Cameras and motor cars Spin on the hub of nothingness (“Ex Nihilo,” Collected Poems 49).

And yet she continued to send her works out into that big machine-­feeding cultural world in which most writers were conceiving themselves in terms of mechanistic science. What reception and what recognition could she possibly have expected?

Accolade from the Less Deceived Philip Larkin examined Raine’s poetry and declared it pure and true. Perhaps this bears repeating. Philip Larkin—­that Eeyore up there behind those high windows, that clinically depressed I speak your weight machine, that balding, bicycle-­clipped, Thatcher-­loving son of a fascist who did not fall far from the tree—­has committed to print an appreciative assessment of Kathleen Raine’s poetry. It is an interesting moment in twentieth-­century literature.

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Larkin was one of the few post-­war, putty-­faced Britons of consequence to focus seriously on Raine’s poetry. Dream entangled yet earthbound, Larkin famously took his time with everything he wrote, so his appreciation for Raine looks all the more measured, settled, and worthwhile, and not least for the two writers being thus far apart ideologically—­she a Platonist (or, to bring it fashionably down to earth, away with the fairies) and he a perfectionist pessimist “who found the universe a bleak and hostile place and recognized very clearly the disagreeable realities of human life, above all the dreadful effects of time on all we have and are” (The Letters of Kingsley Amis 1152). Larkin’s favorable review of Raine’s Collected Poems (1956) seems to signal Raine’s significance beyond any mere cultist’s sphere of self-­esteem and self-­promotion. For nearly twenty years Miss Kathleen Raine has sought to express in her poetry abstract themes fundamental to man and his position in the universe—­the unity of creation, the conflict of spirit and selfhood—­and the publication of her Collected Poems demonstrates how far the height and intensity of this purpose set her apart from her contemporaries. I can think of few recent poems as free from jargon, vulgarity and smartness as those in this book. Her work lacks every quality traditionally associated with the title ‘poetess’: there is no domesticity, no cosiness, and ‘love poems of a personal nature’, the introduction tells us, ‘have also gone’. What remains is the vatic and universal. (Further Requirements 165)

Larkin seems to want to give the lie to anyone who would say that he (Larkin) is permanently pent up within the mechanics of librarianship. He is acknowledging that Raine’s vision has the distinction of spiritual quest, and he is recognizing that her voice is somehow untouched by the positivist science, socialist excitement, and social realism of the undoubtedly materialistic milieu. Open her Collected Poems at random, and the chances are that what can be seen on the page does rather emphatically confirm this. I see the blue, the green, the golden and the red, I have forgotten all the angel said. The flower, the leaf, the meadow and the tree, But of the words I have no memory. I hear the swift, the martin, and the wren, But what was told me, past all thought is gone. The dove, the rainbow, echo, and the wind, But of the meaning, all is out of mind. Only I know he spoke the word that sings its way In my blood streaming, over rocks to sea, A word engraved in the bone, that burns within To apotheosis the substance of a dream. That living I shall never hear again, Because I pass, I pass, while dreams remain. (“Angelus,” Collected Poems 13)

As Larkin has it, “everything she considers is pressed into its place in the eternal pattern” (Further Requirements 165).



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The evaluation is itself worth evaluating. Larkin’s praise for Raine carries something of the librarian’s habitual preoccupation with procedural matters such as changing fan belts (“pressed into ... place”) or making sure the last meeting’s minutes have been amended correctly. He seems surprised, and yet willing to commend where commendation is due. Raine’s poetry seems much above his expectation. There are not merely no grammatical errors in it. Raine’s poetry, it seems, would not have disgraced a Hardy. Her language is plain, strong, and unaffected. Himself plain, strong, and unaffected, Larkin “never laid claim to feeling what he didn’t feel, and it was that honesty, more total in his case than in any other I’ve known, that gave his poetry such power” (The Letters of Kingsley Amis, 1152). Larkin plainly, strongly, and unaffectedly conveys the sense that Raine’s plainness, strength, and unaffectedness are all much to her credit. There is no doubt that the quality of these preoccupations and the pure underivative language in which they are expressed have resulted in some very fine poems ... which prove Miss Raine to be one of the most serious living English poets—­serious, that is, in the sense of utter devotion to her vision (Further Requirements 165).

Therefore, the librarian has shared with us his inspection of some poetry that is, despite some very superficial similarities with regard to personal integrity, quite unlike his own. Larkin has drawn our attention to the sui generis fineness of Raine’s work—­and then he has ticketed and boxed it without any further requirement of fuss. “I think it is arguable that she has not so far written the poems she will be known by.” (Further Requirements 165) Larkin’s review feels a little bit like a passage lifted from one of Jane Austen’s poised and tightly constructed comedies of manners. Emma Woodhouse’s subtly begrudging, conceited, and mannered commendation of Mr. Martin’s letter of proposal to Harriet Smith comes to mind. For Emma Woodhouse, Mr. Martin’s prose is very much to the credit of the writer ... express[ing] good sense, warm attachment, liberality, propriety, even delicacy of feeling ... Yes, I understand the sort of mind. Vigorous, decided, with sentiments to a certain point, not coarse. A better written letter, Harriet (returning it) than I had expected (Emma, 45).

Just as Emma Woodhouse continues to talk, as if disinterestedly, of letter-­writing technique and technicalities (when the genuineness of the love between Miss Smith and Mr. Martin could not be clearer), so too does Philip Larkin (though not actually created by Austen) have an arguably de haut en bas way of discussing the clues to a something, a somewhere—­an air, a dream, a stream, and a mode of writing—­just beyond his ken. There is a fish, that quivers in the pool, Itself a shadow, but its shadow clear. Catch it again and again, it still is there. Against the flowing stream, its life keeps pace With death—­the impulse and the flash of grace Hiding in its stillness, moves, to be motionless.

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Perhaps, Larkin’s praise is the praise of the exacting practitioner. Perhaps, it is as wholehearted a gesture as could practically be expected from the expert with ordinary language to communicate commonplace experiences. There is something unimpeachable about the combination of clarity and reflectiveness. He could be said to be speaking from behind the slit window of the decidedly non-­gullible. He is, after all, the greatest Poet Laureate the United Kingdom will never have. The saving skepticism—­of, say, the English garden-­party organizer who knows that if it’s not raining now it probably will be—­is what makes Larkin tick: when it comes to consenting to credulity, when it comes to opening oneself to the risk of being deceived, for Philip Larkin less is more. Worthwhile insights do get formulated within Larkin’s tight—­or perhaps uptight—­ application to Raine’s work. True notes travel the more crisply through the frost of disinterestedness. A lesser reviewer—­ perhaps the more deceived, the more culpably credulous—­would find it difficult to reach the reader with as lively an impact and as clear a note. Reading “The Unloved,” Larkin says One of Miss Raine’s most characteristic ways of writing a poem is to build up a chain of images, each of which expresses a different facet of her subject, so that the poem has in fact no development at all. The effect is paradoxically both static and exciting, as may be seen from this poem, called “The Unloved”: I am pure loneliness I am empty air I am drifting cloud. I have no form I am boundless I have no rest. I have no house I pass through places I am indifferent wind. I am the white bird Flying away from land I am the horizon. I am a wave That will never reach the shore. I am an empty shell Cast up on the sand. I am the moonlight On the cottage with no roof.



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I am the forgotten dead In the broken vault on the hill. I am the old man Carrying his water in a pail. I am light travelling in empty space. I am a diminishing star Speeding away Out of the universe. (Further Requirements 73)

Larkinian reading room murmurs notwithstanding (the phrase “paradoxically static and exciting” could have been repurposed from one of Larkin’s entertainingly rude or erotic letters), Raine’s poetry has been evaluated favorably by an eminent and intelligent scrutineer outside her own sphere of influence and interest. I find Miss Raine’s impact greatest when she writes most simply ... and it may be the way forward for a talent of this order lies paradoxically in a cruder, more strongly marked mode of expression. However, this collection makes it clear that the distance Miss Raine had already traveled is sufficient to earn the honor and gratitude of her age (Further Requirements 165–166).

Just how profuse a puff this review amounted to at the time—­“She [Raine] could not have wished for a more complimentary review” (Philippa Bernard, No End to Snowdrops 96)—­can be inferred from Kingsley Amis’s pop-­eyed reaction in a letter to Larkin at the time. What’s all this about you having written a review? That idiot Gordon Wharton mentioned it in a letter the other day touting for poems. Said you praised ‘Katie’. Katie RAINE? you must be ... losing your mind. Tell me where it appeared, and/or send me a copy. No on second thoughts if you send me a copy you won’t need to tell me where it appeared, will you now? (The Letters of Kingsley Amis 466)

There is no more to be found from Amis on the matter. Was he more impressed by Raine’s work in light of Larkin’s review than he thought he would be? Less? Fifteen years later, Larkin included two Raine poems in his Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (1971): “The World,” from The Pythoness (1949) and “Two Invocations of Death,” from The Year One (1952). It is perhaps notable that both poems had already been included in Raine’s Collected Poems that Larkin reviewed in 1956. Was Larkin unimpressed by or simply incurious about the poems Raine published after 1956? Remember that Larkin said in his 1956 review, “I think it is arguable that she has not so far written the poems she will be known by.” (Further Requirements 165) Did Larkin just stop reading Raine in 1956? Or did he keep reading her and come to regard her as essentially finished by 1956? One wonders if, between 1956 and 1971, Larkin jotted down any thoughts at all about, say, The Hollow Hill (1964), The Written Word (1967), Ninfa Revisited (1968), Six Dreams and Other Poems (1968), Selected Poems: David Gascoyne, W.S. Graham, Kathleen Raine (1970), or The Lost Country (1971). One might also wonder if Larkin had any thoughts about Raine’s poetry between 1971 and his death in 1985. What would he have had to say

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about On a Deserted Shore (1973), The Oval Portrait and Other Poems (1977), The Oracle in the Heart and Other Poems 1975–1978 (1980), and Collected Poems 1935–1980 (1981)? Perhaps the tense, musty, unignorable silence, and the awkward reverence have facilitated a transmission, out of sight, somewhere becoming Raine. I am, but do not know, my song, Nor to what scale my sense is tuned Whose music trembles through me and flows on. A note struck by the stars I am, A memory-­trace of sun and moon and moving waters, A voice of the unnumbered dead, fleeting as they—­ What matter who am I? (“The Poet Answers the Accuser,” Collected Poems 236)

Bibliography Poetry Raine, Kathleen  1943. Stone and Flower: Poems 1935–1943. London: Editions Poetry. Raine, Kathleen  1946. Living in Time. London: Editions Poetry. Raine, Kathleen 1949. The Pythoness and Other Poems. London: Hamish Hamilton. Raine, Kathleen  1952. The Year One and Other Poems. London: Hamish Hamilton. Raine, Kathleen 1956. Collected Poems. London: Hamish Hamilton. Raine, Kathleen 1964. The Hollow Hill and Other Poems 1960–64. London: Hamish Hamilton. Raine, Kathleen 1967. The Written Word. London: Enitharmon Press. Raine, Kathleen 1968. Ninfa Revisited: A Poem. London: Enitharmon Press. Raine, Kathleen 1968. Six Dreams and Other Poems. London: Enitharmon Press. Raine, Kathleen 1970. Selected Poems: David Gascoyne, W.S. Graham, Kathleen Raine. Penguin Modern Poets 17. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Raine, Kathleen 1971. The Lost Country. Dublin: The Dolmen Press.

Raine, Kathleen 1973. On a Deserted Shore, Frontispiece by Gavin Maxwell, Dublin. Dolmen Press, London: Hamish Hamilton. Raine, Kathleen 1977. The Oval Portrait and Other Poems. London: Enitharmon Press, Hamish Hamilton. Raine, Kathleen 1980. The Oracle in the Heart and Other Poems 1975–1978. Dublin: Dolmen Press; London: George Allen and Unwin. Raine, Kathleen 1981. Collected Poems 1935–1980. London: George Allen and Unwin. Raine, Kathleen 1988. Selected Poems. London, Ipswich: Golgonooza Press. Raine, Kathleen 1992. Living with Mystery, Poems 1987–91. Ipswich: Golgonooza Press. Raine, Kathleen 1997. The Presence, Poems 1984–87. Ipswich: Golgonooza Press. Raine, Kathleen 1995. On a Deserted Shore, a Sequence, first published 1973. London: Agenda Editions. Raine, Kathleen 1996. For David Gascoyne, for the Occasion of His Eightieth Birthday. London: Enitharmon. Raine, Kathleen 2000. The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine. Ipswich: Golgonooza Press.



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Autobiographies Raine, Kathleen  1973. Farewell Happy Fields. London: Hamish Hamilton. Raine, Kathleen 1975. The Land Unknown. London: Hamish Hamilton. Raine, Kathleen 1977. The Lion’s Mouth. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Raine, Kathleen 1990. India Seen Afar. London: Green Books. Raine, Kathleen 1991. Autobiographies, Comprising the three volumes published in 1973, 1975, 1977. London: Skoob.

Critical Books and Essays Raine, Kathleen  1967. Defending Ancient Springs. London: Oxford University Press. Raine, Kathleen 1968. Blake and Tradition. The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, Bollingen series XXXV, II, 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Raine, Kathleen 1970. William Blake. London: Thames and Hudson. Raine, Kathleen 2011. “Blake and England.” Temenos Academy Review 14: 26–45. Raine, Kathleen 2017. That Wondrous Pattern: Essays on Poetry and Poets. Berkeley: Counterpoint.

Books on Kathleen Raine’s Life and Works Bernard, Philippa 2009. Kathleen Raine, No End to Snowdrops. London: Shepheard-­Walwyn.

Keeble, Brian 2020. These Bright Shadows. The Poetry of Kathleen Raine. Brooklyn NY: Angelico Press.

General Amis, Kingsley 2001. The Letters of Kingsley Amis, ed. Zachary Leader. London: HarperCollins. Austen, Jane 1992. Emma, ed. James Kinsley. Oxford: Oxford World Classics, Oxford University Press. Butter, Peter H. 1962. Edwin Muir: Writers and Critics. Edinburgh and London: Oliver and Boyd. Guénon, René 2021. The Crisis of the Modern World, trans. Arthur Osborne, 1942. India: Indica Books. Larkin, Philip 1973. The Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Larkin, Philip 2001. Further Requirements: Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews, 1952–1985, ed. Anthony Thwaite. London: Faber and Faber. Muir, Edwin 1965. Edwin Muir: Selected Poems, ed. eventually by T.S. Eliot. London: Faber and Faber. Schmidt, Michael (ed.) 2000. The Harvill Book of Twentieth Century Poetry in English. London: The Harvill Press.

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“Is (This) Translation Any Good?”: The Evaluation of Literary Translation Giuseppe Sofo

Translators and translations are constantly evaluated at every stage and in all fields of translation. In translator training, the evaluation of the products of the trainees is a fundamental aspect of the learning process, but evaluation especially occurs during the process of producing a translation for the literary market (mainly from editors and publishers) or for the industry (from companies and clients), and once the process is over, this evaluation continues, with readers (both simple readers or critics in the literary field, and final users in the industry) evaluating the results of the translation in different ways. However, the process of evaluation is as crucial—­both for translation practice and the establishment and evolution of translation theory—­as it is complex and multifaceted. Even if we restrict the field to the evaluation of literary translation, leaving aside all other forms of translation, we still have to deal with an extremely heterogeneous set of approaches, all of them struggling to turn evaluation from a subjective form of interpretation of a translator’s work into an objective method of observation of the final product. First of all, to study the evaluation of literary translation, we have to follow two different directions. On the one hand, we have to focus on the value of literary translation as a whole, on the merits and faults that have been attributed to this practice of transmission and transformation of literary works, which has at times been deemed impossible and very often as an imperfect tool for the reproduction of the original, at its very best; on the other hand, we have to focus on the merits and faults of each unique instance of translation, on how individual translations have been and can be evaluated, and how this evaluation has changed over the years, following the shifts in translation theory and practice. We thus have to answer two distinct but related questions: “Is translation any good?” and “Is this translation any good?,” which have been the driving forces of almost all critical

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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reflection on translation, since its very beginning, before the birth of translation studies as a discipline, and until today, and which have interested not only professionals and critics but also common readers of translations. Looking into these two different directions together will allow us to understand how we evaluate translations and translators, what are the norms ruling translation and its evaluation, and how these norms have evolved over time.

The Value of Translation or Is Translation Any Good? Translation has been one of the main instruments of cultural transmission, helping the diffusion of knowledge by allowing texts—­and the ideas underlying these texts—­to cross borders, to the point that it would be fair to say that translation is one of the founding acts of every culture. Literary translation, in particular, has allowed the diffusion of literature beyond national and linguistic borders, and many scholars have recognized the vital function of translation as a driving force of the literary system (Even-­Zohar 1990; Lefevere 1992). Translation has allowed very distant authors (in time and space) to encounter each other’s work, playing a central role in the evolution of the literary system as a whole, as well as of national literatures and of what we know as Weltliteratur. However, despite all its merits, the discourse on translation has mostly formed around its faults. Nothing has driven critical reflection on translation more than the concept of “mistake.” If we look at some of the very first essays ever written on translation, we see that discussing mistakes in translation is not only at the center of translation theory from its beginnings, but that it is also partly responsible for the birth of critical reflection on translation. Saint Jerome wrote his Epistula ad Pammachium de optimo genere interpretandi, one of the earliest essays on translation, to defend himself from the attacks he had suffered because of errors attributed to him in a previous translation. In the case of another text at the dawn of translation theory, Leonardo Bruni’s De interpretatione recta, the reason is once again the concept of mistake, but from the accuser’s point of view. The text opens with a response to the criticism Bruni received after having commented very negatively on a translation of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics in the preface to his new version of the same work. Obviously, we are dealing with two opposite situations, but the mistake was in both cases what triggered the need to produce a theoretical discourse about translation. On the one hand, to demonstrate that errors (if any) are inevitable and to justify one’s choices. On the other hand, after examining many errors of a translator, to propose different choices that would have resulted in a better translation. Centuries later, despite the birth and evolution of translation studies, one could still classify most of the critical production on translation in one or the other of these two approaches. André Lefevere, in his article “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers” (1982), ironically describes what he considers a typical contribution by a translation studies scholar, and after listing some of the most obvious errors in English translations of Brecht’s Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, he states: I have no desire, however, to write a traditional “Brecht in English” type of translation-­ studies paper, which would pursue this strategy to the bitter end. Such a strategy would inevitably lead to two stereotyped conclusions: either the writer decides that laughter cannot

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go on masking tears indefinitely, recoils in horror from so many misrepresentations, damns all translations and translators, and advocates reading literature in the original only, as if that were possible. Or he administers himself a few congratulatory pats on the back (after all, he has been able to spot the mistakes), regrets that even good translators are often caught napping in this way, and suggests that “we” must train “better and better” translators if we want to have “better and better” translations. And there an end. Or a beginning, for translations can be used in other, more constructive ways. (Lefevere 1982: 3–4)

It is undoubtedly true that translations can be used much more “constructively” than to condemn translators. However, most translation criticism, whether it is done by scholars or by reviewers, still falls into this trap, or it is limited to a rarely justified subjective evaluation of the work carried out by the translator. Another concept that can undermine any evaluation of translation from the very beginning, and which has haunted translators for centuries, is the idea of “untranslatability.” Critics have never ceased to define certain specific literary works, specific literary genres (that is especially the case of poetry), or at times even literature as a whole as simply “untranslatable.” However, what these declarations of untranslatability seem to forget is that all literature, even poetry, is translated: it has been translated for many centuries, it is translated today, and it will be translated in the future. Rather than focusing on the impossibility of translation, we should thus focus on how literature is translated and how we can evaluate the results of these translations. If some texts are considered untranslatable but are nonetheless being translated, then perhaps the problem is not their translatability itself, but rather our perception of translation and consequently of what “translatable” means. Translation has in fact too long been seen simply as a “copy” of the original. Georges Mounin (1955: 7) said that “all the arguments against translation could be summed up in one argument only: it is not the original.” If the value of translation has been deeply questioned over the centuries, it is precisely because translation has been perceived as something it could not be: a copy of the original. The discrepancies between languages, readerships, and times in the case of translations of works from a different era simply do not allow us to copy one text and magically reproduce it in the same way in the new language, as the paradox of Jorge Luis Borges’ novella “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (2000) proves quite well. Therefore, after focusing on the value attributed to translation as a whole, we need to focus on the attempts made in the history of translation to evaluate single translations and the problems that all these methods of evaluation have encountered.

The Evaluation of Translation or Is This Translation Any Good? If we leave aside the value of translation as a whole and we focus on the evaluation of individual translations, we have to face the fact that the heterogeneity of translation as a field and as an object of study makes it very difficult to propose a coherent and comprehensive method of evaluation that can be applied to all instances of literary translation. Different methods have been suggested for the evaluation of translation, more often referred to as translation quality assessment (Maier 2000: 137), although the most relevant



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research in this field has been made in the translation industry and is increasingly dedicated to machine translation rather than to human translation (Moorkens et al. 2018). If machine translation can be more easily evaluated by spotting and counting the evident errors contained in a translation, evaluation becomes a much more subtle task while dealing with literature, as translating a literary work involves dealing with a work of art, conveying a cultural and aesthetic value inscribed in the author’s style and language. Errors in a literary translation are thus much more difficult to identify objectively, and this leads to a more qualitative than quantitative approach. The greatest difficulty encountered in the field has been the establishment of common rules or frameworks to judge quality because of “the subjective nature of the notion of quality, the lack of universally accepted criteria, and the anecdotal evidence provided by the literature” (Naidj and Motahari 2019: 20). Drugan writes, in fact, that “theorists and professionals overwhelmingly  agree there is no single objective way to measure quality” (Drugan 2013: 35). That is largely because “evaluating the quality of translation presupposes a theory of translation. Thus, different views of translation lead to different concepts of translational quality and hence different ways of assessing it” (House 1997: 1). The history of translation and of translation studies has been shaped over many dichotomies that have engendered a constant debate: literal versus free translation, source-­ oriented versus target-­oriented translation, accuracy versus acceptability, foreignizing versus domestication, and many more. Although translation studies have been increasingly keen to see the reality of translation as something more fluid, which would be almost impossible to reduce to a choice between two extremes, these dichotomies have in fact not ceased to exist, and they still shape today’s translation environment. This already gives us an idea of how difficult it is to imagine a universal system of quality assessment for translation since the theorists as well as the practitioners of this field have very different—­and often opposite and incompatible—­views on what “quality” means because they have very different views on what characteristics make of a translation a “good” or a “bad” translation. As Vanderschelden (2000: 277) has written, literary translation poses even more problems than translation in general because “quality in literary translation is a very elusive concept,” as “it presupposes a set of ideas on the subject which may vary according to individual convictions and the context of translation. The position and priorities of a publisher are therefore likely to differ from those of the author and the translator.” The understanding of what qualities a translation needs to have has also evolved over time, which is one of the reasons behind the need for retranslations, together with the fact that translations tend to “age” much more rapidly than their originals (Berman 1990). We then have to consider the publication context more broadly, because expectations change according to the literary market we are speaking of, according to the publisher of the work (its catalog, its expected readers, and so on), the genre, which deeply influences the translation strategies, and many other variables. This is why most scholars now agree that while there is a need for a certain number of established criteria for evaluation, the method must adapt to the text itself, as each work presents us with a very different set of elements we can judge, and different possibilities of evaluating them, according to the text and its context (Rodríguez 2007).

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Nonetheless, several theorists have proposed evaluation methods for translation, based on different approaches, and many have focused on literary translation. Reflections on the importance of establishing criteria to assess the quality of translation start to emerge in some of the very first seminal works of the emerging discipline of translation studies. That is the case of Eugene Nida’s Toward a Science of Translating, in which we find specific “criteria to be used in judging translations,” and in particular “three fundamental criteria [that] are basic to the evaluation of all translating, and in different ways help to determine the relative merit of particular translations. (...) (1) general efficiency of the communication process, (2) comprehension of intent, and (3) equivalence of response” (1964, p. 182). In the early stage, evaluation was mostly focused on the concept of “equivalence” (Vinay and Darbelnet 1958; Nida 1964; Catford 1965), defined as “the replacement of a representation of a text in one language by the representation of an equivalent text in a second language” (Hartmann and Stork 1972: 173), or as “the replacement of textual material in one language (SL) by an equivalent textual material in another language (TL)” (Catford 1965: 20). This means that the target text was judged on the basis of how able it was to reproduce the original by proposing an “equivalent” form of the source text. Initially, these approaches were based on a linguistics-­oriented form of translation studies and tended to focus on the unit of the word or of the sentence at the very best. One of the main contributions in the sense of opening the concept of equivalence to the wider fields of text and culture is the work by the German scholar Katharina Reiß (1986). As Susanne Lauscher writes, in the influential model proposed by Reiß: The three process-­governing rules (the determination of text function and the analyses of  the linguistic and extralinguistic determinants) ensure that the procedure of quality assessment refers to both the macro-­and the micro-­level of a text. Thus, translation evaluation can no longer be a matter of word-­by-­word comparison of target and source text. Through the category of extralinguistic determinants, Reiß also links source and target texts to their social, non-­linguistic context, and draws attention to the impact of context on the linguistic make-­up of texts. As a result, the wording of the source text can no longer be considered the only point of reference for translation and quality assessment. (Lauscher 2000: 152)

However, all these approaches focusing on equivalence have problems translating what equivalence actually means in concrete terms, in the process of evaluation, as the understanding of what could be considered equivalent could vary pretty drastically, according to the theory the critic ascribed to, to the time in which the translation was carried out, or even to linguistic idiosyncrasies of the single reader. Strictly related to the concept of “equivalence” is the concept of translation “quality” (Cary and Jumpelt 1963; Schäffner 1998; House 2015). As House has written, in fact, “looking at equivalence leads directly into a discussion of how one would go about assessing the quality of translation. Translation quality assessment can thus be said to be at the heart of any theory of translation” (House 2015: 1). However, the concept of quality is not more stable than the concept of equivalence, and different theorists have varied greatly on what they considered recognizable as quality. As Maier writes:



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MacKenzie and Nieminen (1997), for example, focus on a quality system; Hatim and Mason (1997) address the translator’s performance; Kiraly suggests, from his “constructivist perspective,” that assessment practices be based on the “‘professional standards’ and ‘real-­world quality criteria’ operative in the world of professional translation work” (2000: 158); and Wójick-­Leese (2000) employs the framework of cognitive linguistics to study the translation of free verse. Even in the context of literary criticism and deconstruction, Arrojo (1998 and, especially, 1995) grapples with the need for translators and teachers of translation to make their own “textual authority” as “transparent as possible” (to their students), both showing those students that “this kind of authority, like any other ... is a form of power that can be overcome” and helping them to discover “which [translation] rules they should follow” in individual situations (1995: 102). Diverse as the above discussions are though, at least an echo of Reiß’s concern (2000: 3–4) with an “equal value” between an “original” and a “version,” however, those terms are defined and can be detected in all of them. (Maier 2000: 141–142)

Descriptive translation studies (Toury 1995) introduced a different approach of evaluating translation, which rejected the concept of equivalence. Instead of exclusively focusing on the source text, descriptive translation studies focus on the translated text itself as the starting point for a thorough analysis, “as a text-­type on its own right, as an integral part of the target culture and not merely as a reproduction of another text” (Snell-­Hornby 1988: 24). This approach thus “takes the translated text as it is and tries to determine the various factors that may account for its particular nature” (Hermans  1985: 13), marking a significant shift from previous approaches. The Skopos theory (Reiß and Vermeer 1984; Vermeer 1996; Nord 1997; Reiß et al. 2015) has taught us that “it is the purpose of a translation that determines the translation strategy and the shape that it takes in the host culture” (Williams 2013: 53). In order to evaluate the results of a translation, we should consider what is its purpose and what is the underlying “project,” that is, what is being translated, why, by whom, and for whom? Without a clear answer to these questions, it is simply impossible to evaluate the quality of a translation because different translation projects can lead to entirely different translations. Another key work in the context of evaluation has been Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility (1995). Rather than offering a system of evaluation, Venuti analyzed how translations were evaluated in the Anglo-­American world, and he discussed a twofold form of “invisibility,” which was crucial for the evaluation of translators and translation. In the words of Venuti: A translated text, whether prose or poetry, fiction or nonfiction, is judged acceptable by most publishers, reviewers, and readers when it reads fluently, when the absence of any linguistic or stylistic peculiarities makes it seem transparent, giving the appearance that it reflects the foreign writer’s personality or intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text—­the appearance, in other words, that the translation is not in fact a translation, but the “original.” The illusion of transparency is an effect of fluent discourse, of the translator’s effort to ensure easy readability by adhering to current usage, maintaining continuous syntax, fixing a precise meaning. What is so remarkable here is that this illusory effect conceals the numerous conditions under which the translation is made, starting with the translator’s crucial intervention in the foreign text. (Venuti 1995: 1)

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This has drastically changed over the past decades, especially since the encounter between translation studies and cultural studies (Bassnett and Lefevere  1990,  1998), and translation studies and postcolonial studies (Bassnett and Trivedi  1999). The focus on power and the cultural implications of translation led to the “cultural turn” in translation studies (and consequently to the “translation” turn of cultural studies). This paved the way for a very different understanding of the importance of translations in transmitting a whole culture, and not just a text, and therefore of the importance of giving the reader the opportunity to discover the world anew through the translation. The recent history of translation teaches that both translation theories and practices have gradually moved toward increasing visibility of the difference between the translation and the original text, not seen as a fault anymore but rather as a diversity that can enhance the perception of the text. Translation is no longer an imperfect copy of the original but one of the most important instruments to unveil the richness of literary texts. This desired diversity or heterogeneity presupposes a different view of the relationship between text and translation, in which the two are not separate entities living different lives but rather different but related versions of the same work. Gentzler (2017) has recently suggested a way of evaluating translation on an entirely new level by focusing on the effect that translation has on the target culture rather than on the source text, the target text, or a comparison between the two. His concept of the “post-­ translation effect” extends, in fact, the limits of evaluation much further, going well beyond the textual level: To measure the success or failure of the ideas or the aesthetics of a translation, one has to look beyond translation and to begin to examine the cultural changes that take place after the translation, hence the move toward a post-­translation analysis. If the Bible were translated into a new culture, did people convert to Christianity or were new churches built in subsequent years? If the translation Enlightenment philosophy introduced ideas of individual liberty, were despotic leaders deposed, new constitutions written, and people granted the right to vote? If new verse forms were introduced, did the conventions of poetry in the receiving cultures change for the next generation of “original” writers? If a feminist text were introduced into a culture with severe restrictions on women, did the dress codes, voting rights, driving rights, daycare availability, and job opportunities in the receiving culture change over the next decade? Sometimes the analysis of textual matters is not enough. I suggest that scholars in the future analyze both the initial reception of the translated text and the post-­translation repercussions generated in the receiving culture over subsequent years. What are the changes in poetry and politics, art and architecture, education and the environment, and what role do translations play in effecting those changes? I argue that in conducting such an analysis, scholars will find that translation is not merely a footnote to history, but one of the most vital forces available to introducing new ways of thinking and inducing significant cultural change. (Gentzler 2017: 3)

The idea of evaluation we have here goes well beyond the concepts of equivalence and quality that marked the beginnings of research in translation evaluation, and it seems to rather point toward the opposite direction; instead of looking for equivalences, this approach allows us to look for the “difference” that the translation makes in the world, for what translation gives us that we could not obtain by reading the original text only. Although this might sound a little extreme, Gentzler’s suggestion certainly allows us to



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see how drastically the concept of evaluation in translation has changed over time and how it could change in the future.

Conclusions We have tried to draw a coherent image of the role of evaluation in translation, by describing the most important passages in the evolution of this concept in translation studies, but as we have seen, if there is one constant in the context of translation evaluation, or translation quality assessment, that is the variability and subjectivity of all approaches, even the ones constructed precisely to avoid subjectivity, and the need of adapting each approach to the single text we are dealing with. Although it is not in the scope of this chapter to discuss these further aspects in detail, it is certainly worth pointing out that a complete evaluation of literary translation should include a thorough study of how translations are produced, how readers choose translations (and of the relationship between popularity and quality in translation), and how aware readers are of the role of the translator in the work they are reading. This would allow us to investigate how translations influence our appreciation and evaluation of an author or a text, our perception of single literary works and our perception of literature as a whole. The evaluation of translation has too often taken the form of generic subjective statements about the quality of a translator’s work, without proper analysis, and with the intention of looking for mistakes, as if we were dealing with an act of accusation of the translator rather than the appreciation of the new form of a work of art. Going beyond the perception of evaluation as a list of equivalences or mistakes, to include all the possibilities that translation offers for the diffusion of literary works in multiple languages, and consequently for the development of new works, and the social and cultural impact a translated work might have, will allow us to treat the evaluation of literary translation as a very serious matter for the history of translation, literature, and our cultures.

References Arrojo, Rosemary 1995. “Postmodernism and the Teaching of Translation.” In Teaching Translation and Interpreting 3: New Horizons: Papers from the Third Language International Conference (Elsinore, Denmark, 9–11  June 1995), eds. Cay Dollerup and Vibeke Appel, 97–103. Amsterdam-­ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Arrojo, Rosemary 1998. “The Revision of the Traditional Gap between Theory and Practice and the Empowerment of Translation in Postmodern Times.” The Translator 4 (1): 25–48. Bassnett, Susan and André Lefevere (ed.) 1990. Translation, History and Culture. London: Pinter.

Bassnett, Susan and André Lefevere (ed.) 1998. Constructing Cultures: Essays on Literary Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Bassnett, Susan and Harish Trivedi (ed.) 1999. Post-­ Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice. New York-­London: Routledge. Berman, Antoine 1990. “La Retraduction comme espace de la traduction.” Palimpsestes 4: 1–7. Borges, Jorge Luis 2000 [1939]. “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” In Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings, eds. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby, 45–53. London: Penguin.

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Cary, Edmond and Rudolf Walter Jumpelt (ed.) 1963. Quality in Translation, Proceedings of the IIIrd Congress of the International Federation of Translators (Bad Godesberg, 1959). New  York: Macmillan/Pergamon Press. Catford, John Cunnison 1965. A Linguistic Theory of Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Drugan, Joanna 2013. Quality in Professional Translation: Assessment and Improvement. London: Bloomsbury. Even-­Zohar, Itamar 1990. “Polysystem Studies.” Poetics Today: International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication 11 (1). Gentzler, Edwin 2017. Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post-­Translation Studies. New  York-­ London: Routledge. Hartmann, Reinhard Rudolf Karland and Francis Colin Stork 1972. Dictionary of Language and Linguistics. London: Applied Sciences Publishers. Hatim, Basil and Ian Mason 1997. The Translator as Communicator. New York-­London: Routledge. Hermans, Theo (ed.) 1985. The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation. London: Croom Helm. House, Juliane 1997. Translation Quality Assessment: A Model Revisited. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. House, Juliane 2015. Translation Quality Assessment: Past and Present. New York-­London: Routledge. Kiraly, Don 2000. A Social Constructivist Approach to Translator Education: Empowerment from Theory to Practice. Manchester: St. Jerome. Lauscher, Susanne 2000. “Translation Quality Assessment: Where Can Theory and Practice Meet?” The Translator 6 (2): 149–168. Lefevere, André 1982. “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature.” Modern Language Studies 12 (4): 3–20. Lefevere, André 1992. Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. New  York-­ London: Routledge. Mackenzie, Rosemary and Elina Nieminen 1997. “Motivating Students to Achieve Quality in Translation.” In Transferre Necesse Est: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Current Trends

in Studies of Translation and Interpreting (Budapest, 5–7 September 1996), eds. Kinga Klaudy and János Kohn, 339–343. Budapest: Scholastica. Maier, Carol 2000. “Introduction.” The Translator 6 (2): 137–148. Moorkens, Joss, Sheila Castilho, Federico Gaspari, and Stephen Doherty (eds.) 2018. Translation Quality Assessment: From Principles to Practice. Cham: Springer. Mounin, Georges 1955. Les Belles infidèles: Essai sur la traduction. Paris: Cahiers du Sud. Naidj, Sara and Masoud Seyed Motahari 2019. “Translation Quality Assessment in the Literary Text Based on House Model.” Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Studies 1 (1): 19–27. Nida, Eugene 1964. Toward a Science of Translating. Leiden: Brill. Nord, Christiane 1997. Translating as a Purposeful Activity. Manchester: St. Jerome. Reiß, Katharina and Hans Josef Vermeer 1984. Grundlegung einer allgemeinen Translationstheorie. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Reiß, Katharina 1986. Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Übersetzungskritik: Kategorien und Kriterien für eine sachgerechte Beurteilung von Übersetzungen. München: Hueber. Reiß, Katharina 2000. Translation Criticism: The Potentials and Limitations: Categories and Criteria for Translation Quality Assessment, trans. Erroll F. Rhodes. Manchester: St. Jerome. Reiß, Katharina, Hans Josef Vermeer, Christiane Nord, and Marina Dudenhöfer 2015. Towards a General Theory of Translational Action: Skopos Theory Explained. New York-­London: Routledge. Rodríguez Rodríguez, Beatriz M. 2007. Literary Translation Quality Assessment. München: Lincom Europa. Schäffner, Christina (ed.) 1998. Translation and Quality. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Snell-­Hornby, Mary 1988. Translation Studies: An Integrated Approach. Amsterdam-­Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Toury, Gideon 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam-­ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.



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Vanderschelden, Isabelle 2000. “Quality Assessment and Literary Translation in France.” The Translator 6 (2): 271–293. Venuti, Lawrence 1995. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of  Translation. New  York-­London: Routledge. Vermeer, Hans Josef 1996. A Skopos Theory of Translation (Some Arguments For and Against). Heidelberg: TEXTconTEXT-­Verlag.

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Vinay, Jean-­ Paul and Jean Darbelnet 1958. Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais. Paris: Beauchemin. Williams, Jenny 2013. Theories of Translation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Wójick-­Leese, Elżbieta 2000. “Salient Ordering of Free Verse and Its Translation.” Language and Literature 9 (2): 170–181.

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The Algorithm of Beauty: Aesthetic Judgment as a Science1 Madelena Gonzalez

The word algorithm is the anglicized version of the name of Al-­Khwârizmi, a Persian mathematician from the eighth century; the term was subsequently introduced into the English language in the twelfth century by the monk, Adelard of Bath. According to The New Penguin English Dictionary, it is “a systematic procedure for solving a mathematical problem in a finite number of steps.” If an algorithm is relatively easily defined, this is not the case for beauty. Sadly, there is no space here to cite and probe the wealth of definitions of beauty that have existed from ancient times until the present day, from Aristotle’s Poetics (335 BC) to Terry Eagleton’s The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), to cite just two examples. However, some attempt must be made and will indeed be done so in due course. Let us start by asking whether beauty is truly in the eye of the beholder, as received wisdom would have it, thus rendering it perceptual and individual, in which case it would be incompatible with any kind of algorithm or, on the other hand, whether there is some abstract standard of beauty with distinct characteristics that can be reproduced, by a machine, if necessary. Obviously, if we wish to create an algorithm, we must incline to the latter opinion. Indeed, would it not be possible to discern a formula for beauty, whether it be in Monet’s series of water lily paintings, in the work of Picasso’s blue period, in Shakespeare’s sonnets, in Schubert’s piano concertos, or in George Eliot’s novels? Or, does there remain some surplus element, some ungraspable and indefinable essence that is the hallmark of beauty and the product of genius that can never be reduced to a formula?

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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The replies to these questions have an important impact on aesthetic judgment as a whole and, more particularly, on literary criticism. Is aesthetics the province of empathy and intuition, as specialists such as Valentine Cunningham suggest, or even morality, as the famous critic F.R. Leavis claimed in his seminal work, The Great Tradition (1948)? Indeed, this Leavisite view, largely inherited from the Victorian man of letters, Matthew Arnold, held sway over the study of English literature in universities in the post-­war English-­speaking world until the advent of French theory. Or, following the Formalist and Structuralist school of thought, particularly Shklovsky, Saussure, and the early Roland Barthes, is aesthetics constituted by a series of linguistic operations that form a discernible and reproducible pattern, susceptible to scientific analysis and explanation? If one adheres to the former belief, aesthetic judgment and literary studies become the province of the initiated, based on a refined conception of taste and tact, such as that expounded by Cunningham: “Tact: proper tactility; the gentle touch of the right-­minded communicant” (Cunningham 2002: 156). Following this view, it is the emulation of the supposedly transcendental procedures of the great minds of a generation and an ability to connect with them which hold the key to the understanding of art and which, to some extent, can be the means by which the critic is elevated to the status of “artist,” in his or her turn. The rhetorical flair and flamboyant poetic style of a book like Cunningham’s would seem to indicate as much. Although Cunningham is far from a Post-­structuralist and indeed, to some extent, could be considered a Formalist, or at the very least a stylistician, it is also worth noting that the Post-­structuralist turn has done much to reinforce this perception of the critic as a creator, in the wake of its founding father, Jacques Derrida, a consummate example of the philosopher as artist. However, as thinkers such as Pierre Bourdieu have famously shown, in The Rules of Art (1995), for example, such matters can be as much the product of background, education, and training as they are a God-­given gift or instinctive attribute. If we lean toward this latter view, aesthetics and art can be approached in a more scientific spirit of enquiry. This chapter uses several examples of aesthetic production, ranging from football to ultra-­contemporary fiction to discuss whether such a thing as an algorithm of beauty could exist. If this were so, aesthetic judgment would be closer to a science rather than to an instinctual pursuit. According to Donald Knuth, the famous American computer scientist who “founded the field of data structures and analysis of algorithms” (Karp 1986: 104), “science is what we understand well enough to explain to a computer. Art is everything else we do” (Knuth 1996: xi). This would seem to be corroborated by the general wisdom concerning the lack of definition of art as Thierry de Duve, a Belgian professor of art, avers: “the concept of art is undecidable” (de Duve 1996: 12). In fact, in the twentieth century, the “most salient meaning” of the word “art” became “the very fight over the meaning of art” (de Duve 1996: 23). This chapter attempts to see if it is indeed possible to explain art to a computer so that it can be reproduced by an algorithm.

“The Figure in the Carpet”: Finding the Pattern “The Figure in the Carpet” (1896) is a well-­known short story by Henry James in which the narrator becomes obsessed with finding the secret meaning and intention of his favorite author, that is, the je ne sais quoi or magic ingredient that defines its genius. Needless to

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say, and somewhat ironically, the “secret” remains hidden even as the book closes. In his famous novel, Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), the English author, Julian Barnes, also mocks the supposed fallacy that the greatness of an artist can be explained and pinned down in any material sense, thanks, for example, to the eponymous parrot who inspired Flaubert’s Un Coeur simple (1877). The obsession with understanding why the work of an artist of any kind is worthy of note arose with the establishment of criticism as a profession, as Richard Bradford explains in the first chapter of his Is Shakespeare any Good? And Other Questions on How to Evaluate Literature (2015) where he discusses the evolution of the novel form: “The critics of the 1760s, unlike their successors in the early twentieth century, had no clear notion of what fiction was and what it was supposed to do [...]. A consensus on these matters would not be arrived at until the early nineteenth century” (Bradford  2015: 40–41). Bradford’s contention can be applied to all the arts; criticism only started to harden into a profession and practice from the nineteenth century onward. Until then, it was the province of the dilettante and the gentleman amateur. Indeed, following de Duve, the idea of art as a proper name only emerged around the eighteenth century and only became institutionalized much later. However, before we go any further, we must first return to a possible definition of beauty. The New Penguin English Dictionary states the following: “the qualities in a person or thing that give pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalt the mind or spirit.” The definition given by the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary is similar in substance with a slight variation in terminology: “That quality or combination of qualities which affords keen pleasure to the senses, especially that of sight, or which charms the intellectual or moral faculties.” The word “pleasure” is omnipresent, a fact that is problematic for the scientist, for it introduces subjectivity as the principal criterion and makes any generalization or acknowledgment of shared principles difficult. Similarly, the emphasis on the senses takes beauty out of the realm of observable reality into the realm of intuition and sensitivity, of the ungraspable. This is in line with the classical definition of aesthetics αἰσθητικός  (­aisthetikos) as relating to perception and the five senses. Nevertheless, the expression “combination of qualities” is useful for our argument, as it suggests the existence of a pattern, to which we shall now return in an attempt to shed some light on the formal properties of aesthetic creation. Let us take a few examples to see how the practice of beauty might work. Our first example comes from football, also known as “the beautiful game,” a phrase variously attributed to Pelé, whose 1977 autobiography was entitled My Life and the Beautiful Game, and to Stuart Hall, an English football commentator from the 1950s and 1960s. The pleasure to be received from football has been testified to by millions of people for more than a hundred years and is not in dispute but in what, precisely, might its beauty lie? The second goal from Argentina, scored by the aptly named Angel Di Maria in the recent 2022  World Cup Final against France, is a good place to start. The celebrated English ex-­ international, turned BBC-­ Match-­ of-­ the-­ Day commentator, Gary Lineker, summed it up on Twitter, somewhat poetically, thus: “The genius of Messi, the vision of Mac Allister, the finish of an Angel”. From the beginning of the match, the Argentinians had indeed offered a superb display of football, premised on a very high level of individual skill and talent but also on elegant and successful teamwork. This manifested itself in the



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surgical precision of passing, a succession of slaloms and impressive runs through the French defense and crosses delivered with millimetric accuracy. At every juncture, the team showed originality in the construction of play, and the spectator had the impression of a well-­oiled and beautiful machine swinging into action. This sporting “footballet” was the result of intensive training and practice but also has its origin in an aesthetic intention and a certain philosophy of football that is common in many Spanish and South American teams, an intention which is inspired by the idea of “the beautiful game” or futebol-­arte (“Art Football”), as it is commonly known in Brazil. So what actually took place and what claim can the second goal make to beauty? The goal came from a quick break from the defense as Messi brilliantly took what appeared to be an impossible touch and played the ball with the outside of his boot into Julian Alvarez, who immediately played a pinpoint through ball to Mac Allister after the latter continued his run. Mac Allister then crossed the ball instantaneously to Di Maria, who finished with aplomb. It was Mac Allister’s perfectly weighted pass to Di Maria that allowed him to fire the ball past the French goalkeeper without breaking his stride. The whole production was like a perfectly orchestrated piece of music or dance—­a thing of beauty that brought tears to Di Maria’s eyes. It was described by an online football news site as “a beautiful goal, worthy of the stage” (Pope  2022). In view of the melodrama, bravura, and virtuosity frequently displayed in football, both individually and collectively, it will come as no surprise to learn that the game has often been compared to grand opera. If the very high quality of the players involved and their indisputable talent as individuals cannot be discounted in the end product, it must also be stressed that such exploits are the result of the continual practice of set pieces which are then adapted to play on the field; we will return to the randomness factor shortly; what if the original ball intercepted by Messi had been on the left instead of the right wing, for example? Press coverage stressed the arduous training of the Argentinians and the close-­knit fabric of the team. The point is that such a goal is the product of the daily planning and practice of beauty which can manifest itself, thanks to intensive and prolonged training that has developed special talents in players. This idea of art as skilled practice deserves further exploration and is discussed in more detail in the third section when we touch on the concept of techne, as theorized by the American scholar and thinker Henry Staten, who reminds us that “In its original use, the word art refers not to artworks but to the skill and know-­how by means of which artworks are made” (2011: 223). Obviously, the trajectory of the ball before Messi touched it was the result of chance and a particular set of circumstances, but similar circumstances and a similar response would have been possible elsewhere on the field, say on the left wing, even with different players, leading to a different goal with similar if not identical aesthetic qualities, a variation on a theme, as it were, if we wish to use a comparison with the art of music. One of the elements that contributed to making the goal so beautiful was the interplay of different members of the team in perfect harmony as if following a pre-­arranged pattern of moves. Such an analysis, as the one above, relies on a method that could broadly be termed Structuralism, best encapsulated in Roland Barthes’ 1957  work Mythologies. Barthes’ groundbreaking idea was that any cultural phenomenon, from wrestling to a plate of steak and chips, could be analyzed according to the principles of semiology, which posits a system of signs as a tool for understanding. This was largely inspired by the writings and

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research of Jakobson, Saussure, and the Moscow Linguistic Circle. From 1915 onward, their ideas gradually filtered through into the United States and the rest of Europe after the exile of many of the members of the circle, notably Jakobson. As for Saussure, who was originally Swiss and whose influence on the development of Structuralism cannot be underestimated, he studied in Paris and settled in France from the end of the nineteenth century. Although Post-­structuralism rapidly gained ground in the States and Europe following Jacques Derrida’s influential 1966 lecture at Johns Hopkins on “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” and the publication of Barthes’ Death of the Author (1967) and The Pleasure of the Text (1973), a Formalist and Structuralist method continues to be used in many European countries, particularly in eastern Europe, as a tool for the analysis of literature. The famous English novelist and university professor, David Lodge, was one of the first to introduce this way of working and to popularize it in British universities, thanks to his 1977 volume The Modes of Modern Writing. Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature as well as his Working with Structuralism (1981). The most developed example of structuralist linguistics employed in the analysis of a literary text is Barthes’ S/Z (1970), where he systematically applies five codes to Balzac’s short story, “Sarrasine” (1830), as a key to offer a scientific interpretation of its complexities. The advantage of such a method, if indeed, it can be called such, as those who defend a Leavisite or quasi-­religious Arnoldian approach to criticism might take issue with this terminology applied to literature, culture, and the arts more broadly, is that, in the case of literature, for example, it provides a system that students can be trained to apply to any text, by using the tools of linguistics and stylistics, the latter described by The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary as “the science of literary style” and by J.A. Cuddon’s A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory as “an analytical science” (Cuddon 1999: 872). The alienating effect sometimes experienced by students of literature struggling to understand a text and produce a systematic analysis, based on anything but intuition and sensibility, can be allayed thanks to this method. This is not to entirely discount intuition and sensibility that have their role to play in art and, indeed, in the sciences, particularly in mathematics, but merely to harness them to a clear and functional method, enabling the student and critic to become a technician of literary analysis. Such a stance implies a different attitude to what Staten refers to as the “je ne sais quois [sic) or ‘aura’” (Staten 2019: 3) of the work of art, which traditionally remains cloaked in mystery. This point is discussed in the third section.

“Laying Bare the Device” and ostranenie The above-­mentioned Russian Formalists were the first to suggest the possibility of such technicity in literary analysis. As Tony Bennett points out, “they were united in their wish to establish the study of literature on a scientific footing, to constitute it as an autonomous science using methods and procedures of its own” (Bennett  1986: 19). The expression “laying bare the device” comes from Viktor Shklovsky. It denotes a preference for “literary forms which, rather than concealing or effacing their own formal operations, explicitly display on the surface the processes of their own working” (Bennett 1986: 25). It is closely linked to the concept of defamiliarization (ostranenie in Russian), the “making strange,”



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“slowing down,” or “prolonging” of perception which impedes the reader’s “habitual, automatic relation to objects, situations, and poetic form itself” (Shklovsky 1965: 12). It is hardly surprising that Laurence Sterne’s celebrated novel, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1759), often cited as exhibiting postmodern aesthetics before its time (see, for example, Pierce and de Voogd 1994), should have been chosen for study by Shklovsky. Let us briefly make a foray into a few passages from a contemporary novel, which could also be classified as experimental and postmodern in its aesthetics, that is, self-­referential, generically and stylistically hybrid, drawing on intertextuality to mix high and low cultural influences and to rewrite history in a playful manner. We could add, as well, its preference for the ontological dominant as opposed to the epistemological dominant, as set out in Postmodernist Fiction (1987), by Brian McHale, a critic in the Formalist and Structuralist tradition. His contention is that a postmodernist aesthetics raises questions pertaining to the mode of existence of a text rather than to the knowledge to which it might give rise. United States of Banana is a recent novel (2011), written in English and Spanglish by the Porto-­Rican writer, Giannina Braschi, who has been living in New York since 1977.2 It tells the story of the events of 9/11, seen through the eyes of the main protagonist, Giannina, and through those of the traveling companions whom she picks up on her journey south from the smoking ruins of the World Trade Centre to Porto Rico where she hopes to inaugurate a new age of liberty for the oppressed and the colonized. These fellow travelers include Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the seventeenth-­century Spanish playwright, Calderon de la Barca’s hero, Segismundo from (Life is a Dream, 1639), the celebrated sardine from Goya’s painting, “The Burial of the Sardine” (1810), and also Plato’s Diotima and a taxi driver named Hasib, both of whom become part of Giannina’s informal Symposium with which the story ends. The novel is highly original on the level of language and form and is even described as “revolutionary” on the back cover. At first sight, it can prove something of a challenge to the reader, taking the form, as it does, of an epic poem, a play, a Socratic dialogue, a Platonic symposium, or simply an internal focalization on the discombobulated mind of the main protagonist, seemingly more traumatized by the workings of late capitalism than by the actual disaster of 9/11 unfolding in front of her eyes: I used to hear the voices of the people in taxi drivers—­but now their voices are hooked up to cell phones, iPods, or Blackberries. If you talk to them—­they disconnect only for a second—­and return to their gadgets. Human beings can’t bear very much reality. They need a prop in their hands. It used to be the cigarette. Everybody was smoking in the streets. And now they use electronics to formalize the fact that they’re busy with the dread of daily living that produces nothing creative but the monotony that they call pragmatism. They’re busy producing dust, frenemies, intrigue. They’re fire-­breathing dragons foaming at the office of their mouths. What would happen if we snipped the wires of their busyness. Progress would happen—­as it did to us on September 11. Inspiration made an installation that day (Braschi 2011: 86).

The extract above contains many stylistic flourishes, from the more familiar one of alliteration in d, f, and p, which conveys an impression of heaviness and exhaustion with our contemporary networked existence, to the less common syllepsis, a figure of speech in which a word is applied to two others of which it grammatically suits only one, “fire-­ breathing dragons foaming at the office of their mouths,” “They’re busy producing dust,

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frenemies, intrigue.” The syntax, which consists of either very short sentences or much longer ones interrupted by dashes, imbues the extract with a strong impression of fragmentation, reflecting the unsettling thoughts of the narrator. The internal rhyme of the last sentence and the alliteration in i convey the finality of a shocking and unexpected epiphany in which 9/11 is seen as a work of art. The reference to literary Modernism via the application to the digiverse of a line from part one of T.S Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” “human kind/Cannot bear very much reality,” suggests a sophisticated aesthetic that challenges the banality of contemporary cultural clichés and allows the author to rewrite radical politics as high art. Poetic mastery creates a defamiliarized alternative to the symbolic poverty of consumer society. At the same time, relationships of counterpoint, contrast, and parallelism are created between different words and lines, thus conferring a certain symmetry to the piece and allowing the reader to identify a method in its madness. Indeed, the strange beauty of the text can be teased out with the tools of stylistics and with reference to a Formalist method of analysis. We can see how a banal contemporary street scene has been turned into something strange and unrecognizable, which renews our perception and conveys important messages about contemporary reality. Such techniques constitute a certain style, characteristic of poetic language, which can be repeated, if not systematized, to form an aesthetic pattern or formula. The incipit is a case in point. I saw a torso falling—­no legs—­no head—­just a torso. I am redundant because I can’t believe what I saw. I saw a torso falling—­no legs—­no head—­just a torso—­tumbling in the air—­ dressed in a bright white shirt—­the shirt of a businessman—­tucked in—­neatly—­under the belt—­snuggly fastened—­holding up his pants that had no legs. He had hit a steel girder and he was dead—­dead for a ducat, dead—­on the floor of Krispy Kreme—­with powdered donuts for a head, fresh from the oven—­crispy and round—­hot and tasty—­and this businessman on the ground was clutching a briefcase in his hand—­and on his finger, the wedding band. I suppose he thought his briefcase was his life—­or his wife—­or that both were one because the briefcase was as tight in hand as the wedding band (Braschi 2011: 3).

The reader will notice the same techniques at play, for example, alliteration and internal rhyme. In this instance, the dash has the effect of slowing down the description of events, as if the reader were experiencing them in real time as they happen. The tone is at once ponderous, thanks to the consistent anaphora and repetition but also light and ironical in its choice of vocabulary, “snuggly,” crispy and round” and “powdered donuts,” all of which make reading the text a strange and defamiliarizing experience. Like Barthes’ steak and chips, the Krispy Kreme doughnut is a symbol of a contemporary myth, that of the American consumerist dream which has turned into a nightmare. A quote from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “dead—­dead for a ducat, dead,” is recycled to suggest a violent, topsy-­turvy world where a briefcase, a life, and a wife are on a par, literally and metaphorically. By association, the businessman gets his just “desserts,” as it were, as does the “rat” in the play, in fact, poor Polonius, hiding behind the arras in the queen’s bedroom, and who is mistaken for the treacherous king and stepfather of Hamlet. Thus, instead of the recognition of the immensity of the event as unprecedented personal and collective tragedy that has appeared unfailingly in most post-­9/11  novels, Braschi’s narrator restages the catastrophe around a single grotesque synecdochic (a figure of speech in which a part is



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made to signify the whole) snapshot: “Death of the Businessman,” where the exploded torso of the victim represents the ultimate comic reification of humanity, consonant with the logic of materialism. Barthes’s five codes of structural linguistic analysis could also be successfully applied to this incipit, starting with the hermeneutic code that posits the enigma of the text, in this case thanks to the shocking defamiliarization of the scene described: the violent death of a businessman dressed up as farce, the ghastly and grotesque image of a torso with doughnuts for a head. It is difficult for the reader to know what to think or how to react at this early stage: should s/he be shocked, horrified, amused? What role will this deceased businessman play in the rest of the story? What about his wife? Does his briefcase contain important documents? Thus, we are presented with a series of unanswered questions that invite us to turn the page in our desire to know more and solve the puzzle. Indeed, according to Barthes, reading any piece of fiction is somewhat akin to reading a detective story. Barthes’ proairetic code refers to the sequential elements of action that build up narrative tension and suspense thanks to information furnished in a prescribed order, in this case, the falling to his death of the businessman. In Greek, the word proairetic signifies the choice of one thing before another. This process in turn creates expectations in the reader and a narrative drive. What will happen next to the torso, the briefcase, or indeed the wife, and what will their significance be? The semic code is responsible for scattering overtones and clues beyond the literal connotation of words, constructing character through signifiers. Thus, the reader gets a picture of a slightly portly (“snuggly fastened”), smart (“bright white”) businessman and his life in which his job (the “briefcase” is mentioned three times in quick succession) seems as important as, if not more so, than his wife (“wedding band”), or indeed his life. The symbolic code concerns the larger structure of the text and manifests itself thanks to pairs or clusters of symbolic meanings, often based on oppositions that accumulate to confer a larger structure and meaning to the text. Here, for example, we can find an interesting contrast between the softness of the doughnut and the hardness of the steel girder, pain versus pleasure, and the exactions of capitalism and the self-­indulgence of consumer society. At the same time, on the symbolic level, the doughnuts, which are, to all intents and purposes, harmless objects, take on a sinister role, drawing attention to the price to be paid for easy consumerism and to the self-­devouring, cannibalistic impulses of capitalism, perhaps. The cultural code refers to common bodies of knowledge, in this case, fast-­food culture, business capitalism, the American work ethic, and marriage. By weaving together the five codes, a system of interpretation is constituted, and specific elements that might have been missed, glossed over, or ignored by a less technical reading of the text are made available for interpretation. All through the novel, the same poetic techniques are used in line with the Formalist creed of renewing perception. If the critic takes as his task the laying bare of the device, getting his hands dirty by performing the hard work of stylistic and structural linguistic analysis as a way to expose the mechanics of the text and its workings, a definite pattern can be discerned. Once identified, the recognition and understanding of this imperfect “algorithm” can help the reader to appreciate and comprehend what might at first sight appear impenetrable or confusing. Braschi, the novelist, has recourse to a “system” for

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producing beauty. Of course, it could be objected that this “system” is not precise enough to be fed into a machine to produce a work of art and it is this aspect to which we will now turn.

Computational Creativity and Systems of Beauty: Techne or Genius? Artificial intelligence has occupied the forefront of everyone’s mind for quite some time now, and there has been much speculation on the possibility of its taking over from humans. In his Life 3.0 (2018), the physicist, Max Tegmark, lays out a comprehensive and cogent account of the plusses and minuses of our current digital condition. One of his suggestions is that we should rebrand ourselves as Homo sentiens rather than Homo sapiens if we wish to distinguish ourselves from the increasingly intelligent machines that now play a major part in everyday life. We will return to this fascinating contention which reminds us of the definitions of beauty we saw at the beginning of this chapter. The insistence on the senses is obviously incompatible with a machine. GAFA giants, such as Google and Microsoft, regularly test the progress of AI by measuring their programs up against humans. Recent contests in Chess and AlphaGo have borne witness to the triumph of the machines. More significantly, in 2018, the Portrait d’Edmond de Belamy, a painting produced by an algorithm, or, more technically, a generative adversarial network portrait painting, was sold at auction at Christie’s for 432 500 dollars. According to the computer scientists Rachid Guerraoui and Lê Nguyên Hoang, the “surprise” and “fascination” (Guerraoui and Hoang 2020: 141–142; our translation) elicited by such a production are sufficient to allow us to consider it as art. Although such reactions are subjective, as Guerraoui and Hoang admit, they claim that they are not arbitrary and that they stem from a consensus about what is fascinating or surprising. Presumably, that consensus is observable and, in some measure, definable, thus enabling its reproduction, even by a machine. If we follow the logic of the great modern artist, Marcel Duchamp, the fact that the portrait was recognized and sold as art is amply sufficient to qualify it as art... If we now return to the subject of literature, computer scientists have been working on automatic text generation since 2000. Automatic text generation has a wide number of applications from the theoretical study of generation to the man–machine interface, with chatbots being a notable example. ATG algorithms can be found in the automatic summarization of text, in automatic translation, or, more widely, in the generation of texts. However, the domain of literature has been neglected by research thus far. In effect, the lack of available annotated data has not facilitated automatic learning or the analysis of computational models in this field. In addition, the complexity of the literary text has an impact on the evaluation of systems due to the component of subjectivity which characterizes it. It is interesting to note that a group of computer scientists at the University of Avignon, in collaboration with specialists of literature, are working to remedy this and to develop a new approach that will enable them to generate literary sentences in Spanish. The aim is to generate new sentences from grammatical structures that have different semantics but which retain the emotional sense and syntax of the original. There are two stages in the project: first the study of a model of language taken from grammatical structures and



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second the analysis of vocabulary for the semantic interpretation of that model. Different corpora have been created to develop and test the algorithms. A “manual” qualitative analysis by specialists of literature has also been applied to measure the quality of the texts generated by the algorithms. It is worth quoting the self-­appraisal, expressed by the project managers in an informal internal document: “The results obtained are quite encouraging for our approach is capable of generating grammatically correct and sufficiently coherent sentences which also contain a literary component and perceptible emotion” (Torres 2022; our translation). The ultimate aim of the project is to create a model or algorithm for generating literary texts. The fact that such work is being undertaken is, in itself, significant for it implies that it may not be unreasonable to hope to produce texts of literary value with a machine. In his study of computer programing as an art form from the 1990s, Pierre Levy underlines the structural proximity between literature and programing: “As programming is a form of writing, we wanted to explain the functioning of a piece of software with the same conceptual tools that linguists and specialists of narrative use for the study of literary texts” (Levy 1992: 10; our translation). However, literature is complex and notoriously ambiguous. The reader will have noticed the insistence of the Avignon project on emotion and the necessity at some stage for an evaluation of quality, produced by a human. Ultimately, this may prove problematic as it implies taking into account the subjectivity of different literary specialists associated with the aesthetic side of the project. Supposing the consensus evoked by Guerraoui and Hoang is not reached, then what? Once again, we are confronted with the tricky task of finding scientific criteria for the evaluation and production of beauty. The example above draws attention to the dichotomy between the human and the machine, and between emotion and materialism. One way of exploring this dichotomy further in relation to art is to reconceptualize beauty by giving more space to the idea of techne in artistic production. As Henry Staten explains, the Greek word techne encapsulates the idea of technique, of craftsmanship and material production. As he tells us in “The Wrong Turn of Aesthetics,” a rereading of Aristotle and Plato which brushes aside the cult of genius developed by Kant and the Romantics, Techne, [...] is [...] the “material” part of the technology that is already involved in the shaping of the work: the part involving tools, materials, the skillful wielding of these tools to shape the materials, and the knowledge in and around all of this [...]. Modern opinion has not been much inclined to the notion that artworks are made by techne; it has tended rather to “Romantic” and “humanistic” conceptions which hold that, in order to make a work of art worthy of the name (“beautiful” or “inspired” art, Kant calls it), the essential factor, what really makes it art, must be something beyond techne, something that requires a special, indefinable intervention on the part of the artist. (Staten 2011: 226)

Staten’s hypothesis, which he develops further in his “The Origin of the Work of Art in Material Practice,” is that craftsmanship and creativity are inseparable, and he insists on the fact that Aristotle, for example, makes a specific link between man and the machine: Techne, on Aristotle’s analysis, is thus a kind of spiritual machine principle within the soul of the skilled craftsman: and this too is entirely natural for Aristotle. For even if there is an essential line that on one side runs between the soul with its techne knowledge and the body

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and tools on the other, tools are not a merely contingent add-­on to the human essence. [...] Aristotle singles out one attached organon, the prehensile hand, as the distinctive marker of the human species [...] For Aristotle, [...] the hand is the first prosthesis, given by nature, and human beings are in their essence what, post-­Derrida, we could call an essentially prosthetic animal. (Staten 2012: 50)

This echoes an exchange between two French philosophers, Jean-­Luc Nancy and Benoît Goetz, about aesthetics and technology: Benoît Goetz:  “Leroi Gourhan expresses something very similar to your own ideas when he suggests that we haven’t grasped the technical when we see it as something outside man which is like a weight falling on him from above, when, in fact, it is the extension of man, the exteriorisation of his skeleton, of his nervous system, of his imagination.” Jean-­Luc Nancy: “I think we should go even further than ‘exteriorisation’ or ‘extension’ ... we should say that man himself is the technical animal, par excellence.” (Nancy 1999, paragraphs 3 and 4; our translation) This insistence on the proximity between man and machine harks back to the portrait of our contemporary networked existence and the numerous electronic protheses that characterize our daily interaction with the world, evoked in the passage from United States of Banana, for example. The opposition or compatibility between humans and machines and the capacity of the latter for emotion have been concerns and interests for quite some time. They have featured in numerous works of literature, such as Karel Capek’s 1921 play, Russum’s Universal Robots, Isaac Asimov’s 1950s book of short stories, I, Robot, Arthur C. Clarke’s 1968 novel, 2001 A Space Odyssey and Stanley Kubrick’s film of the same name, to cite a few well-­known examples. In the mid-­1980s, Donna Haraway’s famous essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), rejected the rigid boundaries between humans, animals, and machines, and put a positive spin on the cyborg as a liberating force, particularly for women. For our purposes, and within the framework of Staten’s arguments previously cited, the examination of the proximity between humans and machines provides a means to question the cult of genius, the divine afflatus or wind of inspiration, so beloved by the Romantics, elevated above craftsmanship and techne in the production of the work of art. It brings us that little bit nearer to the possibility of machine-­created beauty and throws into question the supposed mystery of the aura of the work of art. However, one big question remains: that of emotion and the senses to which we have already referred. It is on this point that we now conclude our discussion.

Deep Learning, Big Data, Emotion and Consciousness A recent play by the Canadian artist Linda Blanchet, Killing Robots (2019), tells the story of HitchBot, a robot who is hitching around Canada and ends up being brutally destroyed. The play is staged as documentary theatre, including photos taken by the robot itself and extracts from the robot’s personal diary, and takes the form of a murder investigation.



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The soft, cuddly appearance and fun-­loving “personality” of the robot, supposed to embody all that is best in humankind (“empathy, kindness, and altruism”), elicit considerable sympathy from the audience who are shocked by the violence of “his” death. Such anthropomorphic reactions are hardly unusual in encounters between humans and machines. Here, emotion is literally in the eye of the beholder, influenced by empathetic staging, the robot’s first-­person narrative and sound effects, and, indeed, the audience tends to endow the machine with corresponding human emotions of suffering and fear. Such reactions could be considered purely anecdotal, were it not for the phenomena of big data and deep learning. The possibility of machine consciousness is of ongoing concern and interest to humanity and the specter of Arthur C. Clarke’s HAL 9000 computer with its malicious intent still haunts us: “If humans fail to control an intelligence explosion, the AI itself may take over the world even faster” (Tegmark 2018: 160). The fact that a renowned physicist, such as Tegmark, does not entirely dismiss the possibility of some form of machine consciousness is worthy of note: “Can AIs suffer? Should they have rights? [...] If artificial consciousness is possible, then the space of possible AI experiences is likely to be huge compared to what we humans can experience, spanning a vast spectrum of qualia and timescales—­all sharing a feeling of having free will” (Tegmark 2018: 315). Although this is only one of the many hypotheses formulated in Tegmark’s in-­depth study of our current paradigm, which he calls “Life 3.0,” the vocabulary chosen is significant: “experiences,” “feeling,” and “free will.” On the subject of deep learning, he says that “the results of deep learning are sometimes reminiscent of intuition: a deep neural network might determine that an image portrays a cat without being able to explain why” (Tegmark 2018: 87–88). To return to the example of the game AlphaGo considered as an art form, Tegmark explains how “a “marriage of intuition and logic gave birth to moves that were not merely powerful, but in some cases also highly creative” (Tegmark 2018: 88; our emphasis). Such assertions remind us of some of the definitions of beauty to which we referred earlier, those that stressed the importance of intuition in both producing and judging its value. Tegmark goes even further in attributing some form of sentience to machines, albeit artificial: “Deep learning systems are thus taking baby steps toward passing the famous Turing test, where a machine has to converse well enough in writing to trick a person into thinking that it too is human” (Tegmark 2018: 90). In his latest book, Homo Deus. A Brief History of Tomorrow (2017), the contemporary Israeli writer and popularizer of science, Yuval Noah Harari, posits a new age of “Dataism” where “Homo sapiens is an obsolete algorithm” (Harari 2017: 444). The final chapter of the book, “The Data Religion,” is peppered with other such alarming pronouncements: “Machines know us better than we know ourselves” (Harari 2017: 462), “Data religion now says that your every word and action is part of the great dataflow, that the algorithms are constantly watching you and that they care about everything that you do or feel. [...] We need only record and connect our experience to the great dataflow and algorithms will discover the meaning and tell us what to do” (Harari 2017: 450). In short, he describes a world where human intelligence has already been superseded and, all the world is not a stage, but an algorithm in which poets have been replaced by machines: “According to Dataism, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, a stock-­exchange bubble and the flu virus are just three patterns of data flow which can be analysed using the same basic concepts and tools”

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(Harari 2017: 429). This would seem to indicate that the idea of the aura in relation to art is an outmoded concept. Harari links the process he describes to the fast flows of capitalism gone viral, as the French thinker, Jean Baudrillard, understood as far back as the 1990s in his essay, The Transparency of Evil. It is a system that relies on unlimited resources of information being constantly available: “information flows freely” (Harari, 435). According to Harari, the triumph of capitalism over communism lies in its ability to “understand economics in terms of data processing” (Harari 2017: 435). It is worth noting that Braschi’s novel p­ recisely pinpoints the immanence of the information order and art as a means to escape from it to another, possibly transcendental, dimension. If we return to Harari, he contends that no single human being can control the flow of data: the really important algorithms—­such as the Google search algorithm—­are developed by huge teams. Each member understands just one part of the puzzle, and nobody really understands the algorithm as a whole. Moreover, with the rise of machine learning and artificial neural networks, more and more algorithms evolve independently, improving themselves and learning from their own mistakes. (Harari 2017: 458)

Such assertions are directly in line with Alan Turing’s predictions for the future in an essay, published posthumously in 1951: “Intelligent machinery, A Heretical Theory.” Turing, who is credited with the invention of modern computer science, imagines a future in which, as in Samuel Butler’s dystopian novel Erewhon (1872), the machines have taken control: “once the machine thinking element had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers” (Turing 1996: 259). What is remarkable, is his prescience in predicting a time in which technology would be sufficiently developed to think for itself, as it were: “There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits” (Turing 1996: 259–260). This ties in with the current situation where algorithms learn from experience and from being exposed to massive amounts of data (see Tegmark  2018: 72, 79). One could argue that there is a major difference between the superintelligence of machines and human consciousness, and this seems to be Harari’s suggestion on the last page of Homo Deus. However, we have already seen that scientists are increasingly raising doubts and questions about this point. As Harari himself points out, “After Darwin, biologists began explaining that feelings are complex algorithms honed by evolution to help animals make correct decisions” (Harari 2017: 456). Thus, if, according to “Dataism,” “‘organisms are algorithms’ (Harari, 454) and ‘human imagination is just the product of biochemical algorithms’” (Harari  2017: 454), then presumably these can be analyzed and reproduced. It is only a short philosophical leap from here to believing that a machine can be taught to feel or at least to imitate our feelings and sensations, or, on the other hand, as Harari suggests in his earlier book, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind (2014), that humankind can be “augmented” in order to resemble a machine. From such a standpoint, there would be no real objection or obstacle to developing an algorithm for beauty, provided some kind of consensus could be reached as to its attributes, neither would there be any obstacle to formalizing aesthetic judgment as a science. However, for those of us who might find this an alarming prospect, perhaps some comfort can be taken from the distance yet to be traveled in this domain. Pierre Jourlin, a computer scientist at Avignon University, compares what he calls the “translucid box” of



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the human brain to the “black box” of AI and artificial neural networks. He underlines the gulf between the human brain and AI at the present juncture: In effect, it is possible that the main strength of the human brain resides in the way it is designed, that is to say, it is particularly well adapted to a world in which it feels, reasons, and imagines. These innate advantages are the product of a process of genetic evolution by natural selection that has taken billions of years. If we remember this fact, we can more easily measure the size of the task that confronts research in AI. (Jourlin 2021: 73–74; our translation)

Although he has a similar starting point to that of Harari, recognizing the algorithmic element in biology, Jourlin remains skeptical as to the idea of a swift apocalypse for human intelligence and creativity: In traditional programing, we know that the machine does what we tell it to do and not what we thought we told it to do. This is sometimes the cause of an unpleasant surprise: the bug. In the same way, the pleasant or unpleasant surprises produced by networks of artificial neurons are seldom perceived as a proof of creativity, autonomy, or consciousness. Thus, research into AI has yet to be entrusted to the systems produced by this same research. ( Jourlin 2021: 74–75)

Despite some of the examples we have given, such as the famous portrait of Edmond de Bellamy, produced by an algorithm, despite the concerns of renowned scientists such as Max Tegmark in relation to the exponential development of AI, and despite the catastrophic predictions of pundits such as Harari, it would seem, for the moment, at least, that human beings are still more productive as artists than machines. What better proof do we have of this fact than the numerous works of art that are written, painted, composed, and performed every day, not to mention the endless list of great goals scored since the invention of football in 1863?

Note 1 I am indebted to Dan Jones at Lower Treginnis for the loan of reading matter, including Max Tegmark’s Life 3.0, and for the stimulating ­discussions we had and the food for thought which they provided. 2 A few sentences of our analysis of the novel have been borrowed from Madelena Gonzalez,

“The Uncommon Wealth of Art. Poetic Progress as Resistance to the Commodification of Culture in United States of Banana,” On the Writings of Giannina Braschi. Poets, Philosophers, Lovers, eds. Frederick Luis Aldama and Tess O’Dwyer (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 23—­31.

References Allen, R. (ed.) 2000. The New Penguin English Dictionary. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Bennett, Tony 1986. Formalism and Marxism. London and New York: Methuen.

Bradford, Richard 2015. Is Shakespeare Any Good? And Other Questions on How to Evaluate Literature. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell.

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Braschi, Giannina 2011. United States of Banana. Las Vegas: AmazonCrossing. Cuddon, J. A. 1999. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Cunningham, Valentine 2002. Reading after Theory. Oxford: Blackwell. de Duve, Thierry 1996. Kant after Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Guerraoui, Rachid and Lê Nguyên Hoang 2020. Turing à la plage. L’intelligence artificielle dans un transat. Paris: Dunod. Harari, Yuval Noah 2017. Homo Deus. A Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Vintage. Jourlin, Pierre 2021. La boîte translucide. Un éclairage sur l’intelligence artificielle. Avignon: Éditions universitaires d’Avignon. Karp, Richard 1986. "Combinatorics, Complexity, and Randomness."  Communications of the ACM. 29 (2) (February): 98–109. Knuth, Donald 1996. “Foreword.” In A=B, eds. Marko Petkovsek, Herbert S. Wilf and Doron Zeilberger, xi–xii. London and New  York: CRC Press. Levy, Pierre 1992. De la programmation considérée comme un des beaux-­arts. Paris: La Découverte. Lineker, Gary 2022. @GaryLineker, 18 December 2022. Nancy, Jean-­Luc 1999. “Techniques du present.” Le portique 3. https://journals.openedition.org/ leportique/309 Pierce, David and Peter de Voogd (eds.). 1994. Laurence Sterne in Modernism and Postmodernism. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Pope, Conor 2022. FourFourTwo, “Watch: Argentina double World Cup final lead with wonderful team goal.” December 18. https:// w w w. f o u r f o u r t w o . c o m / n e w s / w a t c h -­ argentina-­double-­world-­cup-­final-­lead-­with-­ wonderful-­team-­goal Shklovsky, Viktor 1965. “Art as technique.” Russian Formalist Criticism, Four Essays, translated and with an Introduction by Lee T. lemon and Marion J. Reis, 12. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press. Staten, Henry 2011. “The Wrong Turn of Aesthetics.” In Theory after “Theory,” eds. Jane Eliot and Derek Attridge, 223–237. Abingdon: Routledge. Staten, Henry 2012. “The Origin of the Work of Art in Material Practice.” New Literary History 43 (1) (Winter): 43–64. Staten, Henry 2019. Techne Theory. A New Language for Art. London: Bloomsbury. Tegmark, Max 2018. Life 3.0. Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Torres, Juan Manuel 2022. “La variété stylistique en français et espagnol: corpus littéraires, analyses linguistiques automatisées et évaluation.,” Internal document, Avignon University. Turing, A. M. 1996. “Intelligent machinery, A Heretical Theory.,” Philosophia Mathematica 3 (4): 256–260. William, Little, H.W. Fowler and Jessie Coulson 1973. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd edn (rev. and ed. C. T. Onions and G.W.S. Friedrichsen). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

8

Literary Value and the Question of Insight on Humanly Relevant Matters Emanuela Tegla

[The media] do not say what there is. They do not discourse on their influence.

They mask their action: the effacement of the immediate and of presence—­ the difference between presence and the present—­to the profit of the latter. You want presence? Turn to literature or the church ... Henri Lefebvre, Rhythmanalysis, Space, Time and Everyday Life

In his discussion on The Art of Literature, Schopenhauer identifies two elements that confer value to a book: “the matter about which he [the writer] has thought”, that is, “the facts of history and the facts of nature” and, second, “the form which his thoughts take.” Regarding the latter, Schopenhauer notes that it is entirely contingent on the writer; even if a book deals with banal, commonplace or widely known topics, “it is the way in which they are treated, what it is that is thought about them, that gives the book its value; and this comes from its author” (7, original italics). What Schopenhauer stresses as generative of value in a book, therefore, are two things: on the one hand, the ability of a writer to think before writing1 and, on the other hand, the qualities of clearness and definiteness of the writing itself. These two are, obviously, interdependent, ensuring the exclusive privilege reading major literature offers, that of “the naked energies of ‘felt thought,”’ as Steiner observed (105). Given the clarity in understanding and judging such matters that was prevalent in those times—­roughly up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, until when literature was thought to have the obligation to provide moral benefits to the readers—­it was possible (and quite common) to criticize, condemn, or ridicule poor artistic achievements. Thus, Schopenhauer notes that the great books of the past were rejected in order to make room for the “new and bad ones which, written for money, appear with an air of great pretension

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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and much puffing on the part of friends” (5), while Schlegel rebukes the popular conceptions of the time, so narrow and artistically unsatisfactory, and sets the record straight by calling the commonly perceived genius “a wealth of false tendencies, the very centre of incompetence. A little talent and a lot of humbug are things everyone praises” (107). Starting with the twentieth century (and, more acutely, with the sixties and seventies), the normative dimension of literature has become, if not an impossibility, a highly questionable aspect. What was to be considered “good” literature and, collaterally, what was to be officially or legitimately sanctioned and excluded from the sphere of “good” literature started to become problematic. Apart from the (often indiscriminate) rejection of the past, there are several factors that can be invoked as explanations of this “development,” from strictly aesthetic, literary to larger—­cultural and philosophical—­ones. Regarding the former, the critical upheaval that dominated the sixties and seventies (especially in France, through the work of philosophers and literary critics such as Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Barthes, and Althusser) led to the proclamation of the death of several long-­established concepts, such as the subject, the self, and the author, and to a radical questioning of traditional literary aspects, such as character, realism, text, style, coherence, significance, meaning, etc. In this process, language was used in order to deconstruct such “realities” and to render them as mere linguistic constructs. The proliferation of discourse (understood as the possibility of asserting freedom, when in fact it functions as diversion), together with the collapse of grounding narratives (such as truth, morality, and reality) that could legitimize evaluative arguments or judgments, resulted in an all-­pervasive subjectivism (again perceived as supreme freedom) in both literary creation and criticism and a generalized diminution of coherence and consistency with regard to what is, or defines, human nature. These manifestations are part of the larger cultural, moral, philosophical, and even political context, ruled by a prevalent tendency to historicize. Susan Sontag describes it as “a predatory embrace of consciousness,” through which, by analyzing its own accomplishments, the human mind “undermines their value and their claim to truth” (7). One of the consequences of this predilection would be that everything becomes temporized and thus reduced to the insignificance of a mere fashion. Another consists of the difficulty (or even impossibility) of ascribing enduring relevance to values (moral, ethical, artistic, and so on), hence their extreme relativization and the acceptance of highly subjective modes of perception and evaluation, along the lines of “anything goes.” Thus, given the intricacies generated by the absence of validity in any potential criteria and of consistency of principles, the evaluation of a literary work becomes a problematic (to say the least) task. However, precisely because of this difficulty, and the moral, cultural, and philosophical “developments” that have led to it, the need for perceptual counsel and evaluative criteria seems more acute than ever. There have been several notable efforts in this direction in the past two or three decades. Many of them display the necessity of skipping, retrospectively, the theoretical and artistic turmoil of the sixties and seventies and of appealing to classics of literary theory and criticism, as well as to writers of the past and their view on reading and writing literature. Axelrod, for example, confesses that he is “more interested in returning to a rather basic and fundamental notion about novels” (4) and tends “to refer to those scholars (some may consider them to now be passé) rather than refer to those who may, for me, be considered ‘trendy’” (7). The writers he discusses in his book are approached from the perspective of “the brilliance of the word, the majesty of its



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rhythm and measure” (6), which is evidently in opposition to the contemporary tendency to deny the traditional referential power of words, the expectation of a meaning, a situation that Steiner deplores as leading to “the dehumanization of language” (197). Terry Eagleton, on the other hand, takes a soft (and, at times, rather cynical) stand when discussing the question of the value of literature. In his attempt to answer the question “what makes a work of literature good, bad, or indifferent,” he addresses several factors that have been used throughout literary history, in the process of literary evaluation, such as originality, realist versus realistic character, universality, enjoyment, complexity, coherence, plot, and linguistic quality. Regarding originality, Eagleton opines that “not everything that is new is valuable” (137), without offering a consistent critique of the fashionable, often indiscriminate contemporary pursuit of novelties. Occasionally, resorting to parallels with the economic domain, he expresses suspicion about the argument according to which the greatness of a literary work (be it poetry or prose) is given by its “ability” to transcend historical time and to have something meaningful to say. To the common critical claim that great literature “deal[s] in permanent, imperishable features of human existence—­in joy, suffering, grief, death and sexual passion, rather than in the local and incidental” (142), Eagleton invokes the ancient masterpieces Antigone and Oedipus the King, observing that, although interest in them has survived for thousands of years, the contemporary reader cannot be sure that the meaning she perceives in them is the same as it was to the ancient Greeks. This is one of the reasons, in Eagleton’s view, why great classics may fall into disfavor, just like “business enterprises [which] can close down and start up again” (143). Historical circumstances are viewed, therefore, as the primary determinants of the evaluation of a literary work. Dealing with eternal questions of the human condition or complexity and depth are not necessarily guarantees of literary value either, according to Eagleton, which is an evidently valid observation; yet, when he introduces the question of style, the critic offers little insight into the importance (and cardinal relevance) of using language in a particular way, particular to the art of literature. The question of the value of a book is closely connected to that of the benefits of reading. J.W. Phelan, for example, supports the thesis that reading fiction generates significant cognitive gain. This perception belongs to the so-­called literary cognitivism, whose theses Phelan endeavors to defend. Through close reading (or, rather, close analysis, as he calls it), one can develop understanding—­not only of literature, but also of the world beyond it. Including in his discussion a “scientific” perspective by quoting statistical surveys (as it seems to be the general requirement nowadays), Phelan nonetheless offers some very pertinent observations on the benefits of reading. One of them is that reading helps toward a better understanding of fellow human beings (aspect which recalls many other thinkers and writers of the past, from Aristotle to George Eliot, for example, who repeatedly emphasized the role literature plays in developing the reader’s sympathies through contact with a variety of personalities and situations that the reader might not encounter otherwise, given the limits of direct experience). Thus, literary fiction can help the reader, Phelan notes, “understand how people think, act and interact along the same lines as common-­ sense psychology” (98). Reading fiction also helps understanding in the sense of “an awareness of the layers of meaning to be found in a given utterance in the literary fiction” (75). These types of understanding (together with the other three Phelan identifies) are possible only through “the literariness of literary texts” (85). What in Phelan (and others)

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appears as literariness is, in point of fact, the question of style, of the way in which a writer says what he has to say, so that, as Schopenhauer observed, “[he] speaks to us when he writes, and that is why he as able to rouse our interest and commune with us” (18). To this end, a writer employs several literary devices at his or her disposal, which ensure the cognitive gain mentioned above and which are also a source of aesthetic value. Schopenhauer links this idea, of the author who, through the text, speaks to the readers, with the question of the value of a book.2 “Literature is communication,” observes Bataille (i), while Blanchot makes a pertinent clarification: “Communication of the work is not in the fact that it has become communicable, through reading, to the reader. The work is itself communication [...]. To read is thus not to obtain communication from the work, but to ‘make’ the work communicate itself” (197). The content of this communication through literary fiction is, obviously, complex and varied but can be grouped—­following the survey cited by Phelan—­into certain categories, such as others’ problems and opinions (which the reader can compare with their own) and life knowledge (which contributes to a better understanding of others and of the self). However, if, following Sartre and others, fictional characters are reduced to scratches on paper, and the fictional world created in the text either fails to ‘live up’ to the standards mentioned above (clearness of style and meaningful content) or is imbued with fashionable ideological topics, communication through literature becomes morally detrimental. In this sense, Bloom observes that “since the universities have empowered such covens as ‘gender and sexuality’ and ‘multiculturalism,’” Samuel Johnson’s famous advice should be amended to “Clear your mind of academic cant” (23). Philosophically speaking, major works of literature communicate truths about human nature and human condition in a much more significant way than science does. However, this aspect of literature is highly problematic nowadays on at least two major grounds. On the one hand, the concept of “truth” has been dramatically relativized and, on the other hand, literature has been subjected to a sort of “scientific” approach that has, in many cases, led to a devaluation of the literary text itself and to a primacy of fashionable criticism. Axelrod notes that “the science has undermined the art and the artist has become marginal to the critic(s) who exploit him/her” (6). There are other challenges that literature and its critical evaluation have been facing lately, most notably the proliferation of what Bloom calls “supermarket fiction” (196) and the threat of political pressure, in terms of evaluating and canonizing certain books, together with banishing certain others, on highly political grounds. Regarding the former, financial considerations have led to the development of “commercial realism,” with its own (implied) set of rules, meant to obscure the artificialities that infuse such texts that have become, according to Wood, “the most powerful brand in fiction” (175). Such fiction (which is nothing more than simple fantasy, as Bergson suggested) operates on a mechanism of selection, extracting from great writers of the past certain elements that suit its purposes and rejecting the true essence of the literary art on very shallow grounds.3 Thus, it lacks what Wood calls “lifeness,” which is not, “cannot be mere lifelikeness or lifesameness,” but rather “life on the page, life brought to different life by the highest artistry” (186). Speaking of the latter, Van Peer notes that the discussion of canonization processes has lately been politicized, at the expense of concerns regarding quality. While earlier generations might have believed the canon to be made up of works that have the highest



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literary quality, “such beliefs have now been condemned as theoretically naive and politically suspect” (18). In practice, this development has taken the form of stigmatizing (or even banishing) some classics, on a charge of having held political views now considered wrong and socially harmful, and, on the other hand, of promoting particular authors on fashionable grounds, such as belonging to certain “oppressed groups” or advocating a certain set of politically correct “values.” The intrusion of the political into domains such as literature, the visual arts, philosophy, and ethics has been much more acute in the past decades as it constitutes one of the major responses to the rise of ideology that follows any collapse of morality—­when moral values are no longer constitutive of life, but have been banished to remote, barely distinguishable regions of consciousness (as well as conscience), the dilution of notions such as the self, spiritual and aesthetic common sense, truth, meaning, etc., operates with the aggression of a widely accepted subversion. To designate, therefore, “the rejection of aesthetic value by advocates of suppressed social groups” as “only superficial,” as Olsen does, is to demonstrate lucidity in the face of the pernicious argument according to which there are no valid standards of evaluating literature and ascribing aesthetic value to it. There are other ways, Olsen righty observes, in which such groups can be given a voice, without the radical move of banishing canonical works and replacing them with strategically chosen others (49). Despite the difficulties one may encounter in finding a way to define what literary value or quality is, it remains an imperative not only because of the current, often distorted way of approaching literature, but also because of the danger of reducing it, under social and political pressure, to mere illustration of new theories and/or ideologies. Evaluation is embedded in reading, that is why it can be best approached through an analysis of a novel—­in this case, The Tartar Steppe, by Dino Buzzati. Published in 1940, The Tartar Steppe [Il deserto dei Tartari] is considered Buzzati’s best known novel; it contains two major themes that obsessively appear in his work as a whole: time and space. The Tartar Steppe begins in a rather abrupt way, with the temporal coordinates of the story: “One September morning, Giovanni Drogo, being newly commissioned, set out from the city for Fort Bastiani; it was his first posting” (1) [Nominato ufficiale, Giovanni Drogo parti una mattina di settembre dalla città per raggiungere la Fortezza Bastiani, sua prima destinazione, 7]. From the very first pages, Drogo is presented as a person acutely aware of the temporal dimension of his life (even his name seems to contain a temporal reference since it is an allusion to giovane, which means young). He contrasts his past—­ defined by “drab days,” “bitter evenings spent at his books,” “the torture of counting one by one the days to which there seemed no end” (1) [la pena di contare i giorni ad uno ad uno, che sembrava non finissero mai, 7]—­with the present: “Now he was an officer at last and need no longer wear himself out over his books, nor tremble at the voice of the sergeant; for all that was past. All those days which, at the time, had seemed so unpleasant were gone forever—­ gone to form months and years which would never return” (2, added emphasis) [Adesso era finalmente ufficiale, non aveva piú da consumarsi sui libri né da tremare alla voce del sergente, eppure tutto questo era passato. Tutti quei giorni, che gli erano sembrati odiosi, si erano oramai consumati per sempre, formando mesi ed anni che non si sarebbero ripetuti mai, 7–8]. This is not the voice of an omniscient narrator. Buzzati makes sure there is no misunderstanding, because the text continues: “Now he was an officer and would have money, pretty women would perhaps look at him, but then—­or so it struck him—­the best years, his first youth, were probably

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over” (2, added emphasis). Still from the first pages, the reader gets a glimpse of some defining features of the protagonist: his deficient self-­love (he looks at himself in the mirror, at “the face he had sought in vain to love,” 2), his constant sense of inadequacy, his superficial self-­criticism, and his lack of self-­knowledge. Later, after his arrival at the Fort, he pendulates between a (rather feeble, in a sense automatic) desire to return to the city and the curious compulsion to stay. There are several factors that contribute to and might function as explanations of his irresistible impulse to stay at the Fort. First and foremost, there is the frequently reiterated conviction he holds, namely, that there is still time. Buzzati does not hesitate to couple this conviction with its usual, accompanying attitude of self-­assurance and even, at times, arrogance: when warned about the dangers of postponing his departure, for example, he says: “I am here for only four months [...], I haven’t the slightest intention of staying” (58) [Io sono qui per quattro mesi soltanto, non ho la minima intenzione di rimanere, 58]. The vanity of feeling oneself an exception appears later as well: “Drogo had understood their simple secret [waiting for a war] and thought with relief that he was an outsider, an uncontaminated spectator” (61) [Drogo aveva capito il loro facile segreto e con sollievo pensò di esserne fuori, spettatore incontaminato, 61]; he feels “cocksure and heedless” (80), then he relishes “with pride his determination to remain, the bitter pleasure of leaving the little assured happiness for something which a long time hence might perhaps prove to be good and great” (82) [con orgoglio la sua determinazione di restare, l’amaro gusto di lasciare le piccole sicure gioie per un grande bene a lunga e incerta scadenza, 80]. Second, there is the stubborn hope for a war, for an opportunity to prove his valor and be praised. Apart from brief mentions of this here and there, Buzzati inserts, at a certain point, a very detailed daydream of the protagonist: “As usual at sunset, a kind of poetic excitement came over Drogo. At this hour, he was always full of hope and he began to meditate once more upon the heroic fantasies he had so often put together on the long spells of guard duty and each day, adding new details, had made more perfect” (95) [Come al solito entrava al tramonto nell’animo di Drogo una specie di poetica animazione. Era l’ora delle speranze. E lui ritornava a meditare le eroiche fantasie tante volte costruite nei lunghi turni di guardia e ogni giorno perfezionate con nuovi particolari, 92]. This dream includes elements of strikingly infantile and sentimental fancy: he, in command of a small army, fights against a numerous enemy, they resist heroically for a long time, most of his comrades die, he is also injured, but the wound is “not too serious, one which allowed him still to retain command” (95) and to be able to receive the laurels for his heroism. The puerile character of his hope is evidenced not only in this daydream, where he measures carefully the extent of his physical damage (being in control of his self-­indulgent imaginings), but also in the episode of the false alarm of an approaching war, when he feels overwhelming panic at the prospect—­ and which occurs right after the description of Drogo’s “heroic fantasies” (97–99). Third, there is the much more complex relation with the steppe situated in the vicinity of the Fort, to the north. Topographically speaking, it is just a desert, “stones and parched earth” (15, added emphasis) [pietre e terra secca, 19], as Ortiz describes it at the beginning, while he and Drogo are heading toward the Fort, on horseback. However, even before actually seeing it, Drogo wonders what it looks like: “but from the eminence of the Fort, one would see some village, pastures, a house; or was there only the desolation of an uninhabited waste?” (20, added emphasis) [ma dall’alto della Fortezza si sarebbe visto almeno qualche paese,



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qualche prato, una casa, oppure soltanto la desolazzione di una landa disabitata? 23]. After their arrival at the Fort, Drogo reports to the adjutant, Major Matti, and asks to be sent back to the city. The conversation is an eloquent example of manipulation on the side of the authority figure (Major Matti leads him, step by step, to the desired conclusion, namely, that Drogo should remain there for four months and then, with a medical report, he could return to his family) and, at the end of it, Drogo asks for permission to see the steppe, being convinced that, since it was such an insignificant request, it would undoubtedly be granted him. To his (and the reader’s) surprise, Matti displays a curious reticence, in his characteristic gradual style: “Behind the wall? I didn’t know you were interested in views [...]. It isn’t worth it. A monotonous landscape—­no beauty in it. Take my advice—­don’t think about it [...]. You have asked me [...] the one thing I can’t grant you [...]. Goodbye. Forget about it—­a worthless landscape, I assure you, an extremely stupid landscape” (28–29). However, later that same evening, Drogo manages to have a look at the desert with the help of Lieutenant Morel. This first “encounter” with the steppe is quite interesting, in the sense that it contains several curious elements, which, symbolically speaking, might be perceived as prefiguration of the later course of his life. Thus, upon setting his eyes on it, “[a] kind of pallor came over Drogo’s face [...]; he was as rigid as stone.” He wants to know more about it: “I have never seen it,” replied Morel [...]. They say ... “What do they say?” asked Drogo, and his voice trembled with unusual anxiety. “They say it is all covered with stones—­a sort of desert, with white stones, they say—­like snow” (30, added emphasis).

Morel does not succeed in satisfying his curiosity, there is very little reliable information about the steppe, however, Drogo’s reaction is one of recognition: “Where, Drogo asked himself, had he seen this world before? Had he lived there in his dreams or created it as he read some ancient tale? [...] Responses had been awakened in the very depth of his being and he could not grasp them” (31) [Dove mai Drogo aveva già visto quell mondo? C’era forse vissuto in sogno o l’aveva costruito leggendo qualche antica fiaba? Echi profondissimi dell’animo suo si erano ridestati e lui non li sapeva capire, 33–34]. The steppe is, therefore, a vast wasteland, neither visually interesting nor pleasant, nor of any military significance (since no one has ever crossed it, Ortiz explains to Drogo, the Fort has been of no use). The interest it stirs in the protagonist takes the form of downright fascination. In addition, “[w]hoever is fascinated,” Blanchot observes, “doesn’t see, properly speaking, what he sees” (32). Blanchot identifies certain key aspects that define fascination. First, there is the element of confusion since fascination “robs us of our power to give sense” (31). This comes as a consequence of a very complex dynamic that develops between the gaze of the fascinated person and the object that exerts that fascination: the latter seizes the gaze, takes it in, and absorbs it in its “depthless depth” (31), leaving the former in the impossibility of creating the distance necessary for avoiding not only directionless confusion, but also the tumult generated by a state of perpetual attraction and suspension. Another key element in fascination is solitude. “Fascination is solitude’s gaze,” writes Blanchot (31), in the sense that it operates as a mirror of the gaze that falls under its spell—­the counterpart of an indeterminate absence.

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Indeterminacy is what rules Drogo’s life from the very first pages to its very end. Despite his occasional and rather superficial gestures toward decisive action—­to return to the city, to live a normal life, etc.—­he stays at the Fort, fascinated by the steppe and by its illusory promise. Life is movement, change (hence the careful notations, throughout the novel, of the movements of the Sun, the changes of the seasons), but he becomes a mirror of the object of his fascination, immobile and immovable like the stones that appear, here and there, in the steppe, solidified, ensnared in the intricacies of conflicting impulses and self-­deceptive perceptions. The insistent internalized presence of “that wretched steppe” (128) [quella maledetta pianura, 122] functions as the perfect barrier against any serious reflection that might determine the protagonist to acknowledge the irredeemable effects of his indecision, as well as of his obscure longing. Drogo displays the defining characteristic of an exile, who, as Kristeva observes, “seeks that invisible and promised territory, that country that does not exist, but that he bears in his dreams, and that must indeed be called a beyond” (5). The steppe, therefore, becomes the concrete representation of his dreams of heroism, which, in their turn, offer the resistance he needs in order to endure the numbing monotony of life in the Fort. However, this holds true for other “inmates” as well (shortly after his arrival at the Fort, Drogo thinks of it in terms of “a prison,” 19), as a dialogue between Ortiz and the protagonist plainly reveals: “What can I say?” said the major. “It’s a bit complicated. It’s a kind of exile up here—­but you have to find some sort of outlet, you have to hope for something. Someone began thinking about it [a possible war], then they began to talk about Tartars—­who knows who was the first?” “Perhaps the place has something to do with it,” said Drogo, “seeing the desert.” “Yes, the place, too, of course. That desert, the mists in the distance, the mountains, you can’t deny it. Yes, the place has something to do with it, too” (195–196). [Che vuole che le dica? disse il Maggiore. Sono storie un po’ complicate... Quassú è un po’ come in esilio, bisogna pure trovare una specie di sfogo., bisogna ben sperare in qualche cosa. Ha cominciato uno a mettersi in mente, si sono messi a parlare dei Tartari, chissà chi è stato il primo... Drogo disse: Forse anche per il posto, a forza di vedere quell deserto... Cero, anche il posto... Quel deserto, quelle nebbie in fondo, quelle montagne, non si può negare... Anche il posto contribuisce, effettivamente, 184–185].

“[T]he daydream transports the dreamer outside the immediate world to a world that bears the mark of infinity,” writes Bachelard (183). It also renders the dreamer motionless, keeping his life in perpetual abeyance. The dialectics of spatial division and choice—­living in the city versus living in the Fort—­has, as inner equivalents, the dialectics of fixedness and infinity (of the steppe and of the dream). Such a state is inherently dangerous, in that, as Gabriele Taylor warns, it does not encourage any specific response [...]. Those who are bored are not always trying to catch up with time, are not always worried that there might not be time to do this or that. But for them time is a pressure in a different, possibly more literal sense: it is a burden which oppresses them. Time is a drag, an obstacle to be got rid of, to be somehow killed. It is a pressure in its very emptiness, lacking anything which could make one feel alive (24).



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The protagonist wallows in such inertness and fails to see the meaninglessness of his repetitive actions and of his hope since, on the one hand, he makes no effort to reflect on his way of life and, on the other hand (in fact, derived from the former), nothing happens to mark the passage of time, to shock him out of his idle daydreaming and self-­deception. However, it would be simplistic to consider that Giovanni Drogo is just a self-­deluded young man, whose life is wasted away by waiting for an unlikely event, for an occasion that would bring to light his potential for heroism. He provides the perfect means for reflections on the dangers of distorted perceptions of time and of the fascination with a space endowed with imaginary significance. He appears acutely aware of its fleeting character, yet he behaves as if he has, at his disposal, inexhaustible resources of time. He gets caught up in a cold, meaningless military routine, which offers him the illusion that his time is occupied. The repetitive character of that routine makes it much more difficult for him to perceive, with any proper acuity, the “flight of time” (3) [la fuga del tempo], but it also sustains and encourages self-­delusion and self-­knowledge. He even indulges in idle thoughts about his being stuck at the Fort, claiming that “some unknown force was working against his return to the city,” but this obscure, hostile force, “without his knowing [...] had its origins in his own heart” (38). Speaking of self-­knowledge, Nussbaum lists “habit” among the three obstacles that need to be overcome in order to obtain it. Thus, habit “both dulls our sensibilities generally and conceals from our notice, or belies the true importance of, many areas of commitment or concern” (254). This aspect is highlighted with remarkable poignancy by Buzzati in The Tartar Steppe. In the chapter that follows his decision to remain at the Fort, for example, Buzzati concentrates on the dangerous power of habits; thus, we find that Drogo “had within him dull sluggishness born of habit [il torpore delle abitudini], military vanity, love for the accustomed walls which were his home” (77–78). Then, Buzzati employs anaphora in order to emphasize the subversive effects of a habit, starting a series of six paragraphs with “he got used to” (78–79). Drogo gets used to the mentally and spiritually numbing repetitiveness of his military duties, to his fellows, to the occasional trip to the nearest village, to riding with his colleagues on free afternoons, to his room, as well as to little things which irritated him at first, such as the sound of the dripping cistern, which now has become “friendly with time,” or “the creaking of the door when it rained [...], the hubbub of the room beneath his” (79). Typical of Buzzati, he does not leave things to chance, does not want the reader to miss the meaning of the realities portrayed and marks, in a straightforward manner (as everywhere throughout the novel), the danger inherent in the protagonist’s attitude and perception of time, so he continues: “All these things had now become part of himself and it would have hurt him to leave them. But Drogo did not know, he did not suspect, that his departure would have been an effort, nor that life in the Fort would swallow up the days one after another, one exactly like the other, at a giddy speed” (79–80). There are many such passages in the novel, and, from a certain point of view, they might seem curious, in the sense that Buzzati runs the risk of spoiling the reader’s curiosity by inserting allusions to the inevitable that will occur. However, what appears to be of greater importance to him is making the reader see and understand how easy it is to fool ourselves by allowing ourselves to be caught up in a meaningless routine and by telling ourselves stories that can justify our inaction, our lack of “effort.” This aspect can be linked to

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another obstacle against self-­knowledge mentioned by Nussbaum, namely, rationalization, which is “an activity of self-­explication engaged in at a superficial and intellectual level which, by giving us the confidence that we have accomplished a scientific analysis and arrived at exact truth, deters us from a deeper and fuller inquiry” (254). There are numerous instances of rationalization in Buzzati’s novel, the most prevailing one being “there was always time still to leave” (81). What Buzzati manages to accomplish with particular effectiveness and artistry is to illustrate the process through which the protagonist reaches the point of irrecoverable self-­deception, the gradual unfolding, through time, of the significance of seemingly innocuous little events, little details of life, which, if recklessly overlooked or feebly understood, amass and form the wall that conceals reality from the self. As his death approaches, Drogo realizes “how unimportant it had all been to wear himself out on the ramparts of the Fort, to scan the desolate northern steppe, to strive after a career, to wait such long years” (264) [Povera cosa gli risultò allora quell’affannarsi sugli spalti della Fortezza, quel perlustrare la desolata pianura del nord, le sue pene per la carriera, quegli anni lunghi di attesa, 248]. If we were to consider, in Heideggerian fashion, that death is the most personal event in someone’s life, the death of the protagonist in The Tartar Steppe acquires at least two major symbolic connotations. First, it concerns the way he dies. After having waited his entire life for the war, when it finally breaks out, he is bedridden due to an unexpected, obscure illness. Despite his efforts to pretend he is well, despite his wretched attempts to convince himself and others that he feels better, he can barely stand on his feet and eventually faints. Claiming that his room is badly needed for the soldiers sent to help them in the upcoming war, Simeoni, Commandant of the Fort, sends him away. Drogo objects, protests, pleads, but to no avail, he is ruthlessly discarded. The beginning of the novel finds Drogo alone, in his own room, at an early hour of a September morning. In the last chapter, he is in an unfamiliar room at an inn, alone again, in the evening. In his youth, before leaving for the Fort, as it appears in the first pages, he compares his life and his own attitudes to those of “scores of lieutenants” who, unlike himself, were leaving their homes “amid gay laughter as if they were going to a fiesta” (2). This reference to others’ happy, fulfilled lives is a constant presence throughout the novel. Now, upon reaching the end of his existence, he repeats this gesture: “It must have been a happy evening even for men of moderate fortune [...]. Himself excepted, everyone has some reason for hope, however small” (260). His life, he realizes now, “had been reduced to a kind of game: everything had been lost for a bet made in a moment of pride” (261) (scherzo in original, which is closer to practical joke, rather than game: La vita dunque si era risolta in una specie di scherzo, per un’ orgogliosa scommessa tutto era stato perduto, 246). His lot is to die in the most difficult way, namely, in atrocious solitude, “in some strange, indifferent spot, in the characterless bed of an inn, to die there old and worn and leave no one behind in the world” (263). However, he resists the impulse to succumb to tears and decides to face death in a dignified way, without fear and self-­pity. This is, ultimately, his heroic gesture—­to be brave in inhuman conditions, to be brave in front of the supreme foreign “invasion.” He heroically struggles to appropriate death, make it his own, refusing, thus, the indiscriminate descent into complete obliteration imposed by the eminently anonymous conditions he finds himself in. “Oh, Lord, grant to each his own death,” exclaims Blanchot, recalling Rilke (120), by which he means dying “an individual death,



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still oneself at the very last, [being] an individual right up to the end, unique and undivided” (120). It seems debatable whether Giovanni Drogo remains himself at the end of his life; he certainly remains true to his life-­long dream, that of dying a heroic death, which, in his own way, he achieves. He fights against the significance of the piteous situation he is in, forcing himself to believe that this last struggle is meaningful and, above all, redeeming. Surprisingly, he has a moment of doubt: But then it crossed his mind to ask: suppose it were all a deception? suppose his courage was only a kind of intoxication? suppose it had merely something to do with the wonderful sunset, the scented air, the temporary relief from physical pain, the singing on the floor below? and suppose in a few minutes, in an hour, he were once more to be the other Drogo, weak and beaten? No, don’t think about it, Drogo, don’t torture yourself anymore; the worst is over now (264–265). [Ma poi gli venne in mente: e se fosse tutto un inganno? se il suo coraggio non fosse che una ubriacatura? se dipendesse solo dal meraviglioso tramonto, dall’aria profumata, dalla pausa dei dolori fisici, dalle canzoni aal piano di sotto? e fra pochi minuti, fra un’ora, egli dovesse tornare il Drogo di prima, debole e sconfitto? No, non pensarci, Drogo, adesso basta tormentarsi, il piú ormai è stato fatto, 249].

These questions, occurring right at the end (of his life and of the novel) might, indeed, seem curious on a superficial level. In point of fact, they are profoundly ironic: his lifelong conviction that he should spend his whole life waiting for the war so he can die heroically in a battle has never been troubled by any misgivings, and there is no reference, throughout the novel, to the protagonist fearing that his belief might be mere (self-­) deception. The man who passively submitted to circumstances his entire life refuses to do so in death. Irony pervades the entire novel. It is hard to find a page that does not contain it, whether right on it or through cross reference. Muecke identifies three essential elements of irony: its double-­layered character (there is a lower level, which represents the situation as perceived by the victim of irony or as presented by the ironist, and an upper level, which belongs to the observer), the opposition or incongruity between these two layers (saying one thing and meaning something different, saying one thing and doing the opposite, etc.), and lastly, the element of “innocence” (the victim of irony is blissfully ignorant of the existence of a perspective contrary to his conviction or the ironist offers no clues as to the implied presence of the upper level) (19–20). In The Tartar Steppe, at the micro level, we encounter numerous instances of irony of incongruity: the day of his departure finally arrives; however, the protagonist does not feel the expected joy (the first pages of the novel are suffused with negative terms—­“drab days,” “torture,” “stupid,” “bitterness,” etc., 1–2); upon arrival at the Fort, “he was determined to have himself transferred as soon as possible” (23); however, within a few hours, he agrees to stay for four months; four years later, when he finally leaves and returns to the city, he experiences feelings contrary to the ones he anticipated (again, an abundance of negative terms, such as “sadness,” “empty,” “bitter taste,” “vast silence,” bitter feeling,” “disappointment and coldness,” “painful,” “sad,” “painstaking,” “bitterness,” “stupid,” “pointless,” etc., 167–178); the panic that seizes him one night, while on duty, when he and Tronk seem to distinguish something in

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the distance, something that could have been construed as an invasion (“Drogo felt a surge of panic. This is it at last, he thought, completely forgetting his warlike fantasies, it had to happen to me—­now something terrible will happen” 97). Such instances play up, on the one hand, the protagonist’s highly deficient self-­ knowledge and, on the other hand, contribute to the intricacies that constitute the more complex discrepancies in the novel, namely, general or existential irony. This is revealed, as mentioned above, by the protagonist’s relationship with time—­the novel opens with a clear demarcation between the past (with its “drab days” and counting the hours—­“all that was past,” the protagonist is convinced, 2) and a promising future, but later Drogo allows the past to “return” in the sense of accepting monotony, boredom, repetitiveness; Drogo regrets that “the best years, his first youth, were probably over” (2), but then he spends his entire life waiting; his constant misperceptions, revealed as such to the reader by subsequent developments (upon arrival at the Fort, he feels “he was no part of that world,” 16, it appears to him as a world “infinitely remote from his own life” 20), and his abandonment to fascination, torpor, and idleness; his deep conviction that there is plenty of time left, he could always leave, “he was an outsider” (61), uncontaminated by the illness the fascination for the Fort actually represents, as the old man warns him (“He [the old tailor] and the commanding officer and lots of others will stay here till they’re done—­it’s a kind of illness. You’re new, sir, watch out—­you’re newly arrived; watch out while there is time” 57–58). He succumbs to the corrosive effects of time, solitude, and self-­deception. We temporize; we miscalculate, misapprehend, and deceive ourselves; we allow tricks of the imagination to become unquestioned and unquestionable truths; we misplace value and flippantly overlook or disregard reality; we escape self-­reflection through any means, however monotonous or unsuitable to our true self; we indulge in an obscure sense of pride, without examining its roots or its validity. Buzzati employs several literary devices to illustrate these aspects of life, from allusion to repetition and, above all, irony. Regarding the latter, there is very little detachment (usually considered a necessary characteristic) in Buzzati’s presentation of the overwhelming ironic dimension of his protagonist’s life. On the contrary, he has no qualms about inserting, within the narrative, meditations on the question of time, the insidiously mistaken perception of its passage, on the ambivalences of the human mind—­all this in a tone full of compassion, both, one might say, for the character and for the reader. Buzzati’s lack of distance, of detachment, together with the technique he occasionally adopts throughout the novel, namely of appearing to address, in a simple, personal manner, the character himself or the reader contribute effectively to the general meaning of the novel: that the victim of irony is everyman, that the writer, as well as the reader, are in the same inescapable situation. Drogo’s life may have its unique particularities, but his predicament can (and should) easily be universalized as the plight of all men. The tragic element in Drogo’s life can be viewed as the tragic element within existential irony, since, as the Romantics said, life in general is inescapably ironic. Irony encourages not only questioning, but also the perception, recognition, and understanding of certain truths about the human condition. It is an expression of freedom; this might be one of the reasons why Bloom considers that “the loss of irony is the death of reading and of what had been civilised in out natures.” After this loss, there is “a final inch, beyond which literary value will be irrecoverable” (25–26). Following this argument (of the link between irony and value), it comes as no surprise that popular literature



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(or “supermarket fiction,” as mentioned above) is characterized by a distinct absence of the ironical element. Additionally, the plot in such fiction is quite exuberant, favoring, through reading, mere escapism rather than cognitive gain and reflection. Samuel Johnson, otherwise a great admirer of Richardson, observed about Clarissa that it is not a book “to be read with eagerness,” if we were to consider it for its plot (174). The same “warning” might apply to The Tartar Steppe: nothing much happens in Buzzati’s novel, but we read it (and appreciate it) for its subtler qualities of style and for the insightful way in which the two fundamentally human determinants—­time and space—­are presented within the fictional world. We respond (as we do with all great fiction) to “the quality of mind transmitted to us,” as Scholes and Kellogg, in their discussion on the relevance of plot in fiction, beautifully point out, through the language used, the characters, and the commentaries inserted in the narrative, to “the intelligence and sensitivity with which the fictional events are related to the perceivable world or the world of ideas.” Thus, it is not the plot, but the “quality of mind” that is “the soul of narrative” (239). It is this connection between the fictional world and the “real” world that provides meaning in a work of fiction. Meaning, as well as existential relevance, by encouraging reflection on humanly significant matters. The point of view Buzzati adopts in The Tartar Steppe facilitates how the reader perceives such aspects. Unlike the masters of the long-­ celebrated technique of detachment and impartiality (such as Flaubert or Turgenev), Buzzati employs several narrative techniques, ranging from directly addressing the reader or a character, to free indirect speech, and to (sometimes rather long) commentaries on the question of time. Like Balzac, he interrupts the narrative flow in order to insert such reflections and questions that the reader herself might ask. Indeed, given the existential relevance of the topics addressed, the reader wonders, but also becomes subject to an act of recognition—­of the misleading perception and mistaken decisions the protagonist makes. Poets, thinkers, and philosophers have been warning about the importance of time and space since ancient days. What makes a novel like Buzzati’s particularly relevant nowadays is the intricate, profoundly complex interconnections it makes between such aspects of life, given the new connotations these two concepts and realities have acquired lately, as well as the possibly deficient penetration of such truths into the contemporary human consciousness. Time, the most essential aspect of life, has become much less intelligible—­in our distorted relationship with it, we consume it, kill it, reject it through an astonishingly rich array of distractions. Our time is “the mediatised everyday,” to use Lefebvre’s expression (50), which gives the illusion of infinity (media have no temporal beginning or end) and discourages dialogues (above all, dialogue with oneself, a prerequisite of self-­knowledge). Space also has received different or additional connotations. At least since Aristotle, the question of “where to live” has been of paramount importance, since it determines one’s life (as it does in Drogo’s case. If he had decided to move back to the city, his life would have been entirely different). Therefore, we might consider how often we overlook the fact that we live in time, but also, and equally inescapably, in space. The repetitive and homogeneous aspects space has acquired now might obscure the apprehension of time in itself and as constitutive of space. It is part of the value of a literary work to offer us insight on matters relevant to life. Literature teaches us to pay attention, to consider life’s possibilities, to beware of our refusal or inability to see or to acknowledge (“reality,” feelings, particular situations, self-­serving stories, etc)—­in short, literature has, as Nussbaum also observes, an

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undeniable practical dimension, in that it offers something to “our sense of life” (190), it “speaks to and about us” (231), it engages “with the reader’s soul” (246). Many concepts used throughout this discussion (reality, truth, and soul) might seem suspicious to a contemporary mind that supports the current tendency toward extreme subjectivism and relativization of values. This tendency might prove to be, once again, just a fashion. However, fashions do have sometimes irrecoverable consequences, as it happened with the theories promoted during the sixties and seventies. “These phantoms,” as Bloom calls them (28), continue to haunt and influence literary creation, as well as literary perception and criticism. Highlighting the paramount importance and relevance of literary works and the aspects that give value to them seems, in the contemporary context, of stringent necessity.

Notes 1 Schopenhauer identifies three types of writers: (1) those who “write without thinking” and who constitute the most numerous category; (2) those who “do their thinking while they are writing” and who are plenty; and (3) the authors who “think before they begin to write.” Writers who can be inscribed in the last group, Schopenhauer considers, “are rare” (2). 2 He should do so, according to Schopenhauer, in a clear and definite manner. This quality of a literary text—­clearness and definiteness—­has been often overlooked (if not radically ­criticized

and dismissed as irrelevant or as oppressive to the freedom of an author’s imagination) since the sixties and seventies, hence the proliferation of what Eliade called “the mythology of literary difficulty, that desperate belief that only an unintelligible text could reveal the true situation of man” (163, original emphasis). 3 With his usual straightforwardness, Schopen­ hauer calls such authors “sterile heads [who] take naturally the path of negation; so they begin to deny truths that have long been admitted” (5).

Bibliography Axelrod, Mark 2016. Poetics of Prose. Literary Essays from Lermontov to Calvino. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Bachelard, Gaston 1994. The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jobs. Boston: Beacon Press. Bataille, Georges 1973. Literature and Evil, trans. Alastair Hamilton. London: Calder & Boyars. Blanchot, Maurice 1989. The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln, London: University of Nebraska Press. Bloom, Harold 2001. How to Read and Why. New  York, London: Touchstone, Simon & Schuster.

Buzzati, Dino 1966. Il Deserto dei Tartari. Milan: Mondadori. Buzzati, Dino 2007. The Tartar Steppe, trans. Stuart C. Hood. Edinburgh, London: Canongate. Eagleton, Terry 2013. How to Read Literature. New Haven, London: Yale University Press. Eliade, Mircea 1978. No Souvenirs. Journals, 1957– 1969, trans. Fred H. Johnson, Jr. London: Routledge & Jegan Paul. Kristeva, Julia 1991. Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New  York: Columbia University Press.



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Lefebvre, Henri 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life, trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London and New  York: Continuum. Moore, Robert Etheridge 1951. “Dr. Johnson on Fielding and Richardson.” PMLA 66 (2) (March): 162–181. Muecke, Douglas Colin 1980. The Compass of Irony. London, New York: Methuen. Nussbaum, Martha C. 1992. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Olsen, Stein Haugom 2008. “Why Hugh Maccoll Is Not, and Will Never Be, Part of Any Literary Canon.” In The Quality of Literature: Linguistic Studies in Literary Evaluation, ed. Willie van Peer, 31–53. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Phelan, Jon 2021. Literature and Understanding. The Value of a Close Reading of Literary Texts. London, New York: Routledge.

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Schlegel, Friedrich 1991. Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis, London: University of Minnesota Press. Scholes, Robert and Kellogg Robert 1966. The Nature of Narrative. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Schopenhauer, Arthur 1960. The Art of Literature, trans. T. Bailey Saunders. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The University of Michigan Press. Sontag, Susan 1987. “Introduction” to Emil Cioran. In The Temptation to Exist, trans. Richard Howard, 7–33. London, New York: Quartet Encounters. Steiner, George 2011. The Poetry of Thought. From Hellenism to Celan. New York: New Direction Books. van Peer, Willie 2008. “Canon Formation. Ideology or Aesthetic Quality?” In The Quality of Literature. Linguistic Studies in Literary Evaluation, ed. Willie van Peer, 17–31. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing. Wood, James 2003. How Fiction Works. London: Vintage.

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How Books Get Reviewed: Evaluation and the Freelance Journalist D.J. Taylor

One of the sharpest comments on the craft of literary evaluation that ever came my way is a Times Literary Supplement “Viewpoint” by John Carey, published as long ago as 1980 and reprinted in Original Copy: Selected Reviews and Journalism 1969–1986 (1987). Carey, by this stage half a decade into his Oxford Merton professorship, pulls no punches and takes no prisoners: objective critical standards, quasi-­ divine judgment seats, and canonical prescription are all straightaway dispensed with and the subjectivity of the critic everywhere proclaimed. The essay ends with a rousing statement of first principles: The real usefulness of value judgments, I believe, can emerge only when we have acknowledged that they are subjective. That usefulness lies not in anything they can tell us about works of literature (for they can tell us nothing) but in what they can tell us about the people making the judgments, including ourselves. Debate about differing estimates of the value of a text should prompt us to an exploration of the individual assumptions, the determining configurations of personality, imagination and background, of the debaters.

To understand the nature of the message, Carey insists, we need to understand the viewpoint of the messenger—­a statement that can instantly, and profitably, be applied to Carey himself, a middle-­class suburbanite revolted by the varieties of luster and éclat he found on display at the Oxford of the 1950s who spent much of his long career laying them to waste. In what follows, I want to apply this modus operandi to myself. When I sit down to review a book to what influences, prejudices, and inducements am I subject? And to what influences, prejudices, and inducements are the people around me themselves

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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subjected? If there is such a thing as a critical climate (arguable, in this distinctly heterogeneous age), where does it find its collective certainty? What has to be done to send this collective certainty off along a different path? To begin with, some autobiography. I have been reviewing books in British newspapers and magazines for approximately forty years. The first book I ever reviewed was a rather good feminist novel called Estella’s Expectations by Sue Roe for the UK Spectator in the summer of 1982, a week after I came down from Oxford. The last one was an annotated edition of Oscar Wilde’s critical writings, for the Washington Examiner, just the other day. The sum total of all these forays into literary journalism, year in year out, sometimes in the balmy days of the early 1990s at the rate of three or four a week, must amount to a couple of thousand volumes, which sounds a lot but is not really when set against the output of bygone titans of the trade. Graham Greene, for example, is supposed to have noticed a thousand books in the 1930s alone, and the source material for Orwell’s exploits in the same field would fill a small library. What assumptions did I bring to this unending task? What started me off on reading, and what kept me going? Where did I find out about books, what judgments did I make about them, and where did I obtain the information that encouraged those judgments to be made? Socio-­economic factors should never be discounted, so I should say immediately that I was the son of a working-­class father and a middle-­class mother living in a p­ rovincial city, educated at a direct grant school of ancient foundation and brought up in an atmosphere of intense and hierarchical conservatism. As for purely cultural factors, and without wanting to sound like some early twentieth-­century auto-­didact reading Nietzsche by the light of an oil lamp while the mill girls clump their way to work in the street outside, with respect to books I am almost entirely self-­taught, studied English Literature (Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and Lawrence) for a bare two years, did History at university and until late adolescence would probably have shared the opinion of my immensely reactionary history master, Mr. Harries, that English literature was “something an educated gentleman did in his spare time.” Where did I find out about books and what did I think of them when I found them? In the early days, I had three sources of information: the items—­not all that many of them—­ that lay on the parental bookshelves; the books my father brought home from the library each Friday night; and, in the fullness of time, the books I started bringing home myself. In the first category lay Orwell’s A Clergyman’s Daughter and Waugh’s Decline and Fall, which my mother turned out to have purchased as Penguin paperbacks in the early 1960s. The second was a bran tub in which repeated dips would sometimes turn up bran (Jackie Collins and Dennis Wheatley) but on other occasions yielded up novels by John Updike and Piers Paul Read. Category three was often governed by publishers’ colophons. Publishing firms were smaller in those days, more redolent of the tastes of the people in charge; their corporate-­cum-­cultural identity was that much easier to gauge. Generally, in the late 1970s, anything sponsored by Jonathan Cape, Chatto & Windus, Faber, Secker & Warburg, and Hamish Hamilton was likely to be pretty good. Then, of course, there were bookshops, to which I graduated at about the age of 15: Gliddon’s in Norwich City Centre, where I ended up working in the nine months between school and university, and Bowes and Bowes on the University of East Anglia campus and easy walking distance from our family home. The latter offered paperbacks of Orwell’s

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four-­volume Collected Journalism, Essays and Letters at 50 pence a throw as well as a spindle of Picador paperbacks (Ian McEwan and Henry Green), nearly all of which turned out to be worth reading. But what did “worth reading” mean? By this time—­around my sixteenth birthday—­I was aware that there were such entities as book reviewers, and that they featured in the arts pages of newspapers and weekly magazines and that their opinions might be worth having. The publication on which I most often shelled out my pocket money in impressionable sixth-­form days was the Spectator, whose books section was awash with belligerent male critics such as Paul Ableman, Auberon Waugh, and its extremely youthful literary editor Peter Ackroyd, given the job at the age of 23, who each week could be found conducting a fiction masterclass in which occasional bouquets might be flung in the direction of promising newcomers but whose chief aim, it seemed to his teenage acolyte, was to inform the great and the good quite how badly their latest darling work had failed to shape up. It says something for the vigor of Ackroyd’s prose style that, four and a half decades later, I still have a sheaf of these reviews in a file. They include the pitiless assault on Erica Jong, who was accused of stuffing her books with cliches as a scarecrow might wad his costume with old newspapers and bits of cardboard and the claim, provoked by some academic treatise or other, that nothing worthwhile had come out of any university English department for the last ten years—­an assertion made all the more bracing by the fact that Ackroyd had previously spent time as a Mellon fellow at Yale. Next to this weekly firework display, the Times Literary Supplement seemed a pallid also-­ran, full of hedge bestriders and fashion followers whose abiding characteristic was a reluctance to commit themselves: I was particularly irked by the equivocations of its nervy fiction reviews, in which each sentence appeared to qualify or backtrack on the message of the one that preceded it and even the final paragraph could seem wary of declaring an opinion. “Isn’t that rather a value judgment?” I once enquired of some grand Oxford eminence met in student days when he was laying down the law about this frightful modern music. “Yes indeed,” he replied. “And we’re here to make them.” Come the late 1980s, I began reviewing seriously for the national press (Independent, London Evening Standard, Sunday Times, and occasional forays into the Guardian). If asked what I considered to be the newspaper critic’s proper approach to his or her task, I would have straightaway answered that he or she had primarily a duty to inform the prospective reader whether the item under review was worth £9.95 (the price of hardback novels in those days) of their money. I would also have maintained that nine tenths of published novels would have been better left in manuscript, that book reviews ought to be anti-­academic and adversarial and—­ following my great hero, Auberon Waugh—­that reviewers ought, above all, to be judged by the liveliness of their response, and that a 600-­word fiction roundup at the back end of a daily newspaper is not a venue for cautious throat clearing but demands strong opinions, emphatically expressed. The curious thing about the Grub Street marketplace in which I fetched up in its late 1980s and early 1990s heyday was how many of its denizens appeared to share this view. It was the great age of the young, skeptical, exclusively male iconoclast (David Sexton, James Wood, Anthony Quinn, Nick Lezard, and, a bit a later, Philip Hensher were also making their mark at this time) laying about him with a flaming sword and tumbling established reputations into dust, an era in which you could open the books pages of the



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Observer to discover that all five of the week’s novels had been ceremonially cut into pieces. “Book reviewing is becoming a blood sport again,” Private Eye’s anonymous critic reckoned in 1989 while analyzing the ritual dismemberment of an Iris Murdoch novel by half-­a-­ dozen angry young critics who, by way of a kind of morphic resonance, had decided that Dame Iris’s rambling word fests with their mage figures and their earnest conversations could no longer be given the benefit of the doubt. No point in denying it: that anonymous critic was myself. How to account for this spiky new critical landscape, with its hatchet jobs, its withering assaults on established reputations, and its weekly reminder that Kingsley Amis was no longer capable of cutting the mustard? At its heart, I suspect, lay a shift in environmental conditions. Journalism changed in the late 1980s. Rupert Murdoch had defeated the print unions. New technology was coming in. There were more newspapers—­five “quality” Sundays at one point—­more room for arts journalism, more money to pay the people who wrote it and a heartening demand for the services of bright and opinionated twentysomethings. The Sunday Times Books Section in those days was a discrete entity, 16 pages long, with a staff of five and room for a couple of dozen reviews. All this encouraged a breezy confidence in the editors who handed out books for review and the critics bidden to appraise them. As Boyd Tonkin, then running the New Statesman books pages but soon to take charge at the Independent, once put it to me, the culture was robust enough to take the eviscerations in which review sections of the period tended to specialize—­a process which in some cases was actively encouraged by their editors. Nothing was ever said outright, but I can remember half-­a-­dozen occasions on which I was handed a book on the not quite conscious assumption that its author would be left sprawling in the dust. These are not, perhaps, the ideal conditions in which books ought to be evaluated; nevertheless, for quite a while in the late 1980s and early 1990s, they became the conditions in which certain books were evaluated. How are they being evaluated now? Who are the people who write about books in newspapers and magazines and who judge them in prize competitions, and what are the assumptions that they bring to them? Although there has been a slight uptick in the percentage of minority and ethnic groups represented, the personnel are pretty much the same: highly intelligent and often Oxbridge-­educated, canon-­respecting yet margin trawling, up in all the latest professional jargon (note the preponderance of such fashionable adjectives as “liminal” and “transgressive” in the contemporary review), determined to “get on” and carve out careers for themselves in the world of books. One definite change for the better is the number of women involved. The reviewing landscape of thirty years ago was, with certain exceptions, a boys’ club. Most of the literary editors were men and so were most of the critics they tended to employ. It is occasionally suggested—­mostly by women—­that female reviewers are less deadly than the male and genetically predisposed to kinder judgments, but the critical stances adopted by such comparatively recent recruits to the trade as Claire Lowdon and Johanna Thomas-­Corr would seem to suggest otherwise. As for the assumptions brought to the task of reviewing the week’s new fiction, one of them is—­again, with certain prominent exceptions—­a general positivity. This, again, is a by-­blow of the wider literary marketplace, whose book pages are under threat from declining newspaper circulations and whose storage shelves are swamped by a tide of new publications that not even the most determined editor could ever do justice to. If, as

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gnarled old stagers sometimes complain, the great majority of new books are not so much reviewed as endorsed, then this is because there is so much less space for them: such is the press of new material that books succeed merely by being reviewed; their authors can congratulate themselves on having caught the editor’s eye when a shelf-­full of also-­rans have been carted off to the remainder dealer. Certain newspapers are known for their emollient line: one often comes across remarks on social media to the effect that such and such a novel cannot be any good “as even the Guardian didn’t like it.” The second assumption that can be brought to twenty-­first century Grub Street is its left-­liberal bias, a tendency that, in book pages, can often seem to run in direct counterpoint to the newspaper in which it appears or at any rate the policies of the group that sponsors it. You doubt that Rupert Murdoch ever casts an eye over the TLS, but if he did so he would be horrified by the plethora of reviews of books about climate change and the legacy of imperialism. Several factors have contributed to the dearth of any serious right-­wing literature in the UK—­a category that was going strong until at least the early 1990s—­but one of them is the fact that no critical climate exists in which it could be received. Nobody, however talented, could write, say, a pro-­Brexit novel or a state-­of-­the-­nation saga with a reactionary bias as it would be impossible to find more than a handful of critics prepared to take it seriously. On the other hand, an anti-­Brexit novel will nearly always be given the benefit of the doubt, however, cack-­handedly it happens to be put together. All this, naturally, has terrible consequences for literary objectivity—­not, of course, as we have already established, that such a thing exists. The average reviewer is, naturally, keen on acclaiming the numbers of marginalized and hitherto dispossessed new voices being welcomed onto publishers’ lists while remaining uneasily conscious that such books require very tactful handling. “Anyone out there feel like giving a bad review to a woman brought up in a succession of bed-­and-­breakfast joints by an abusive mother with whom she is still estranged? No I thought not,” Private Eye’s anonymous critic—­again, myself—­remarked of Kerry Hudson’s recent memoir Low Born. In fact, Low Born is an exemplary work, but what if it had not been? The same extreme nervousness attends the spectacle of a white person reviewing a book by a black person, which, should the artifact under discussion turn out to be spectacularly feeble, is liable to provoke complaints about a member of a privileged elite trampling the sensibilities of a marginal and deserving outsider. How does all this work in practice? As I revealed earlier, the last book I reviewed was that edition of Oscar Wilde’s critical writings, edited and annotated by Nicholas Frankel and published in a spanking hardback edition by the Harvard University Press. What assumptions and prejudices did I bring to it? On the one hand, sympathy with Wilde as a victim of his times and circumstances was tempered by an inbred dislike, brought from childhood, of his habit of showing off. Also brought from childhood was a faint suspicion that for a grown man to want to write about ladies’ fashions—­as Wilde did repeatedly during his time as a magazine editor in the 1880s—­is simply a waste of time that could have been put to better use. Imported from those early stakeouts with the Spectator was a distrust of Frankel’s highly academic preface with its invocation of literary theorists and remarks about the subject’s “dialogic imagination.” Shunted on from an Oxbridge education was a faint contempt for the kind of readers who apparently have to have words such as “Bohemian” and “Epicurean” explained to them in footnotes, or rather for editors who imagine that such words need explaining in the first place.



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In the end, you will be pleased to know, despite having grave doubts about author, editor, audience, and the material selected, I very much liked the book. But any reader who wanted to know how this judgment was arrived at would need access to a whole raft of information whose existence they could only guess at. Ultimately, perhaps the best service newspapers and weekly magazines could offer their readers would be to revive their “review of reviews” sections—­a staple of the 1990s but long since perished in the face of financial cutbacks—­yet with a slightly different spin. Here, as well as summarizing what critics had said about a particular book, a book-­world insider would be encouraged to delve a little further into such topics as the background, psychology, and prejudices of the reviewer and the cultural assumptions of the periodical that had commissioned the review. Not only would this get us closer to the text on display, but it would also help to unpick the subtle network of compromises, evasions, and stealthy propagandizing of which the specimen review consists.

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A Lifetime of Evaluation Penelope Stenning

I am not an academic. I was once, for a while, so, although I have absorbed the jargon, the methodology, of how literature is taught and written about in universities, I feel that I am comfortably distanced from it. Thus, I can compare the intensities of academic literary study with something far more intimate, a feeling about books and writers that is private and impressionistic. I am intrigued by the prospect of being able to look at “evaluation” from different perspectives. One of these involves the strictures of literary study as a discipline, with regulations and conventions that make it difficult to integrate your feelings with rules that seem always to fence you in. This chapter, then, is a digressive narrative taking into account the struggles between my apprehensions and the straightjacket of how I am expected to respond to books. For me, “aesthetics” is not a term that I accept in its strictly philosophical sense. It is, I believe, a description of tough sensibility. You might not like what you read, but at the same time you might admire the skill of the writer who alienates you; and at the other end of the spectrum, you might be magnetized by writing that most treat as inconsequential. It is a wonderful dichotomy. I learnt to read “literature” with Janet and John books. I was born in the late 1940s, a time in which children’s books were limited, limited in availability and imagination. My parents told me tales that they made up, mostly at bedtime; sometimes tales about the bogey man. I am not too sure that I went to sleep to escape his wrath or stayed awake traumatized in case he came through the door. Fairy tales were not always more reassuring except that when you reached the end of the story, good seemed to triumph. They were my first literary experience of moral values, of good over evil. It was no wonder that there was cold comfort in Rupert Bear (first published in the Daily Express in 1920) and Noddy (1949, Enid Blyton). My book world consisted of a talking toy bear, little talking mice,

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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and a small wooden boy who lived in Toyland. Only now do I realize that the dead matter of printed books, authored by someone I had never met or would never meet, shared so much with the improvised performances offered by my parents. Both were about inventing new worlds from words and holding your attention as the story unfolds. When I was ten, I knew nothing of aesthetics or evaluation—­the words would have had no meaning for me—­but I was capable of deciding how well the magic of storytelling pulled you from your own world to somewhere else. That has never gone away. Grimms’ FairyTales (1812) and Hans Christian Andersen’s New Fairy Tales (1843) and Tales from the Thousand and One and Nights played a large part in my early years. The themes often embedded in these tales are played out time and time again in literature. Fantasy, mystery, romance, humor, tragedy, adventure, fun, fear, death, redemption, and laughter are the stuff of life. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with sleep” (Shakespeare, The Tempest). Do we retreat from life into literature or does the latter illuminate aspects of existence we might otherwise repress, overlook, or take for granted? I have no recollection of how I felt about these excursions into other lives and universes, but that is the point. For a child, the borderline between a story and the actual world is fragile, to say the least. As adults, we read fiction as an alternative to what life is, knowingly and consciously. Sometimes we retreat into novels as a form of escapism, a means of shutting down what we would like to postpone. On other occasions, we travel through high-­art fiction in the same way that we visit art galleries, a form of aesthetic elevation. Perhaps children have a special means of genuinely appreciating literature because they cannot distinguish between what is real and made up. It is a fascinating thought, but one that I will dispute below: literature is important because we know we have gone somewhere else. Comics were frowned upon by my mother, all except Girl. It was in part didactic; the language was “correct,” and the lead characters embodied fine moral values. My recollection of the comic was that it was about ballerinas and nurses: “girly” stuff. Boys seemed to have a much more adventurous read with the brother comic The Eagle. I was born of a generation that was ready to acknowledge and even accept gender inequality. The feminist movement, which undermined this ideology, came later, and this issue is discussed below. Of late, I have read that Girl was relatively unsuccessful during its early years because some of its strips involved the portrayal of girls in traditionally masculine roles, notably “Kitty Hawke and Her All Girl Air Crew.” Readers’ parents objected to this apparent rewriting of recent history. It was an, almost, open secret that women had been allowed to deliver fighters during the Battle of Britain, but taking part in dogfights was unfeminine and therefore forbidden. There were celebrated women fighter aces in the Soviet Union, but using graphic fiction to create an alternative history of our recent past was seen as unsuitable. Since the rise of children’s literature as a tolerated sub-­genre in the nineteenth century, readers under the age of 12 to 14 have been treated much in the way that authoritarian regimes deal with their adult counterparts, as dangerously vulnerable to brainwashing, verging on mentally defective. In 1983, the Alabama State Textbook Committee banned Anne Frank’s Diary from pre-­teen classrooms because they judged it to be the potential cause of depression. In the mid-­1980s, several left-­wing London boroughs attempted to remove Beatrix Potter from primary school reading because they saw Peter Rabbit as the embodiment of white middle-­class values. One has to wonder how literature is expected to function as an index of maturity. At what age are

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we thought capable of making moral, let alone aesthetic, judgments about the words and indeed the pictures on the page? In the last year of junior school, I would pray for rainy playtimes when a large bundle of comics, not permitted to me at home, were placed at the front of the class to while away the time and keep us quiet. The likes of The Beano (the world’s longest running comic) with superstars Gnasher and Dennis the Menace. The Dandy with characters such as Desperate Dan and Korky the Cat. Improbable characters in mischievous situations with words used such as “wow” and “whizz” and “whoopee.” They were fun to read. Moral values were still embedded in the text as Dennis was often punished at the end of an escapade. Corporal punishment was still the norm, which brings to mind Billy Bunter of Grey Friars School (hardback edition published from 1947) and Just William (Richard Crompton 1922): mischievous naughty school boys, who had adventures, solved mysteries and were punished for any wrongdoings. Escapism, tension and laughter, much needed in a girl’s world, were drowning in literary allusions of sweetness and light: “what are little girls made of, sugar and spice and all things nice.” Again the borderline between the imagined worlds created by others and the one we inhabited was a blur. If books let us out to a world of our fantasies were they works of art—­in that they enabled us to suspend disbelief—­ or mere distractions, recreational alternatives to experience, and therefore worthless? As kids, we experienced the dilemmas later to be pondered by academic reception theorists, though thankfully we were unaware of this. The bible (King James edition) turned out to be a good read; there were many stories and that old chestnut good over evil pervaded throughout. It sparked the imagination of distant times and places, and it contains so many allusions that we recognize in English literature. In the end, we have to ask ourselves: is the bible literature? Well, it contains an enormous number of narratives, but how we perceive them depends on whether we see them as documentary accounts of the relationship between God and humanity or a delusion. As a work of literature, Milton’s Paradise Lost is celebrated as the finest Christian epic. However, what if we treat the Old Testament as a fantasy? Should we judge Milton’s epic as an early example of science fiction and evaluate its qualities as such? The mysteries read in my childhood influenced my later reading habits. The plots have become more sophisticated over time and the same theme of adventure and solving a mystery persists, but we should also pay attention to how crime and spy fiction sensitizes us to ambience and circumstance. Cars, a ringing telephone, fellow detectives, bowler hats, and the local Paris café (with alcohol) were atmosphere rather than narrative, but they seemed necessary for Simenon’s Maigret to solve a case of murder. The seventy-­six novels and forty-­nine short stories are quickly read; Simenon transports the reader back in time to a romantic yet sinister French capital. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes only had a horse and carriage to get around, but he still solved the case. The pure uncertainty of nineteenth century London, where something dreadful appears to lurk beneath the calm mannerisms of Victoriana, is as addictive as the whodunnit puzzle of the plot. The character, first created for a Study in Scarlet in 1887, lives into the twenty-­first century. The popularity of mystery novels arguably started with Wilkie Collins’ The Woman In White (1859), which was worth reading for the lovers of the genre. One only has to browse in an airport book shop to gage the popularity of spy and detective novels as the “go to” holiday read. Are these books, like the readers it is assumed will buy them in airports, a means of simply



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taking a fantastic journey while briefly ignoring actuality? I would dispute this. The best crime/thriller writers conjure atmospheric tension from their words just as astutely as their “literary” counterparts. It is horribly unjust to treat Agatha Christie-style novels as the epitome of the genre. Patricia Highsmith never claimed to be anything other than a crime writer, but self-­evidently, her novels demand comparison with those of Dostoevsky as studies of the psychology of evil. Before I purchased my holiday kindle, I had carelessly thrown books by John Le Carre, Frederick Forsyth, Peter Rankin, and Peter James that could be found in my carry-­on bag. I enjoy James’ references to places in Sussex, a landscape that I know well. Place and identity have influenced my choice of travel reading. I took a copy of E.M. Forster’s A Room With A View to Florence and Irvine Washington’s Tales of the Alhambra to Granada, and The Awakening of Osiris (translated by Normandi Ellis) accompanied me to Egypt and I read it out aloud (to the dismay of travel companions) while gliding down the Nile on a felucca. These are “high cultural” authors, but their brilliance in evoking a sense of place does not surpass that of Simenon or Conan Doyle. It is a commonplace to regard a writer’s ability to evoke an environment or location as the result of their skill as manipulators of formal and rhetorical devices; in short, a sense of place in a novel is a magical illusion. I think that there is something incomparably unique in experiencing the actuality of a place and comparing it with its counterpart on the page: rather like being accompanied by the real Mona Lisa to see da Vinci’s portrait of her. I am of an age that was subjected to the ubiquitous eleven plus system; I passed and was sent to a direct grant convent school. Enter Charles Dickens. Gaining first place in English literature in year 2 (today’s year 8), the teacher sarcastically suggested that I had been “burning the midnight oil.” Not at all, I owed it all to Mr. Dickens, The Christmas Carol and Nicholas Nickleby. I finally got around to read The Tale of Two Cities during a hospital stay just ten years ago. It is never too late for Dickens. Dickens wrote his novels by adapting his method of serialization, leaving his readers in suspense until the next monthly publication. He engages the reader’s attention; it drives the narrative and thus the reader’s attention forward. One could relate to his characters and view them as caricatures of certain types of people. There was humor, tragedy, love, and suspense. The Victorian public treasured them, and they have survived the test of time metamorphosing as television drama, films, and musicals. During Dickens’ lifetime, he was treated by many as a literary social climber, a man who made use of his self-­taught skills to satisfy the basic appetites of the ordinary reader, the literate person with no more than a basic education who came from the same modest class as Dickens himself. Typically, his closest rival, Thackeray, wrote in his review of A Christmas Carol. “Unhappy people! Deluded race! ... What strange new folly is this? What new deity do ye worship? ... Know that your new idol hath little Latin and less Greek? Know ye that he had never tasted the birch of Eton [Thackeray was of Charterhouse], not trodden the flags of Carfax [a square in Oxford; Thackeray went to Cambridge] ... Discern ye not his faults or taste, his deplorable propensity to write [prose as] blank verse? (Fraser’s Magazine, February, 1844). We were not taught, in school or university, that many of Dickens’ peers regarded him having despoiled the art of literature by making it popular. I loved it because his characters were magnetic, and his stories were addictive. Have I inherited something of the culture of unpretentiousness toward which Dickens steered the novel? The school literature curriculum included everything that they considered “great” and necessary for a good education. The question that was never addressed was why those chosen

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genres and books were thought to be superior to others. Who had chosen the so-­called “canon” and just as significantly why was it thought useful for us to spend an inordinate amount of time studying them? Did it equip us to deal with the big questions of adulthood, ethical, moral, existential, etc.? The Romantic poets were trudged through, Jane Austen explained. Then, there was Shakespeare; quotes to be learned and an exam to be passed. I first discovered that there was more to it than that when we were taken to London to see a performance of Macbeth: a crocodile of giggly convent school girls. Little did I realize how that visit would change my attitude towards Shakespeare. It was my first experience of theatre: the words, the poetry, the plot, the history, and they came alive; it took on meaning and enjoyment. Later, in class, looking at each line became more bearable. Retrospectively, it only occurred to me that I had made an unintended discovery about Shakespeare and his importance. Until the eighteenth century, hardly anyone “read” Shakespeare in our sense of scrutinizing the silent text. The vast majority of his contemporaries, those who filled the Globe for his plays, were all but illiterate. They rejoiced in the often over flamboyant noise of figurative language at its most daring, metrical patterns that overlapped with prose, political and moral questions that seemed vital to all aspects of lived existence. This was pre-­literate literature, literature at its most visceral and unadorned. Familiarity with the most popular works such as Macbeth, King Lear, Othello, and the Tempest mean that they are among my favorites. I stopped “reading” them and listened to them in my head. During my latter school years, my father talked to me of the books that he had read and those that had influenced him. He loved to read and had time when he was waiting on his London taxi rank for a fare. We talked together about the politics of the day (he had strayed into local politics) and how books reflected the world in which we lived. He mentioned authors such as Orwell, Mailer, Beckett, Steinbeck, and Hemingway. The first time that I read Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (1952) I realized that prose did not have to ramble in order to paint pictures or evoke emotions; it was visceral, sharp, and gritty. Many more names of authors spring to mind, including Henry Miller and Vladimir Nabokov, although it was years later before I could lay my hands on a copy of The Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring, or Lolita. All three had been banned from being published when written. All these writers’ books were forbidden to me in school. As with the long-­banned Lady Chatterley, it became clear to me that literature could be transgressive and radical because it was literature. In politics and even in so-­called liberal societies, it is possible to edit what is felt to be unacceptable, to rewrite the truth. However, novels, unlike memory or history, are not amorphous. They withstand the tests of time and resistance by offering immutable stories, often shocking ones, that refuse to go away. Maybe it was Mr. Dickens who helped me through the school exams, but it was my father that had influenced my love of reading. It became a voyage of discovery. Teachers training college beckoned; university entrance was considered unlikely. If you did not gain entrance to college, then nursing or secretarial college were the options available; hairdressing and shop work were not considered suitable. I was hoping to go to drama school (not encouraged); however, my life took a different path. I eloped to Scotland with a science undergraduate. My own fairy tale. We could not bear to be separated. Reverend Mother said that I could no longer attend the convent. My young husband introduced me to science fiction, HG Wells’ The Time Machine (1895). This was then followed by The War of the Worlds (1898). The Sleeper Awakes was my first dystopian novel



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(1910); here was all the adventure and imagination that Eagle readers were allowed to foster. My father must have read them; I wonder why he had not thought them suitable to mention. Science fiction seems to stand alone as a genre; there are many people who read it to the exclusion of all others. One such person is my youngest son (although he was keen to point out to me that he does read other things). The key word that he uses is escapism. Escape from this world and the set of rules that we live by. Science fiction offers adventure, different worlds, different rules, and hope. Hope that whatever mess we humans make of this world, there a way to survive. He claims that his love of reading started when he received a Beano annual one Christmas: “whoopee!,” The Beano again! Then, came Tolkien’s The Hobbit (1937) and The Lord of the Rings. The scene was set for Asimov and the Foundation Series (1942–1944). Survival and hope are persistent themes in literature as each generation grapples with their world. Never so much as now, with live news feed of the human cost of climate disasters and the tragedies of war. Many treat science fiction as a tolerable second-­rate genre. Certainly, it is not predictive, in the manner of the dystopian visions of Orwell or Huxley; it is too fantastic to be credible. In some ways, that is its strength. Its characters, even the non-­human ones, resemble us, but by removing the familiar framework of realism, we highlight the strengths, weaknesses, and sheer peculiarity of our species that the mundane ordinariness of the real world as routinely depicted in novels often causes us to overlook. The non-­science fiction dystopian genre reflects our worst fears of anarchy, the breakdown of world order, and all the terror that would ensue. It is not a new genre—­for example George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953)—­ but books written now have a heightened awareness of the possibility of the world’s apocalyptic end. Kazuo Ishiguro’s Clara and the Sun (2021) is about artificial intelligence; a book set in the future and told by Clara an artificial friend. It is a disturbing portrayal of what could happen. The Road (Cormac McCarthy 2006) haunts my imagination. It demonstrates the need for human survival and the strength of love; the love and hope that compels a father to save his son in a destroyed world. How different is prophetic literature from other forms of writing, indeed other media, that disclose to us the strengths and horrors of the wider globe? Does its status as a respectable form of entertainment somehow devalue it? I would argue that the opposite is the case. Uniquely, literature, and the novel in particular, does not pretend to offer us documentary fact. We follow the twists and turns of a dystopian narrative without knowing quite what awaits us or for that matter which individual, the narrator included, we can trust. We experience the same uncertainties and fears of those who exist in actual societies where fate is determined by potentially malicious, often unseen forces. Film might come close to this, but being alone with the words of Orwell or McCarthy is far more terrifying. During my days of young love, between baby feeds and school runs I found time to read whatever I wanted. I immersed myself in books in translation. There seemed to be a feeling, “an otherness”, not in the future as in science fiction but of a bygone age and a different culture. There were always notes reassuring me that the translation was true to the text; how was I to know otherwise. Books that included Madam Bovary, War and Peace, Doctor Zhivago, Don Quixote, and books by Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Zola, and Emmanuel Kant (and other philosophers). Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward was banned in Russia but available in

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the United Kingdom in 1968. The book took me to another time and place, not thus far from my own, that of Stalin’s Russia. It is overtly political but set within the human drama of a cancer ward, ward thirteen; the fear and horror of the disease and the terror of the Stalin era are juxtaposed. Both are human tragedies. In my opinion, books that are forbidden or create controversy ought to be read. There is and was always the question of whether a translated literary work loses the uniqueness of the original: the triangular bonding of author, reader, and text through the language and culture they share. Sometimes, especially with Solzhenitsyn, the trauma and horror of the story transcends linguistic differences. For eight years, I lived in the North of Ireland. To my dismay, I became aware that little of Irish history was taught in many schools, let alone their rich tradition of Irish literature. I made it my business to read as much Irish literature as I could. I rediscovered old favorites such as Yeats, Beckett, and James Joyce. I took an interest in Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw, reading both plays and prose and seeking out theatre productions. Politics and passion are woven into Irish literature whether it is written in the eighteenth century as in Jonathan Swifts Gulliver’s Travels (1726) or by James Joyce. “Oh Ireland my first and only love, Where Christ and Caesar are hand in glove” is an extract from Joyce’s “Gas from a Burner” (1912). He wrote this in response to the knowledge that his book of short stories The Dubliners (1914) had been destroyed by the publisher John Falconer. My love of Irish literature stood the test of time through to the present day. Edna O’ Brien’s works had a liberating impact on me; talking about the taboo subjects of sex and women’s lives in postwar Ireland (The Country Girls trilogy, published in one novel in 1982 but written in the 1960s). Her work was denounced from the pulpit; it is literature grounded in personal experience and the social issues of the time. Roddy Doyle’s books made me laugh. His works are set mostly in working class Dublin, and he uses local colloquial language and slang. My initial surprise that Irish writing was largely ignored in schools mutated into an understanding of why this was so. North and South the island was riven with sectarian disputes on who had the right to which piece of territory or even which account of historical events. History was and is disputable according to the deeply founded beliefs and objectives of the disputer, but with literature, there are far less easily discernible divisions. Yeats’ famous “Easter 1916” is certainly about the eponymous nationalist Easter Rising, but it is impossible to treat it purely as an expression of sympathy for the rebels or something else. The phrase “A terrible beauty is born” echoes through the poem like a tortured lamentation, but for what they did or what they failed to achieve? If a teacher were asked, “is this a republican poem or an anti-­republican poem?” they would not be able to offer an answer. All they could say, if they were clever enough, is that is about being genuinely Irish, divided in affiliation and sympathy. This is what literature can offer, a discourse that rejoices in confusion and diversity. An aesthetic judgment: in my view, the finest modern poem in Irish writing is Derek Mahon’s “A Disused Shed in Co Wexford.” Ostensibly, it is about nothing more than mushrooms growing in the eponymous shed, yet in brief almost innocuous references he shifts our attention to the world outside, to the recent history of Ireland. The allusions are faint, almost subdued, and all the more powerful for that. The poem is beautiful because of its setting. Mahon is a poetic magician, but being Irish turned him into a unique artist. Literature is about places and events, but Irishness is an extra challenge for the writer.



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The feminist movement in literature is not a new concept. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. I searched out early works such as Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper; both highly moving and revealing books about the state of women’s minds and their lives. Over time, I have been drawn to the works of many writers who highlight the plight of gender. Emma O’Donoghue is an Irish writer who lives and works in Canada. Her book The Room (1988) affected me profoundly. It is about a small boy who lives in a locked room with his mother, imprisoned by a man, Old Nick. The small details of everyday life in that confined space, the dialogue between mother and child, and the hope and realization of their eventual release reflect how so many women are trapped and held prisoners in their own worlds. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is set in the New England of the near future, which has become a patriarchal theocracy where women are treated almost as the possessions of men. Some accused her of being neurotically dystopian: a world such as this could never come into being. She asked them to “dial back the clock” to a little more than a century, and note the parallels and then look at how some religious and political activists favored a return to this nightmare as the norm. However, something should be said: do works that expose the patriarchy of modern society and promote various forms of feminist ideology exempt themselves from assessment as good or bad works of art? Not so with Atwood because her novel is more than a political tract. She makes use of the unique devices of fiction to make us continually wonder if what we see in our mind’s eye is too terrible to be credible or dangerously close to the world in which we live; that is an accomplished combination of polemic and art, comparable with Orwell. A related issue here is the standing of Sylvia Plath as a writer. One has to ask if her elevated status in the canon, particularly in universities, is influenced most by what we know of her life, essentially her relationship with Hughes, or by the intrinsic quality of her verse and prose. The problem with Plath is that she cannot be regarded only as a woman writer. Her marriage to Hughes, whose behavior is as much speculated upon as known, and her eventual suicide cannot be separated from our perception of her writings. This should not diminish the quality of the latter, but try as we might to read them as literary art biography always intrudes with bared teeth. Atwood can take a step back and speak as a woman about society as well as embedding her insights into her work. Her dealings with gender are comparable with Mahon’s portrait of Irishness. In all instances, we find ourselves trying to balance what we think of the literary work against our more instinctive notions of its topic. For Plath, unfortunately, it is almost impossible to separate the two. I am drawn to the genre of magical realism. Books grounded in reality but have a magical or fantastical element, books such Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus, (1984), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude(1966), and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita to name but a few. The latter was originally censored and finally published in English in 1967. The book is set in both contemporary Russia and Jerusalem at the time of Pontius Pilate; it is based in political reality as well as a fantasy. There are a number of interpretations as to what the author might have meant. Which beggars the question of even if an author states the meaning of their work or what it represents, are they to be believed? I was to find that the question had been troubling academics for some time. When my four children were fully grown, I entered university as a full-­time student to read English.

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I felt overwhelmed and privileged. I read Old English, Middle English, through to modern times; genres I had previously not known existed were explored. l willingly embraced a vast quantity of texts that must be read, read from every angle imaginable. I studied author’s lives, grappled with theories, tried to remember quotes, and deconstructed until there was nothing left. At one point, I was introduced to the double act of Wimsatt (W K) and Beardsley (M), who had written an essay called “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946). They were concerned that students did not fall prey to the juvenile delusion that a poet or novelist speaks to them through their work. This would distract them from paying attention to the architecture of the literary text. Therefore, I thought, was I deluding myself in my belief that the authors I respected most, such as Carter, Marquez, Rushdie, Bulgakov, etc., were actually present, sending a message to me through the smoke and mirrors of magical realism? I had always managed to balance my admiration for books and poems as works of art in their own right against a sense of them conveying an image of their creator, as an activist, thinker, and artist. According to Wimsatt and Beardsley, it was not as simple as that. Things worsened when my lecturer confronted me with the venerable Roland Barthes whose most celebrated work was “The Death of the Author” (1967). Many authors are of course “dead” in the literal sense of the word, but Barthes contended that they never existed at all. His thesis was that people, particularly literary writers, only existed as products of their words. Common sense, or so I believed, told us that living, breathing, and thinking humans produced books and poems as an expression of their unique sensations or ideas. No, said Barthes; it was the other way around. We, all of us, depend on “texts” or “discourse” for our presumed existence. This was fascinating and unsettling, and what was most troubling was my discovery that Barthes’ premise underpinned virtually all of the sub-­categories of the then fashionable “Literary Theory.” It seemed that all that I had admired most about literature was being dismantled systematically by the universities in which it was taught. If the “author” was an illusion, to be replaced by the complex impersonal nature of Structuralism and Poststructuralism, then poems, plays, and novels were no longer “art,” something that it was possible to both revere and enjoy. Before university, every time I had picked up a book or listened to actors on a stage, I felt the presence of the person who had built something superb and mystifying from words and syntax available to each of us: literary artists created literary art. However, through my years at university I found myself pitching my instincts against the authority of the institution, especially in the form of Literary Theory. Did I triumph? In a way, but it was largely a silent victory. On one occasion, I considered writing an essay on Barthes where I pointed out that if we took his ideas seriously, which everyone did, then who exactly had come up with the radical thesis of “The Death of the Author”? If all literary authors were illusions, then so was the revered Roland Barthes. I did not write it because I did not wish to be given a fail. Instead, I conducted guerrilla tactics, in an attempt to preserve my love of and allegiance to great authors and their works while avoiding the dead hand of Theory. “Godot,” [Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot (originally written in French, 1948/9)] did not come, but it was worth the wait. What is a degree in English set to achieve? A few decades ago such an academic qualification would secure a decent job irrespective of the subject. These days I am told, often by my own children and grandchildren, the arts and humanities are struggling to survive. In the United Kingdom, degrees cost the equivalent of a mortgage, and



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undergraduates are looking for a return on their investment, and for many, English seems not to be worth the cost. It is not, by its nature, vocational. Thinking back to my own struggles as an undergraduate, it occurs to me that English literature degree courses could make themselves more attractive and viable by taking on, in modules as they are now called, the anomaly that confronted me and others and which persists. I was puzzled that nowhere in degree courses in my day—­and indeed now, if my tours of degree websites online are anything to go by—­was the notion of aesthetics or evaluation formally addressed. Concepts such as “art” or “value,” let alone “craftsmanship,” were only ever implied, even by traditionalist academics who were anti-­theory. They were never taught or talked about. If one spent a good deal of the three years at university debating and arguing about which literary texts are valuable, which are superior to others, and on what basis we reach our conclusions, then surely someone with a degree in English would be rightly respected for their considerable intellectual powers, along with their aesthetic sensibility. All employers would take that seriously.

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Evaluating Unfinished Novels: Octavia E. Butler and the Improbability of Justice Rafe McGregor

There is a fascination with unfinished novels that cannot be fully accounted for by the newsworthiness of being written by famous authors or being discovered posthumously. Where there is sufficient quantity or quality, unfinished novels are usually valued like any other literary work and Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (1982) and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King (2011) are exemplars of modernist and postmodern literature, respectively. If there is a lack of either quantity or quality, unfinished novels are usually valued for either the light they shed on the author’s other novels or the light they shed on the author’s creative process. Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Trickster (1989–2005), which was started scores of times and abandoned after a few dozen pages or less in each case, sheds retrospective light on both of its prequels—­Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998)—­as well as on Butler’s creative writing practice. In this chapter, I argue that the value of Parable of the Trickster qua unfinished novel is the way in which the text reveals the universal in the particular, the public problem of reconstructing a just and sustainable reality in Butler’s personal problem of representing the lived experience of a realist utopia.

Unfinished Works Saverio Tomaiuolo (2012) notes both the prevalence of unfinished works in the canon of English literature and the disproportionate amount of interest they arouse within and without academia. His examples include Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (1400), Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queen (1596), Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander (1598), Jane Austen’s Sandition (1817), and George Gordon Byron’s Don Juan (1824). A similar list

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of German and Russian works would include Friedrich Schiller’s Demetrius (1805), Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1836), and Leo Tolstoy’s The Living Corpse (1900), suggesting that unfinished works are common across all three categories of literary art: poems, novels, and plays. Very often, unfinished works were works in progress at the time of the author’s death, but even these apparently straightforward circumstances raise the question of the meaning of “unfinished.” A completed first draft may be an almost finished literary work, a far from finished literary work, or simply a text that the author will never revise or publish. Indeed, there seems to be a relationship between the concept of “finished” and authorial intention. If an author does not submit a work to a publisher or, as is often the case, explicitly requests that particular works are destroyed, the work is at least unfinished to the extent that the author did not consider it ready to be consumed by the reading public. None of Franz Kafka’s three novels—­The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926), and Amerika (1927)—­were intended for publication, but all three are nonetheless exemplary works of modernist literature, albeit ones recognized as unfinished (Murray  2004). In contrast, the posthumous publication of Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished The Original of Laura (2009) by his son, Dimitri, was widely criticized and the novel received overwhelmingly negative reviews (Boyd  2010). The relationship between unfinished works and authorial intention is not restricted to works published posthumously, as a recent example illustrates. Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman (2015) appears to have been a first draft of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) that was never intended to be published, but it was released by Lee’s publishers under controversial circumstances a few months before her death (Nocera 2015). In response to these and other complications, James Wallen argues (2015: 125) that “unfinished work” does not refer to a particular type of text, but rather to a set of interpretive practices critics bring to works that were still in progress at the time of the author’s death or were abandoned or destroyed while still in progress. He also claims that the term is usually only applied to the work of a genius because most of the millions of historical and contemporary unfinished poems, novels, and plays are of little or no interest to anyone. We apply the label to works by authors in whom we already have an interest and the attraction of the works so labeled is usually—­but not always—­that the author died while writing them. Wallen (2015: 126) draws attention to the “unique biographical significance” of these works, and Tomaiuolo concurs that there is a sense in which many unfinished works facilitate interpretive practices in which they either anticipate the deaths of their authors or recapitulate their lives. Wallen also recognizes the overlap between the unfinished work and the fragment, a literary-­philosophical genre that is both praised for its autonomy and censured for its incoherence. Ultimately, Wallen (2015: 125) is not convinced of the usefulness of the term, regarding it as “an oxymoron that can only be defined by a tautology.” Tomaiuolo is more optimistic about the value of the term, contending that unfinished works are a means to the end of transforming interpretive practice to approach all novels as events rather than objects, an aim with which I am broadly sympathetic (McGregor 2021). Both Tomaiuolo and Wallen agree that unfinished works are valuable as part of the creation of a comprehensive view of the author’s biography, along with more standard sources of information such as autobiographies, memoirs, and letters. Tomaiuolo (2012) is primarily concerned with unfinished Victorian novels, in the course of which he draws attention to the significance of genre to the evaluation of unfinished

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works. The Victorian novels with which Tomaiuolo (2012: 13) is concerned are realist and his particular interest in unfinished novels is due to the importance of closure to “the construction of fictive models of reality” in realist novels. Terry Eagleton (2012: 145) describes the literary change from realism to modernism in terms of the realist attempt to hide its own artifice as a representation against the modernist attempt to draw attention to precisely its artificiality as a representation. In consequence, the modernist work is resistant to reading for several reasons, one of which is “because it seeks to distil something of the fragmentation and ambiguity of modern existence, qualities which invade its form and language and risk rendering it opaque” (Eagleton 2012: 185). As such, it is unsurprising that many of the canonical works of modernist literature are unfinished, including Kafka’s three novels, Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, and Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities (1943). For Wallen (2015: 136), The Book of Disquiet is particularly valuable qua modernist novel because it is acknowledged to be necessarily unfinishable rather than contingently unfinished, both an “intentional fragment” and “intentionally fragmentary.” The affinity between unfinished works and modernism is a function of the ambition of literary modernism as a project and the increasing postmodern (and poststructuralist) collapse of metanarratives. Fredric Jameson (1991: 45) argues that the literary change from modernism to postmodernism involved an increase in formal experimentation to the extent where works are devoid of substantive content, which makes them ideal for commodification and the commodification of almost every aspect of late capitalist life accounts for postmodernism as its “cultural dominant.” In other words, postmodernism and postindustrial capitalism are part of the same development in late modernity. The increase in formal experimentation undermines the distinction between finished and unfinished works (and, indeed, between work and text). The link to postindustrial capitalism is explicit in many works in the postmodern canon, including David Foster Wallace’s unfinished The Pale King. Modernist and postmodern literature aside, however, there remain numerous unfinished works that have been published to critical acclaim, most recently: Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004), Truman Capote’s Summer Crossing (2006), Robert Jordan’s The Gathering Storm (2009), and Michael Crichton’s Micro (2011). As the inclusion of Jordan and Crichton’s works suggests, unfinished novels are a feature of both “literary” and “genre” fiction (a distinction I do not find useful but mention in virtue of its ubiquity). My subject in this chapter is a work of science fiction that is not only unfinished, but unpublished: Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Trickster. The novel would have been the third installment of her Earthseed series, which was planned as Parable of the Sower (1993), Parable of the Talents (1998), Parable of the Teacher, Parable of Chaos, and Parable of Clay. Butler worked on Trickster from 1989 to 2005, right up until her death at the age of 58, in February 2006 (Canavan 2019). During this time, she made scores of false starts, the longest of which is just under fifty pages and most considerably shorter. These drafts, along with a great deal of other material, have been available in The Huntingdon’s Octavia E. Butler Papers archive in San Marino, California since 2013 (hereafter “OEB”). The two published Parables tell the story of protagonist Lauren Oya Olamina’s founding of the religion of Earthseed in 2025, in the face of global, social, and environmental disintegration (Sower), and the rise of that religion to the point where it sponsors the launch of the first starship, intended to establish an extrasolar colony on a life-­bearing planet, in 2090 (Talents). Butler’s plan was



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that all four of the unpublished Parables would be set on this planet, which is named Rainbow and abbreviated to Bow (Butler 1999e). I present a summary of Trickster in the next section before focusing on the question of its evaluation.

Parable of the Trickster All three of the first Parables take their titles from biblical parables in the Books of Luke (Sower and Trickster) and Matthew (Talents). The Parable of the Trickster is not one of the better-­known biblical allegories, in consequence of its multiple titles, which are in turn a consequence of an essential moral ambiguity (King 2018). The allegory is usually referred to as either the parable of the dishonest or shrewd steward or manager. The difference between “dishonest” and “shrewd” is based on a moral evaluation of the steward’s actions, the answer to which is opaque. The symbolism of the allegory is nonetheless clear, that no servant can serve two masters as he or she will grow to love one and hate the other. In Trickster, the human colonists cannot both cling on to the form of life they had on Earth and thrive on Bow. There is also a more explicit sense of deception in which Bow resists and even repels human beings by playing tricks on their sensory perception. There are several aspects of the many premises, outlines, and fragments of Trickster sketched by Butler that remain fairly consistent, most of which concern the protagonist, the setting, and three overlapping plotlines to which she kept returning. She seemed certain that the novel would be written in the first person from the perspective of the protagonist and narrator, who would be named either Imara Hope Lucas (Butler 2001a), Imara Wright Drew (Butler 1999d), or Imara Dove Holly (Butler 2001b). Imara is an African American woman who was adopted by Olamina during her teens (between 13 and 17) and is aged between 35 and 45  when the narrative opens (Butler  1999c). Imara is an Earthseed therapist in some versions and a sharer in others. Sharers suffer from “hyperempathy,” an organic delusional disorder in which they literally and involuntarily feel the pain they perceive in others and with which Olamina was afflicted (Butler 1993: 11). Some time between 2090 and 2095, Imara leaves Earth in an Earthseed Instar with between 4700 and 5339 colonists to realize the Earthseed “Destiny,” which is to establish extrasolar communities (Butler 1993: 222, 1999c, 2001c). After a flight of between 107 and 137 years, during which Imara is placed in DiaPause (Butler 1999f), a method of suspended animation, she arrives on Bow, which is 11.8 light years away from Earth (Butler 1999e, 1999f). Bow can support human life, with plenty of oxygen and water. The planet has no moon, is cooler than Earth, and has days that are just under twenty hours long. The ships have arrived near the equator, where it is warm, wet, and windy and the plan is to build the colony in a river valley (Butler 2000a, 2001f). In most versions, Bow has no fauna beyond earthworms and microorganisms and no flora beyond a slimy, moss-­like substance. The settlers immediately miss the beauty of Earth, a feeling that is exacerbated by the fact that the colors on Bow are all muted and the atmosphere smelly, varying in places from being merely unpleasant to actually smelling like vomit (Butler 2001d). The colony is divided into 50 to 60 housing groups of 30 to 100 people each, built in a protective semicircle around their crops and water supply (Butler 1999e, 2000a). Each housing group has a communal gathering hall at its center,

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but the individual houses are inhabited by nuclear families. The gathering hall is both a community center and home to the minimal governmental functions, which include leadership by an Earthseed shaper and recordkeeping by an archivist. The colony is multinational and multi-­ethnic, with each of the individual colonists being selected for their skill set. By the fifth year, the colony is fully established, with the settlers living off the land. In the first plotline, which includes the most substantial fragment (47 pages), Imara Lucas Hope is the expedition’s archivist and Olamina’s adopted daughter. Imara has been appointed the official guardian of Olamina’s ashes, which are to be scattered on Bow in an Earthseed funeral on Day 2000 of the arrival of humanity, revisiting the opening of Talents, in which the fledgling Earthseed community of Acorn celebrates its fifth anniversary (Butler 2001g). The narrative begins in medias res with the community leader, a shaper named Eric Parnell, appearing to lose his mind in his opening speech as he starts shouting nonsense. Imara, waiting to play her part in the ceremony, has a hallucination and subsequently realizes that she, Eric, and the community’s dentist are all hallucinating. They cannot find any physical explanations and worry that prolonged exposure to the conditions of Bow is destroying their mental health. In the following chapter, which begins the next day, Imara hallucinates a conversation with Olamina as soon as she wakes up. Seven more people are admitted to the clinic. The concerns about prolonged exposure to the planet are exacerbated when Imara works out that everyone who has been hallucinating is either part of the last transit crew or the first ground crew, the only people who were awake in the first 100 days of arrival. In the second plotline, which has more dedicated fragments but of shorter lengths than the first, Imara Wright Drew is the expedition’s psychiatrist. The narrative opens with her awakening from her “coffin-­sized DiaPause tank” and gradually recovering her senses and motor control. Imara is part of the first ground crew and the reports from those who have explored Bow are discouraging: while it can clearly sustain human life, everyone has found being on it either disconcerting, unpleasant, or both (Butler 1999f ). Imara finds out that after she was put in her DiaPause tank, her husband, Powell Davidson, changed his mind about joining the Earthseed expedition. She is given a letter from him apologizing for his decision and realizes that he is now long dead (Butler 2001f). In the following chapter, Imara begins to regain her strength, and other colonists are introduced. Three days later, a colonist who claimed to have seen an indigenous species goes missing. Her corpse is found at the bottom of a canyon, and Imara is asked to attend the scene (Butler 1999g). As soon as she goes outside, she has a hallucination and there is an overlap with the first plotline. Imara starts thinking about adapting to rather than curing the hallucinations, at least in the short term, and this is both the resolution to the plot and the core theme of the narrative (Butler 2004). In the third plotline, Imara Dove Holly is the expedition’s law enforcement agent, the Sheriff of Bow, selected personally by Olamina before the starship departed. Imara is married to a farmer, Aurio Cruz. When she does not have law enforcement duties to fulfil, she assists both her husband and the colony’s archivist (Butler 2001b). Five years after the colonist’s arrival, someone starts a fire outside the largest greenhouse of the Rose Housing Group, causing considerable damage. The opening five years after the establishment of the colony also recalls the opening of Talents and the danger posed by fire, the link between



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mass arson and social disintegration, in Sower. When Imara begins her investigation, she has her first hallucination and subsequently learns that many people are hallucinating frequently (Butler  2001e). There is a second fire, in consequence of which one of the colonists is killed. The ubiquity of the hallucinations makes the case almost impossible to solve, but Imara eventually finds a way to make use of the hallucinations to detect the arsonist while the medical professions continue to seek a cure (Butler 2000a). Strangely, given the amount of relative detail provided, there is no suggestion of a central theme in the archivist plotline. The strongest suggestion is in the psychiatrist plotline, in which the solution to the problem of the hallucinations is not to “cure” or overcome them, but to accept them as one of the features of life on Bow in order to minimize their impact on everyday life. The sheriff plotline appears to go even further, before pulling back. The suggestion is that the hallucinations are not just a phenomenon with which human beings can live but a phenomenon that can actually be exploited for gain. This is to some extent undermined by the fact that the medical professionals are intent on finding a cure, but it may well have been Butler’s intention that the exploitation would precede and even preclude the cure. There is actually an allusion to this idea in the archivist plotline, in which the narrator reflects that “two of the most important tenets of Earthseed were foresight and adaptability” before Eric Parnell addresses the community about their adaptation to life on Bow (Butler 2000c). Earthseed is based on the belief that the concept of god is identical with the concept of change and that humanity should embrace change and manipulate it to their own benefit. The theme of adaptation in Trickster is developed in Butler’s notes by means of two concepts or metaphors, the xenograft and the trickster. A xenograft is an interspecies transplant, and she described the story as one in which people xenograft humanity onto a new world whose immune system tries to expel them (Butler 1998b, 2002). The resistance of Bow to humanity is the sense in which the planet is the trickster and the hallucinations the most dangerous means by which it tries to expel them. Her planned conclusion to the novel was that the colonists would be forced to make a choice, “to try to hold on to what they were as normal human beings on Earth or to allow the change they have both fought and adapted to for years to continue,” providing a clear link to the biblical parable (Butler 2000b).

Unique Biographical Significance In my introduction to unfinished works, I noted that there are standardly two sets of criteria against which they are evaluated. The first are the many and varied sets against which any works of literature are evaluated, such as literary thickness (a particular relationship between literary form and literary content) in my own literary theory (McGregor 2016). In other words, unfinished works are not evaluated qua unfinished work but qua literary work and many unfinished novels are eminently successful when evaluated in this way, such as Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet, Wallace’s The Pale King, and Bolaño’s 2666. Where there is insufficient quantity (a fragment rather than a narrative) or quality (a first draft) to evaluate unfinished works qua literary works, they are evaluated for their unique biographical significance, which includes the extent to which they shed light on the author’s creative process and on the author’s other novels (Tomaiuolo 2012; Wallen 2015).

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Trickster clearly lacks too much in both quantity and quality for an evaluation qua literary work to be meaningful. It is equally clear that the archival material constituting Trickster (OEB2031-­2244) has value in illuminating Butler’s creative process, the two published Parables, and her other novels. Gerry Canavan (2014) was the first academic to be granted access to the archive, which he describes as records of “a cycle of narrative failure” that provide a thorough—­and at times uneasy—­insight into Butler’s creative practice. I return to his conception of narrative failure in the final section of this chapter. Canavan’s (2017, 2019) main argument for the value of Trickster, which has motivated his call for Butler’s estate to disregard her wishes and publish some of the archival material, is that it retrospectively infuses the first two Parables with new meaning. Canavan (2019) begins with Butler’s writer’s block on Trickster, which was exacerbated by the declining health and increased medication of her final years. In the archive, she is explicit about having writer’s block since completing Fledgling, her last novel (a standalone), which was published in September 2005 (Butler  2005). Writer’s block was not a new experience for Butler (1999b), however, and not even new to her experience of writing the Parables as she was also explicit about her writer’s block on Talents, during which she rewrote the first 150 pages many times. Canavan (2019: 60) describes Trickster as “utterly fascinating and provocative,” a claim with which anyone who takes science fiction seriously would be hard-­pressed to disagree. His argument for the value of Trickster is worth quoting in full (Canavan 2019: 60): We need Trickster: we need Trickster to get us out of the hopeless trap that Talents leaves us in, where the soaring hopes and ambitions of Sower wither, disciplined and betrayed by the unending unfolding of the nightmare of history; we need Trickster to tell us whether the utopian break in history promised by the Earthseed project has been squandered or compromised by whatever Powers-­That-­Be have circumvented Olamina and given the ship its macho, retro-­conquistador branding.

The narrative of Talents involves two dramatic reversals of fortune. It opens in 2032, in the small but nonetheless thriving Earthseed community of Acorn, which was established at the end of Sower (five years before) and has expanded from 13 to 59 people. The period of multiple and coinciding processes of cultural and natural disintegration known as “the Apocalypse,” from 2015 to 2030, is officially over and it seems as if the conflict that will drive the plot is going to be the expansion of Earthseed rather than its survival (Butler 1998a: 8). These expectations are frustrated, however, with the rise of a Christian fundamentalist group called Jarrett’s Crusaders that destroys Acorn and enslaves Olamina, placing her in a far worse position than at even the most harrowing moments of Sower. Olamina escapes and Earthseed flourishes, becoming one of the most popular religions in the Americas. Talents concludes in 2090, when an 81-­year-­old Olamina witnesses the launch of the first starship, the realization of Earthseed’s extrasolar ambitions. The “twist in the tale” is that the starship is named “Christopher Columbus,” suggesting humanity is trapped in a self-­ destructive cycle regardless of which planet it calls home (Butler  1998a: 388). Butler (1999b) confirms Canavan’s concerns by identifying the reason for her writer’s block on Talents as being reluctance to put Olamina through more suffering after Sower. Butler’s overcoming of this reluctance was so decisive as to turn Talents into a more torturous and



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less hopeful narrative than Sower, which in turn established an ultimately pessimistic trajectory for the series. Canavan notes that one of the consistent themes of the many versions of Trickster was that disaster would strike the colony on Bow, reprising the destruction of the walled community in Sower and the destruction of Acorn in Talents. The colonists would, however, triumph and then face further trials and tribulations in Teacher, Chaos, and Clay until eventually forging a life very different from that on Earth (Butler  2005). The title of Canavan’s article is “Eden, Just Not Ours Yet,” and he uses Eden to frame Bow as a utopia particular and peculiar to Butler’s always pragmatic vision of humanity. He (Canavan 2019: 74) captures the essence of Butler’s Eden as: “Eden—­but not the kind that flatters who you already are and what you already value, but which forces you to totally transform to try and survive it, if you can.” Trickster’s value is thus changing the trajectory of the Parables from immanence to transcendence, from a vicious cycle of self-­destruction to the establishment of a new form of human life, a struggle that is perilous but successful, even if always temporarily and contingently so. Canavan compares Trickster and the rest of Butler’s archive to the drafts of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work held in the library of his own university, Marquette, claiming that both sets of archives are necessary for a comprehensive understanding of the published work of both authors. He (Canavan 2019: 74) concludes: Without them [the Trickster fragments], the Parables are not only incomplete, they are sad. Beautiful, yes, but sad, and sad in a way that is hard to recover from, as anyone who has seen a happy undergraduate leap with eager enthusiasm from Sower to Talents knows—­they come back, eyes wide, feeling betrayed. If any utopian impulse remains vital in the Parables after Talents—­and I hope one does—­it is only to be found in Trickster.

As such, while Trickster lacks the quantity and quality for evaluation qua literary work, it is valuable for the ways in which it illuminates Butler’s creative process and her oeuvre. Canavan’s argument for the value of Trickster is more specific, that it is valuable not only in illuminating the two published Parables, but also in infusing them with a retrospective meaning. Without Trickster, Butler’s vision of human possibilities is immanent, the Parables almost pointless; with Trickster, her vision is transcendent, sketching a precarious but achievable utopia. I have very little to add to Canavan’s evaluation because it is both well-­argued and compelling. My claim is, however, that there is another way to evaluate Trickster, which begins with Canavan’s comment on its cycle of narrative failure.

Poetics of Process Canavan’s position, as I read it in his published work on Trickster, is as follows. Trickster is not valuable qua literature but for its unique biographical significance. This value is realized in several ways, the most important of which is the retrospective meaning with which it infuses Sower and Talents. Other ways in which Trickster is valuable include insights about Butler’s other published work and about her creative process, particularly her approach to writer’s block, which she was sometimes able to overcome and sometimes unable to overcome. The cycle of narrative failure that constitutes Trickster as it exists was

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not caused by its subject matter—­a utopian form of life—­but by Butler’s personal circumstances. Butler had a well-­defined utopian vision, of a potentially deadly and always contingent Eden, and time and health permitting would likely have overcome her writer’s block on Trickster just as she overcame her shorter but perhaps more intense writer’s block on Talents. Unless further material is unearthed in the archive, no one will ever know the reasons for Butler’s block on Trickster—­indeed, she may not have known herself. My position is that whether or not there is a difference between the two periods of writer’s block on the respective Parables, the sixteen-­year cycle of narrative failure is suggestive of the difficulty of the subject matter, particularly when compared with the imaginative genius demonstrated by Butler in her representation of civilizational collapse and recovery in Sower and Talents.1 My claim is not merely that Trickster provides insight about Butler’s creative practice, which Canavan has already made, but that the unfinished novel is valuable in revealing the improbability of actually establishing a utopian—­i.e., a just and sustainable—­form of human life. In other words, Trickster reveals the universal in the particular, the public problem of reconstructing a just and sustainable reality in Butler’s personal problem of representing the lived experience of a realist utopia.2 This contention only holds, however, if Trickster is evaluated as a process rather than an object, an evaluation that is particularly appropriate to Trickster given its constitutive archival material. Both Caterina Cotrupi (2000: 19) and Dirk Van Hulle (2004: 1) employ the concept of a “poetics of process.” Cotrupi (2000: 91), who is exclusively concerned with the criticism of Northrop Frye, identifies a critical and literary practice in which the work of literature is approached as “a constructive process rather than as an aesthetic product.” Frye’s criticism was exemplary in this respect, but authors could achieve a similar effect in metafictions, such as Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1767). Tristram Shandy is not about the life of Tristram Shandy but about the process of writing Tristram Shandy. Van Hulle, who is concerned with the work of three modernist authors, makes less use of the concept, but notes the significance of the preservation of manuscripts to the problematization of the published work as a finished product. I shall take a poetics of process to be a literary evaluation that focuses on the creative process rather than the aesthetic product, which is consistent with Tomaiuolo’s (2012) evaluation of literary works as events rather than objects and John Gibson’s (2018) evaluation of literary works as actions. Gibson’s evaluation is useful in establishing a link between the literary work as an action and the extra-­representational capacity of that literary work. While there is little point in evaluating Trickster qua aesthetic product, Trickster is exemplary qua constructive process. As poetics of process, the cycles of narrative failure that constitute Trickster enact rather than represent the cycles of political failure to reconstruct a just and sustainable reality. The difficulty of writing about utopia evinced by Trickster has extra-­representational value in demonstrating the difficulty of creating utopia. In order for Trickster to be valuable qua unfinished novel as poetics of process in the particular way I have described, the subject matter—­utopia—­must be problematic to both creative practice and political reality. Canavan has, however, already disclosed the clarity of Butler’s conception of utopia, and it is indeed this clarity that constitutes the unique biographical significance of Trickster, which is the way it infuses the Parables with retrospective meaning. If anything, Canavan understates the clarity of Butler’s conception and this appears problematic for the conception of Trickster’s value as poetics of process. Butler had a rich and manifold utopian



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vision, and her failure to achieve it seems to undermine any claims about Tricker’s value as poetics of process. The work does not reveal Butler’s process; it reveals the failure of that process. This concern is exacerbated by the fact that she had a clear vision of both what utopia would look like and what conditions would need to be met to achieve it. In her notes, Butler (1999a) set out her thoughts on what an actual utopia would look like, whether it was ever likely to be achieved on Earth, and what narrative devices could be employed to achieve a fictional utopia in Trickster. Her utopian vision for Earth was based on four pillars: renewable energy, desalination of seawater, efficient waste disposal, and cooperation among nations. She was not optimistic about achieving these aims and believed that the two greatest threats to an Eden on Earth were climate change and genetic engineering. Butler’s ability to extrapolate from current events (which she followed consistently and closely) to future problems is well known and she predicted both the rise of an ultra-­conservative demagogue on the platform of “make America great again” (Butler 1998a: 18) and the failure of the War on Terror, which she described as “insane, pointless, unwinable [sic]” (Butler 2005). Sower was published a mere five years after the United Nations established the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in spite of which Butler recognized the irreversibility of human-­induced environmental collapse. She believed that the genetic engineering of human beings would be legalized for the purpose of correcting health defects but very quickly be used to customize children. It is too early to assess the accuracy of this prediction, but pressure to ease the global legal restrictions on heritable human genome editing is currently mounting (Beers 2020). Butler’s narrative devices for achieving utopia were just as relevant to Earth as they were to Bow: the need to deal with those who take pleasure in the suffering of others and the need to sever the harmful relationship between conquest and excitement. She did not have convincing answers to either of these problems but believed in the value of peer learning in early education and explored sadism in the Parables by means of hyperempathy. Butler’s struggle with Trickster was thus not to imagine utopia, but to represent the lived experience of a utopian existence or the lived experience of creating utopia. She envisaged her Eden and she saw what would need to be done to achieve it, but could not write the story of that achievement or of what life would be like after it had been achieved. Similarly, human beings can imagine more just and sustainable forms of life and identify the steps that would need to be taken to reach them, but they remain as improbable now, after the sixth IPCC assessment report, as they were after the first, published three years before Sower. It is precisely the combination of Butler’s clarity of utopian vision and clarity of the conditions necessary to achieve that vision on the one hand with the cycle of narrative failure that constitutes Trickster on the other hand that provides an extra-­representational demonstration of the difficulty of representing the struggle for and aftermath of utopia by means of poetics of process. This is, in itself, a literary value that should not be ignored, but the literary value of Trickster as poetics of process extends beyond the poetic to the political, to the improbability of actually establishing a utopian form of life.3 The demonstration is not just of the difficulty of representing the struggle for and aftermath of utopia but of the improbability of the success of that struggle. As such, the value of Trickster qua unfinished novel as poetics of process is at least twofold: the demonstration of the difficulty of representing the struggle for and aftermath of utopia; and the revelation of the universal in the particular, of the public problem of reconstructing a just and sustainable

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reality in Butler’s personal problem of representing the lived experience of a just and sustainable reality. From the perspective of poetics of process alone, the literary value of Trickster is therefore plenitudinous, a rare example of a literary ladder from the poetic to the political. My focus in this chapter has been on Butler’s Trickster as an unfinished novel. Trickster is untypical of unfinished works in at least two ways. First, it is also unpublished and may well never be published. Second, Trickster consists of scores of false starts, none of which exceed 47 pages, and their accompanying notes. In consequence of these features, there would be little point in evaluating Trickster qua literary work in the manner of Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet and Wallace’s The Pale King. Trickster clearly has value in virtue of its unique biographical significance, however, and Canavan makes an excellent case for this significance, focusing on Trickster’s epiphanic reconstruction of the meaning of the Parables as a series (of either three or six novels) rather than its revelation of Butler’s creative process. My argument has been that there is another way in which Trickster is valuable qua literary work, distinct from both aspects of its unique biographical significance, which is its value as a poetics of process that reveals not only the artistic problem of representing the lived experience of utopia, but also the improbability of achieving that utopia in reality. In this sense, my evaluation is more pessimistic than Canavan’s, returning to the sad conclusion of Talents, albeit by a route with as yet unrealized sociological and political value. This third way of evaluating unfinished works could be applied to other examples that are amenable to the poetics of process. This would have to be conducted on a case-­by-­case basis, however, as no evaluative principles or rules emerge from my discussion of Tricker’s poetics of process. The poetics of process nonetheless opens a new horizon for the evaluation of unfinished works.4

Notes 1 I am not employing “genius” figuratively. Butler was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship—­ better known as a “Genius Grant”—­in 1995 (MacArthur Foundation  2022). Wallace received the same award two years later. 2 For a comprehensive discussion of the significance of the relationship between personal troubles and public issues to the social sciences, see Jon Frauley’s (2010) Criminology, Deviance,

and the Silver Screen: The Fictional Reality and the Criminological Imagination. 3 For a comprehensive discussion of the diversity of literary values, see the first chapter of The Value of Literature (McGregor 2016). 4 This work has been supported in part by the Croatian Science Foundation under the project UIP-­2020-­02-­1309.

References Beers, B. C. van 2020. Rewriting the Human Genome, Rewriting Human Rights Law? Human Rights, Human Dignity, And Human Germline Modification in the CRISPR Era. Journal of Law and the Biosciences 7 (1): 1–36.

Boyd, Brian 2010. Nabokov Lives On: Why His Unfinished Novel, “Laura,” deserved to be published; what’s left in the voluminous archive of his unpublished work. The American Scholar 79 (2): 45–58.



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Butler, Octavia E. 1993/2019. Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing. Butler, Octavia E. 1998a/2019. Parable of the Talents. London: Headline. Butler, Octavia E. 1998b. Journal. Oct. 24–26. With the author’s autograph notes. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB1056. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 1999a. Journal. Jan. 5–May10. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB1065. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 1999b. Journal. Jan. 9. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB1066. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 1999c. Journal. Aug. 5. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB1072. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 1999d. Parable of the Trickster: Novel: Notes. July 18–Aug. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2034. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 1999e. Parable of the Trickster: Novel: Yellow Binder: Notes. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2076. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 1999f. Parable of the Trickster: Novel: Yellow Binder: Early Version. July 25. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2080. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 1999g. Parable of the Trickster: Novel: Fragment. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2090. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 2000a. Parable of the Trickster: Novel: Notes. Jan. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2040. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 2000b. Parable of the Trickster: Novel: Notes. May. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2044. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 2000c. Parable of the Trickster: Novel: Partial Draft. Octavia E. Butler Papers.

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OEB2215. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 2001a. Parable of the Trickster: Novel: Notes. Sept. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2045. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 2001b. Parable of the Trickster: Novel: Notes. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2061. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 2001c. Parable of the Trickster: Novel: Fragment. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2098. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 2001d. Parable of the Trickster: Novel: Fragment. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2131. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 2001e. Parable of the Trickster: Novel: Fragment. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2137. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 2001f. Parable of the Trickster: novel: partial draft. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2211. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 2001g. Parable of the Trickster: Novel: Partial Draft. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2213. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 2002. Parable of the Trickster: Novel: Fragment. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB2100. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 2004. Journal. Sep. 14–22. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB1149. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Butler, Octavia E. 2005. Journal. Nov. 27–Dec. 7. Octavia E. Butler Papers. OEB1169. The Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. Canavan, Gerry 2014. “There’s Nothing New/ Under The Sun/But There Are New Suns: Recovering Octavia E. Butler’s Lost Parables.”

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Los Angeles Review of Books, 9 June. available at: . Canavan, Gerry 2017. “Disrespecting Octavia.” In: Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler, eds. A. Pierce and M. Mondal, 180–185. Yokine, WA: Twelfth Planet Press. Canavan, Gerry. 2019. “Eden, Just Not Ours Yet: On Parable of the Trickster and Utopia.” Women’s Studies 48 (1): 59–75. Cotrupi, Caterina N. 2000. Northrop Frye and the Poetics of Process. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Eagleton, Terry 2012. The Event of Literature. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Frauley, Jon 2010. Criminology, Deviance, and the Silver Screen: The Fictional Reality and the Criminological Imagination. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Gibson, John 2018. “On the Ethical Character of Literature.” In Kafka’s The Trial: Philosophical Perspectives, ed. E. Hammer, 85–110. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jameson, Fredric 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso. King, Fergus J. 2018. “A Funny Thing Happened on The Way to the Parable: The Steward,

Tricksters and (Non)sense in Luke 16:1-­ 8.” Biblical Theology Bulletin 48 (1): 18–25. MacArthur Foundation 2022. “Octavia Butler.” MacArthur Fellows Program. Available at: . McGregor, Rafe 2016. The Value of Literature. London: Rowman & Littlefield International. McGregor, Rafe 2021. Critical Criminology and Literary Criticism. Bristol: Bristol University Press. Murray, Nicholas 2004. Kafka. London: Little, Brown & Company. Nocera, Joe 2015. “The Harper Lee ‘Go Set a Watchman’ Fraud.” The New York Times 24 July. Available at: . Tomaiuolo, Saverio 2012. Victorian Unfinished Novels: The Imperfect Page. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan. Van Hulle, Dirk 2004. Textual Awareness: A Genetic Study of Late Manuscripts by Joyce, Proust, and Mann. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Wallen, James R. 2015. “What is an Unfinished Work?” New Literary History 46 (1): 125–142.

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“How to Bring So Goode a Matter into a Better Forme”: The Value of the Horse in Early Modern Writing1 Elisabetta Deriu

In 1560, Thomas Blundeville asked himself how “so goode a matter” such as the theory of horsemanship could be further studied, explored, and, above all, linguistically improved in its written form. A rhetorical question, and one of the topoi at the core of most early modern European treatises, whereby an author (and a translator, in Blundeville’s case)2 assesses himself and his work by comparison, as a part of an international koiné of equestrian writers. Writing about horsemanship as an author then requires an evaluation of various other aspects of the discipline (how does it fare as a noble profession? as a science?)3 and of the horse itself (is it valuable? How? When is it not?). The object of early modern treatises on horse riding is generally a steed of some quality serving a noble purpose and a noble person. Archival sources dating back to that same period are heterogeneous and follow other paths and patterns: their origin, nature, purposes, scope, contents, and the language in which they are written may greatly vary depending on the country and institution of which they are a product and an instrument. Information on horse-­related activities may virtually be found in any kinds of sources, especially in those related to a princely household. Some documents, though, are specifically devoted to horses: in stables’ and studs’ registers and journals compiled by dedicated administrative staff or various professional horsemen, for instance, the horses’ status is mostly defined in terms of sex, age, and destination: stallions, mares, geldings, foals, young horses of one or two years of age, and so on; saddle horses, sturdy all-­purpose horses for everyday chores, pontifical horses and mules, teams of princely carriage horses, or more humble cart horses, donkeys ... Therefore, diverse as these sources are, they account for a far more diverse range of equines (noble or otherwise), by recording their many uses in a world which is “saturated” by their presence.4

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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The Masters Every early equestrian author defines himself, his background, and accomplishments in relation to his predecessors: he acknowledges them while affirming himself among their ranks. In so doing, he may either accept their theories and/or choose to overwrite or even dismiss them, totally or in part, as obsolete, inadequate, or unclear. In 1584, John Astley clearly declared his affinity to an illustrious “lineage” of predecessors: “But yet before we enter into this part [Astley’s own theories], let us see (as we have purposed) what those excellent authors that write of this Art have said thereof.” The author of an Art of ryding, and a follower of the Italian master Grisone among others, Astley accurately quoted his sources indicating the references’ pages numbers.5 The adhesion to a previous tradition of horsemanship may not always be quite as straightforward. In 1618, an erudite master such as Michael Baret might even quote a classical authority in Latin to justify the purpose of his Hipponomie even among a larger readership than the community of equestrian authors and riders: Now seeing the truth of this art is darkened with ignorance, and drowned in the whirle poole of conceipt; I have thought it my duty, as much as in me lyeth, to illustrate some darke corners thereof: for (as Cicero saith) Non nobis solum natis sumus, sed partim patriæ, partim parentibus, partim amicis debemus, that we are not borned, onely for our selves, but partly for our country, partly for parents, and partly for our friends, but the least part to our selves.6

Later in 1620, Nicholas Morgan of Crolane put even a greater distance between himself and some of the most respected authorities: Hitherto I have spoken of the setled and resolved opinyons of the Ancient Authors and Horsemen of our old times, such as Zenophon, Vegetius, Russius, Grison and the like, each gathering the practise of his own particuliar experience, and leaving them a infalible rules, and presidents to posteritie, to be ever immitated or followed, yet how may I give credit, on ground my beliefe upon their maximes I stand exceeding doubtfull, nor can I be drawne thereto by any perswasion.7

Not only the content but also the writing itself, vehiculating the discourse on equestrian things, may sometimes be subject to an evaluation on many levels—­rhetorical structure, style, lexical arsenal deployed, and all the more so when the source text is, as in Blundeville’s case seen above, originally written in a foreign language: Federico Grisone’s Gli ordini di cavalcare, the first treatise on horsemanship ever printed, in 1550, which is to inspire and trigger the early modern debate on horsemanship in England as well. This is now [...] almooste two yeares sithence I determined myself, to have translated into our vulgare tounge, the foure booke of Gryson, intreatinge in the Italian tunge, of the arte of ryding, & breakinge great horses [steeds] [...] But after I had translated twoo bookes thereof, and sawe to what inconvenience I was bound; having to folow so doubtful phrases, and maners of speaking, and so confuse an order of writing, as in my iudgement he useth (being in dede a farre better doer, then a writer) by meanes whereof he is constrayned too make many repititions of one thinge. And to use more woordes then nede: I could not satisfie my self



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therewith. And therefore leavinge of ye enterprise, I soughte howe to bringe so good a matter as that is, into a better forme, and ordre if it might be.8

Foreign terminology is indeed a problem, since the renewal of the equestrian art during the early modern period was largely and deeply rooted in Italy,9 and as each Italian master adopted his own set of technical terms based on his origin, background, and formation. Foreign pupils of such masters (from Naples, Padua, Rome, ...) learned in situ the Italian terms; books were printed which circulated the masters’ findings and experience even abroad but always in Italian. Starting from the first published treatise, Grisone’s, the early modern period produced a long theory of books on horsemanship in Italian. The question of how to translate them—­a product of an Italian outlook on equestrian savoir-­faire whose discourse is tinged with regionalisms—­arose each time an author or editor from abroad wished to adapt such a discourse to another frame of mind and tongue. Otherwise, how could a non-­Italian-­speaking lectorate judge the quality of a master’s ideas, experience and technicalities? Claudio Corte, the author of Il cavallerizzo printed in 1573, though active in Italy, used to live and work abroad as well, even in England. However, an English version of his work was edited and published, abridged, only eleven years later by Thomas Bedingfield, who declared the following: “I have not Englished the author at large, not medled with his manifold digressions.” Bedingfield collected and translated only a certain number of parts: the ones that had not yet extensively been discussed by any other English author (“not heretofore expressed”); the chapters that he judged to be more profitable to his English readership, “here brieflie reduced into certeine English discourses”.10 Adapting texts about horsemanship may prove challenging not only in the case of anglophone writers or editors, but a French master trained in Italy like Salomon de La Broue may also find it difficult to process and render Italian prose for his French readers. At the end of the sixteenth century, La Brouë, though making a considerable effort in translating, could not admit that his mother tongue was not rich or accurate enough to give immediate and valid equivalents to those terms and expressions: Acknowledging the lack of proper words to [explain] this art in our French language, I resorted to Italian, so much as Riders use it more and more commonly, and as these words have a certain, more powerful air, are more meaningful, and one word can convey a meaning that would take several words to be expressed in French.

Here La Brouë, a pupil of the celebrated Neapolitan master Pignatelli, evaluated the impact of translation and the loss of meaning and verbal force once the art of horsemanship as taught in Italy was imported abroad: what happens when foreign riders wishing to learn this new art do not fully understand the original terms going with it? As an author writing in French and proficient in Italian, La Brouë decided to integrate the Italian terms in his technical discourse without keeping his readers in the dark; however, in the first book of his Cavalerice français (1602), he actually proceeded to establish a bilingual glossary, Italian into French, containing the periphrases of those very words, locutions, and expressions that were so difficult to translate.11 A few years later, the English master Gervase Markham was proud to address a public of

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“English horsemen”; nevertheless, in 1607, he called one of his works similar to La Brouë’s own treatise: Cavelarice, a term evoking its Italian equivalent. Earlier Thomas Bedingfield had carefully avoided using this same term, in translating the title of Claudio Corte’s treatise, Il cavallerizzo, using instead the Art of Riding.12 The technical content’s quality and scope of early modern works on horsemanship are strictly linked to and enhanced by the intertwined notions of nobility and usefulness; these aspects identify a noteworthy master. In Giovan Battista Pignatelli’s portrait of a hippiatrist, his nobility originates from the careful application of the skills requested by the art itself, such as the capacity to “read” animal sufferings to cure them: The more reasonably a master does his work, the nobler he is; when he performs well, he makes himself proud while being of service to his master. Thus, this art may be considered noble because it cures animals unable to speak and describe their ailments.13

Likewise, the authors specializing in horse riding defend the nobleness of the discipline they practice, teach, and divulge: both an art (acquired by experience and diligent study) and a science (a complex system of knowledge covering all of the various aspects of horsemanship), whose practice suits the gentleman even in its more trivial sides. In 1556, the count Cesare Fiaschi, for instance, exhorted his noble readership to take up the study of veterinary applied to horses: an activity generally performed by lowly and unqualified persons but considered as a most necessary, gentlemanlike science in its own right by Fiaschi.14 In 1602, the Neapolitan Pirro Antonio Ferraro did the same when inviting his readers to devote themselves to the creation of bits and bridles rather than calling an ignorant and mercenary blacksmith.15 The worthiness of a gentleman rider lies even and perhaps foremost in such a global approach to horsemanship: the more aspects of this discipline he masters, the more reputable he is. The technical competence is also strictly linked to the notions of valor and usefulness: a worthy rider possesses moral fiber and the ability to spend his skills in a profitable and honorable way. The title of two seventeenth century’s English treatises manifests the contingent necessity of such an art as horse riding: William Browne’s The Arte of Riding the Great Horse, published during the period of the Anglo-­Spanish wars (1625–1630), whose aim was “to make a horse seruiceable for the warres, with the bitt, very necessary for these dangerous times”;16 and John Vernon’s The Young Horse-­man (1644), according to which properly training a horse is “very useful for all those that desire the knowledge of warlike horsemanship”.17 Early modern treatises on horsemanship are also used to showcase their authors’ professional proficiency as teachers and trainers: some books contain lengthy lists of successful pupils and mount reared, tamed, and trained to perfection—­a sort of double filiation, both humane and equine, attesting to a master’s merits and renown. Giovanni Battista Ferraro’s discourse contains no less than twelve closely printed pages, without breaks or paragraphs, listing in minute detail the most famous Italian cavelarices and schools of his time; his own teacher’s background and filiation; the most renowned studs; finally, his own two-­and four-­legged pupils: hundreds upon hundreds of names, displayed almost in a genealogical fashion, since the beginning of the Italian tradition—­those very first masters who “sprouted more branches than any other plant”.18



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The Horse Equestrian treatises commonly contain an appraisal stating the reasons why horses are so valuable and necessary. This topos is not an early modern invention, but one of the most quoted, loaned, reformulated incipits that belongs to Giordano Ruffo’s De medicina equorum (or Liber de cura equorum or De mascalcia or Hippiatria) written in Latin in the middle of the thirteenth century: “Being that among all of the animals created by the Almighty God Creator of all things which are submitted to the human kind, no animal is nobler than the horse.” Ruffo is a celebrated Calabrian master, an authority whose influence stretched well beyond the Middle Ages and whose work marked the beginning of the medieval tradition of treatises on hippiatrics:19 later generations of authors often refer to his seminal work, whether they are veterinarians or riding masters. The latter declined Ruffo’s fundamental notion in various ways, emphasizing the many attributes of an animal that can be ridden: The horse is generous, and useful, because among all of the animals submitted to the human kind, no one is nobler or more useful to men; if the human dignity shines it’s thanks to the horse, without whom no glorious operation can be decorously and easily done. Therefore, we can say without fail that the horse alone is more useful to us than the rest of the animals: otherwise, how could a man of noble condition, and rank, travel far without unending fuss? How could he ford a river and escape from other perils and uneasy trails? Most important, nevertheless, how could Princes, Knights, and Great Lords of the world display their valor honorably during games, jousts, tournaments, battles, and other field days without the help of such a generous animal?

Giovanni Battista Ferraro, a Neapolitan master operating in the middle of the sixteenth century, summarized in this way the horse’s relevance: as a vehicle, both literally and as a means of social promotion for the man of some quality, as well as a tangible sign of status.20 Such an appraisal of the horse is usually grounded in equine morphology, physiology, and moral character as defined by the humoral doctrine, according to which the horse’s temperament is the result of the balance, imbalance, predominance, or alteration of four constitutive elements: earth, water, air, and fire, presiding each a humor or temperament. Following this theory, the horse’s appearance, particularly its coat’s color and particularities, is the outward result of its temperament, which is in turn a product of the inner combination of the four elements. First formulated by Hippocrates and then commented on by Galenus,21 the theory of the four elements and temperaments remains valid over time and knows no decline among the early modern equestrian authors: half a century after Ferraro, English treatises such as Markham’s Cavelarice still refer to Italian masters to explain this aspect of equine’s physiology: Frederic Grison saith that as a horse is colored, so is he for the most part complexioned: and according to his complexion, so is his disposition of good or evill qualitie: and according to the predominance or regencie of that Element, of which hee dooth moste entyrelye participate, so for the moste parte are his humours addictions, and inclinations: for if he have most of the earth, then is hee melancholie, dull, and subiect to much faintnesse: and the colours incident to that complexion is mostly commonlye eyther kythe-­glew’d, blacke, both sortes of dunnes, Iron-­gray or pyed with anie of this colours. But if hee have moste of the water, then is hee flegmatike, full

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of sloath, ill understanding, faint spirited, and subiect to much tendernesse: and the colours following that complexion are Chesnutte colours, Milke-­white, Fallowe deare colour, or pyed with any of those colours. If hee have moste of the Ayre, then is hee sanguine, free of spirite, bolde, nymble, and pleasant: and the colours appertayning to that complexion are, Bright-­bay, Darke-­bay, Flea-­bitten, White-­lyard, Ashie-­gray, or pyed with anie of these colours: But if hee participate moste of the fire, is hee collericke, light, free, stirring, and full of anger: the colours wayting on this complexion being Bright sorrels, Cole-­blacks without whites, or pyed with eyther of those colours. But those complexions are sayde to be the best, which having an equall mixture or composition, dooth participate indifferently of all the foure Elements.22

Most early modern treatises mention the theory of elements as a reference point in checking a horse’s value. Among the English-­speaking writers on horsemanship, Nicholas Morgan is perhaps the master who provided the most ample and detailed analysis of various elements, temperaments, and horses’ colors: eight chapters of his Perfection of Horse-­manship (1609), for a total of thirty-­three whole pages, are devoted to this subject.23 Even in seventeenth century’s France, La Broue’s treatise still contained a chapter called “Brief discourse on the signs by means of which the Horse’s nature can be evaluated, whether it be by the colour of its coat or other marks: together with the distinction of the Horse’s temperament according to the different climates influencing its birth and rearing”.24 If this theory was still accepted during the seventeenth century, some authors questioned its value as a yardstick to judge a horse’s overall qualities. In 1589, the Apulian master Ottaviano Siliceo cast doubts on the correspondence between coats’ particularities and horses’ performances: “At the time of the emperor Charles V, I could often see that [in the battlefield] every day many knights fell down, and so did their steeds, regardless of their good, even excellent coats signs; one may then consider that it was not the horses’ fault, but their riders’ [...].25Siliceo expressed at the end of the sixteenth century a question that had already arisen by the 1550s: exactly at the beginning of the tradition of printed treatises on horsemanship, which as we saw promoted such a theory. In 1644, when the English master John Vernon accurately described his ideal combat horse in a matter-­of-­ factly tone, he still included suggestions regarding the coat’s color: First make choice of a nimble and able horse of convenient stature of 15 handfuls high [sach] coloured, as black, brown, cheasnut, dun, bay, socet, fox, Iron grey, Roe, and the like, for a white horse is not so necessary to thy use, nor so convenient to thy safety, as when thou shall be commanded forth on a party, in a dark uight [sic] you wilt the easilier be discerned by the Enemy, so that if they chance to give fire on you, the will have he greater aim at thee, in regard thou wilt be so visible a marke unto them, it is not save for a Sentinell to have a white horse on a pitch field, a file leader being mounted on a white horse is commonly aimed at by the Enemy gunners or Musktiers.26

As can easily be seen, Vernon listed several kinds of coat’s colors, even those that are not off the book, i.e., disregarded by a celebrated master: the colors included here are safe, contrary to the pure-­white horse with so visible a coat that it would put the officer’s life in real danger. The valuable horse is not an animal whose inner combination of temperaments is in some way deemed good from a physiological point of view, but a surefooted, reliable one whose color is not discernible by the enemy.



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Therefore, did the theory of the four elements ever have a real impact in everyday practice of horsemanship as reported in archival sources? Studs’ and stables’ registers from the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries duly recorded the horses’ colors and particularities, often in ample detail, but without mentioning any correspondence whatsoever to equine temperaments. As far as it is known, the wide debate on this matter taking place via the published treatises did not leave archival traces: this did not seem to be a major preoccupation when dealing on a daily basis with horses of various origin and functions, and not only with the noble steeds around which the discourse of horse-­riding masters revolved. Browsing early modern correspondence brings the same result: letters from and to horsemen of various kinds, officers, merchants, dealers, trainers, or aristocrats discuss the horse’s character, morphology, movements, maladies, equipment, and uses without ever evoking the theory of the four elements. Let us take as an example a letter sent in 1652 by the Roman cardinal Camillo Astalli; when looking for two nice pairs of horses, he formulated his desiderata as follows: I wish to get me four Friesian horses, lightweighted and if possible with slightly-­haired legs, measuring not less than seven Roman inches, of not less than three and no more than five years old, provided that they are of the same age; I’m not concerned about their coats, as long as they are the same colour.

Cardinal Astalli clearly did not give much thought to coat’s particularities as a product of the internal combination of the four humors, nor did he spare a thought to the correspondence between those signs and the moral qualities of the horse as long as he manages to get four esthetically agreeable young horses for his coach.27 In studs’ and stable’s journals and registers, the horses’ coat with its particularities is an important piece of data to note down, insofar as it allows a correct external identification of a horse—­in the open, if it belongs to a herd; in the close, if stabled; because a beautiful coat, pleasant to the eye, may be an important element of a horse’s worth; because it carries one or more brands: firebrands or marks apposed with other methods to indicate the horse’s origin, types, and functions as well as its owner name and status; because decoding equine branding may prove difficult due to the quantity and complexity of branded signs and symbols circulating, documents issued by studs and stables, princely households and military instances sometimes included if not a proper handbook, and some kind of attachment describing or reproducing equestrian brands. Even equestrian authors may sometimes devote a chapter to horse branding. The third book of Francesco Liberati’s La perfezione del cavallo (“The perfection of the horse,” 1639),28 for example, is about “the nature and properties of some foreign breeders, with a discourse on the main Italian studs, showing for each one its own firebrand so as they can be recognized”.29 At the same time, horse brand listings are also printed as such and not as a part of a treatise; at least five of them, illustrated and explained, were published between 1569 and 1770. In one of those published in the middle of the seventeenth century, the author Anania Zen states that the readers (and riders) “may thus learn more about the false [horse brands] which have been fraudolously altered”.30 What really counts in this specific case, then, is not the alteration of an internal balance of physiological humors but the actual counterfeiting of apposed—­ but still essential—­signs of identity, whose examination delivers useful data allowing the evaluation of a horse’s status and function.

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In early modern treatises on horsemanship, the equine value can be appreciated not only through comparisons with other creatures but also by considering the horse as a sort of compendium of other animals’ best qualities: an assembly of remarkable morphological and moral traits that can be found not only in equines or mammals but also in other species. In the second half of the sixteenth century, Giovan Battista Ferraro portrayed the horse as a deambulating bestiary of sorts: I would like my horse always to have a Lion’s chest, courage and back; an Ox’s body, joints and eyes; a Fox’s mouth, quickness and ears; a Boar’s voracity and stoutness without which the natural warmth could not be well kept; And finally, I would like my Horse to walk in short steps like a Woman, with her same determination and ease, raising its feet when parading, like a Cock, and to be joyful with a pleasant appearance.31

Ferraro was not the inventor of this kind of comparison; other equestrian authors did the same, Claudio Corte and Pascal Caracciolo among others, following the established tradition and pattern of the literary blason: an eulogy (or even a vituperation) made by repetition and amplification, whose object is compared to numerous other items.32 In this specific case, the list of paragons includes several proverbial stereotypes (e.g., the courage of a lion), well featuring a characteristic considered proper to women in general: their stride. During the 1560s, Corte’s and Caracciolo’s blasons also referred to stereotypical feminine traits, sexually connotated this time: a woman’s patience when she is mounted—­ just like a horse.33 At the time, the salacious juxtaposition of feminine/equine traits was far from being uncommon or shocking; as a literary topos, it was found in a wide range of early modern European texts:34 poems, dramas, and various texts in prose, including, as we have just seen, treatises on horsemanship. In most cases, though, the technical discourse focusing on the value of horses may resort to other textual strategies of a more elevated nature: the exempla, ancient or contemporary historical events whose main character is a horse embodying the best qualities of its kind. Authors may then quote classical authorities or put down on paper their own experience or recollections. This kind of exempla is given as proof of the horse’s usefulness, physical attitude, moral traits, and sometimes even of economic value. A master with an extensive hands-­on experience may describe the exploits of the horses he had trained, once employed as war steeds or in an illustrious stable; more erudite authors may multiply the excerpts from ancient sources to corroborate their affirmations. Therefore, Giovan Battista Ferraro’s lengthy list of horses trained by him features steeds sent to the pontifical court or to the kings of Spain or used, for example, in combat during the war in Flanders in 1576.35 Whereas Morgan multiplied the quotes from ancient sources, as there are many testimonies that recorde the greatness of their fame and worthy actions, for which they gayned great solemnities of their burialls, and remembrances of their worthinesse. As amongst the Persians, who after the death of their excellent Horses, buryed them and made Sepulchers and monuments over them, and as pliny reporteth, the Pyramides did the like. Also Plutarch saith, that Simon of Athens, for the great victorie that hee got by his Horses in the warres in olimpio, after their deathes made sepulchers and monument over them. Likewise Alexander for the renowne of Bucephale his Horse, made him a Sepulcher and Monument, builded a Cittie, and walled it about, and named it after his horses name, as a memorial of his fame: and



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as Plyny recordeth, Caesar the Dictator caused the picture of his Horse to be se uppe before the house of Venus. And likewise the horse of Augustus Caesar, was buryed with an honourable monument over him: And Dion Cassius reporteth, that Adrian the Emperor, after the death of his Horse Borischemius, buryed him and made a Princely Sepulcher, and a stately pillar over him, with Epigrams about it, graven in stone.36

The multiplication of exempla on a given theme—­in this case, the eternalization of famous horses’ memory—­is more than evidently used not only to amplify the notion of equine value but also to prove it by means of “many testimonies.” Just as a master’s worthiness may be judged by the use he makes of his skills for a noble cause, the value of the horse may be deduced by his moral qualities or lack thereof. In a period when horses were relied upon as an instrument—­for labor, combat, travel, and leisure—­ indocile and non-­ compliant equine attitudes are considered both an act of treachery and a real danger, especially on the road and in the battlefield. Moreover, in princely environments and occurrences, the misbehavior of poorly trained horses reflects badly not only upon the master charged with their instruction, but also on the person of some quality to whom they were destined in the first place. Early modern sources—­ treatises or archival documents alike—­abound with anthropomorphic representations of the equine behavior. Every moral trait contributing to the horse’s usefulness is praised. In the second half of the eighteenth century, for example, one of the horsemen in chief to the princely house of Salviati defined in the following way a particularly fine mare: “it’s a humane beast,” that is to say endowed with qualities proper to human beings.37 Conversely, every moral default is seen as a hindrance; as such, it must be sanctioned and possibly eradicated, as though horses were naughty children at best; brutes or criminals to be reformed at worst. It is paradoxical because if, on the one hand, a horse may be considered a noble creature of great usefulness and, on the other hand, it may also be seen as a dumb animal that needs to be governed by the bit and helped with human aids (hands, legs, voice, whip, and spurs). The semantic field of equine ill conduct is virtually limitless and based on a terminology used to define human shortcomings: just as a man, a horse can be lazy, idle, stubborn, false, disloyal ... Let us examine, for instance, a tribunal report dating from as late as the middle of the eighteenth century: when a group of horses got out of human control and wandered overnight in the Roman countryside, a judge subsequently ordered to take them into custody; the report’s compiler uses the noun “incarceration,” as he would have done in the case of human offenders and vagrants sentenced to jail. Words are important, and so are names. Part of a horse’s value may even depend on the name attributed to the horse itself; it is a fundamental act that must be done according to the horse’s breeding and qualities: the most appropriated name reflects and enhances the horse’s overall profile: its origins, morphology, moral qualities, and ownership. A poor name choice would be preposterous or worthy of ... ridicule. In the first half of the seventeenth century, a former pupil of Corte’s, the Roman Lelio Cinquini serving the pope Paul V, and the author of Il Cavallo ammaestrato (“The [well] trained horse”) provided a detailed guide to the choice of the proper horse’s name: If the horse is flawless, it must be named after its stud [...], or donor or purchaser, or its Province of birth: Jennet if it’s a Spanish horse, Friesian if German, Turkish or Barb if coming

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from those countries; or Calabrian, Apulian, Abruzzese should the horse be born in those particular regions. Above all, the horse ought not be given a name contrary to its posture or appearance: Belladonna (Beautiful Woman), Gratioso (Graceful), Nobile (Noble), Gentile (Gentle), Amoroso (Loving) or other such names if it’s ugly, and ill-­proportioned. Similarly, one may not give to a horse of little worth [our italics] a noticeable name such as Alfiero (Ensign), Capitano (Captain), Bravo (Valiant), Francalancia (Bold-­spear), Famoso (Renowned), Gioia (Joy), Leone (Lion); or call Animoso (Daring), Bucefalo (Bucephalus), Elefante (Elephant), Drago (Dragon), Falcone (Hawk), and so on, a cowardly horse; or Saltamacchia (Hurdle-­Jumping), Leggiero (Agile), Capriolo (Roe deer), Veloce (Speedy) a slow, lazy and heavy Horse; because thereby many would laugh both at the horse and at the lack of judgement of those who chose such names.38

In early modern stud’s and stables’ registers and journals, the description of most horses generally (but not always) includes their names: apparently given according to the horse’s color, its country and stud of origin, and some physical and moral traits, as per Cinquini’s instructions cited above. Sometimes, the breeder may decide to change the name of one or several horses; in the first half of the eighteenth century, a handwritten note relating to a herd belonging to the Chigi’s family near Rome indicates that a mare named Joyful had become Viper; that another one formerly known by the name of Venomous is now called Thisbe.39 The reasons for such a choice remain largely unknown; in general, the connection between the choice of a name and the horse’s value is quite difficult to ascertain. Sometimes, however, such a correspondence is not only easily established but even clearly declared. This is the case when, in 1639, a proud owner from the Barberini’s princely family gave the name “Bella” (“beautiful”) to one of his mares: “Bella, named after her beauty”.40 In terms of financial value, we have seen how early modern masters may speak about the noble horses they so well trained in terms of “filiation”; such a definition does not exclude an eventual addition of details of a more mercenary nature. Therefore, a good training normally adds a considerable value to a horse whose origin and nature are already excellent. Cinquini himself, for instance, did not hesitate to put a price tag on his horses’ exploits when recalling that “the first horse [he] trained was a black one belonging to [his] Father’s stud, with a star on the forehead, and stockings [leg markings] on the forelegs, and whose name was Hope; It was very beautiful and used to perform quite well [...] so that he was sold to the cavelarice of the Grand Duke of Tuscany Francesco de’ Medicis for three-­ hundred-­twenty gold ecus with gold.” It is quite interesting to note that the price value of such a superb specimen is never the same: each handwritten copy of Cinquini’s treatise indicates a different amount, following an upward (670/680 ecus) or downward trend (260 ecus) ...41 In terms of archival sources, the nature of studs’ and stables’ documents in particular are largely quantitative: they often express the price both of the horses and the treatment they receive (food, stabling, medical care, and so on). If the horse is of some value, he is generally well provided for; if, on the contrary, it is unable to serve, it is excluded from the economic system to which it belongs. Most Italian princely stud’s books from the fifteenth through the nineteenth century regularly report on the so-­called “rejected” or “discarded horses”: flawed, worn-­out, old, and for these reasons, unproductive horses put aside, then on sale. Even as they are, they could still be considered valuable, as a product of a prestigious stud or because they once served an illustrious house. If poorly beyond use, they may



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still have some value in the marketplace as horsemeat, offal or hide.42 It is a fact, though, that sick horses, temporarily unable to work or be ridden, are well cared for: their value may be revealed by the amount of special food and cures they are being given; or sometimes by what the horse personnel does to comfort and protect it from harm, for example, with warm blankets, sensible harnesses, and tacks. It could be argued that everything is done to preserve a valuable horse, so it is quite expensive to keep and feed an animal. Nevertheless, when browsing archival documents emanating from early modern princely courts, what perhaps strikes most are the numerous occurrences of terms or expressions belonging to the semantic field related to gentleness and loving kindness; sometimes those terms are simply a rhetorical device used to define a courtier’s fidelity toward his princely master; sometimes instead they define the attitude toward equines: a sollecitude already recorded by many sources from Antiquity43 but still striking if associated with the early modern period.44 These same terms and expressions of loving kindness can be found even in treatises on horsemanship; as far as equestrian English-­speaking authors are concerned, Nicholas Morgan in particular examined the characteristics of a “loving horse”.45 In a later source from the 1770s, a horsekeeper to the Salviati’s family reported to his master one case of humane killing regarding a mare beyond salvation and the subsequent efforts to save her filly: the first used to be a productive, valuable dam; the latter, the future of the stud, was now an orphan deprived of her mother’s milk, and whose fate could not be darker. The horsekeeper expressed in writing his difficult choice and the feelings that followed: “Seeing that [the mare] was completely covered in sores, and that every expense and effort would have been lost on her, not wanting to see her suffer, this morning [he] hit her in the head [with a humane killer], but [he] was sorry for this loss [...]”; as for the filly, “[he] will do what [he] can to save her, but it will be [a] difficult [task]”.46 The material value of the horse (its price, usefulness, and athletic qualities; in this case, its fertility and productivity) and its value as a status symbol to the elite are sometimes paired to elements pointing to a different kind of worthiness: the affective, emotional value, deployed, shown and subsisting even when the other kinds of values are suspended or collapsed.

Archival sources Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (BAV), Vatican City Arch. Chig. 8954

Barb. lat. 4273 Ott. lat. 1359 Vat. lat. 15016

Notes 1 The early modern writing we are referring to here is part of a vast corpus including European archival and literary sources on horses and horsemanship dating from the fifteenth to the twentieth century, examined in Deriu [2008] and in Deriu (2023).

2 Blundeville (1560), p.  2. For a contemporary translation of Grisone’s treatise, with critical apparatus, Tobey (2014). 3 A profession intended as an activity whose purposes, technique, and theory (science) are suitable to the gentleman of noble origin.

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4 “Historians long have agreed that early modern life was saturated with horse and horse culture,” in Raber, and Tucker (2005), p. 1. 5 Astley (1584), p. 9. 6 Baret (1618), unnumbered page. 7 Morgan, (1620), p. 51. 8 Blundeville (1560), unnumbered page. 9 Deriu (2014), pp. 24–28. 10 Corte (1573); Corte (1584), unnumbered page. 11 ‘’Recognoissant le defaut des mots propres pour cest art en nostre langue Françoise, i ay eu recours à l’italienne, tant parce que les Cavaliers en usent plus communement, qu’aussi ils ont ie ne sçay quel air plus gaillard, sont plus significatifs, & peuvent expliquer le sens par un mot, qui auroit besoin de plusieurs pour le faire entendre en François,” La Brouë (1602), p. 10. 12 Corte (1584). 13 “Et tanto più un maestro è nobile quanto più ragionevolmente fa suo mestiero: et quando medicarà bene, da altri non potrà essere ripreso; sarà honor suo et utile del padrone. Et però si puol chiamar nobile quest’arte: per causa che medicano animali che non sanno parlare et dir il suo male.” Arquint, and Gennero (2001), p. 17. Unless otherwise stated, the translations into English are my own. 14 Fiaschi (1556), unnumbered page. 15 P. A. Ferraro (1602), p. 16. 16 Browne (1628), title page. 17 Vernon (1644), title page. 18 “Da niuna pianta [...] sono usciti più rami.” G.B. Ferraro, in P. A. Ferraro (1602), pp. 66–78. 19 “Cum int[er] cetera an[im]alia a su[m]mo rerum opifice evident[er] creata usui hu[m]ani g[e]n[er]is supposta v[e]l s[u]biecta nullum an[im]al sit equo nobilius”: Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (from now on BAV), Ott. lat. 1359: Ruffo [XIVth c.], f. 1. Ruffo’s treatise was subsequently translated in Italian, then published for the first time in the 15th century. Montinaro (2015), also available online: https://

books.openedition.org/ledizioni/ 2130?lang=it 20 “Egli è generoso, & utile, percioche fra tutti gli animali all’human genere sottoposti, niun’altro più nobile, ne per lo commodo dell’huomo più atto del cavallo si ritrova; conciosiache per suo mezo, l’humana dignità risplende, trattandosi (senza lui) malagevolmente il decoro delle gloriose operazioni. Talche per la commodità ch’egli ne porge, si può senza fallo dire, che serve à noi, più il Cavallo solo, che tutto il rimanente degli animali: Et che sia vero; in che maniera, huomo di nobil conditione, & grado, senza infinito travaglio giungerebbe alle lontane parti? In che guisa guazzarebbe i fiumi, & uscirebbe da altri pericoli, & malagevoli sentieri? Et quel che più importa, come i Prencipi, Cavalieri, & i Gran Signori del mondo, ne’ giuochi, nelle giostre, ne’ tornei, nelle battaglie, negli steccati, & in altre giornate campali, honoratamente far potrebbono mostra del lor valore, senza l’aiuto di sì generoso animale?,” G.B. Ferraro in P.A. Ferraro (1602), p.  2. Giovan Battista Ferraro’s writings, first published in 1562 (G. B. Ferraro 1562), are also included in his son’s Pirro Antonio Ferraro very own treatise. 21 Siegel (1968). 22 Markham (1607), p. 3. 23 Morgan (1620), pp.  16–29, 89–96, 127–140. 24 ‘’Discours sommaire des indices par lesquels on peut juger le naturel du Cheval, tant par la couleur du poil que autres marques: ensemble de ses divers temperamens, selon la diversité des climats, sous lesquels il sera nay & eslevé,” La Brouë (1602), p. 7. 25 “Io vedea spesso, che molti cavalieri cotidianamente cascavano, & i cavalli loro precipitavano, non ostante che fussero stati con buoni, & ottimi segni; il che considerando, che non era colpa de’ cavalli, ma de’ cavalieri istessi [...],” Siliceo, (1598), p. 16. 26 Vernon (1644), p. 1.



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27 “Ho il desiderio di provedermi di quattro Cavalli frigioni li quali siano leggeri, e se fusse possibile di quelli, che hanno poco pelo alle gambe, non siano meno alti di sette palmi di Canna Romana, non habbino meno di trè anni, ne più di cinque, e siano tutti della medesima età, non premendomi l’haverli più d’un pelame che d’un’altro, mentre però siano tutti di un mantello”: BAV, Arch. Chig. 8954, year 1652, f. 1r. 28 Liberati (1639). 29 “Trattasi in questo Terzo Libro della natura, e proprietà d’alcune Razze de Cavalli stranieri, con discorrersi sopra le principali d’Italia, con mostrar loro a ciascheduna di esse il suo Merco per riconoscerle,” in Liberati (1639), pp.75–143. 30 “Per renderli più assicurati di quelli che alcuna volta vengono fraudolentemente alterati”: Zen (1658), unnumbered page. 31 “Oltre a ciò, io vorrei sempre che’l mio cavallo havesse: Del Leone, il petto, l’animosità, & la schiena: del Bue, il corpo, le giunture, e gl’occhi: Della Volpe, la bocca, la sollecitudine, & l’orecchie: del Porco, la voracità, & la grassezza, senza laquale il calor naturale mal si sostiene; Et finalmente vorrei, che egli imitasse il passeggiar corto della donna, havendo la sua determinazione, & leggiadria, alzando il piede nel passeggiare, come fa il Gallo, essendo gioioso, & di piacevolissimo aspetto”: G. B. Ferraro in P.A. Ferraro (1602), p. 21. 32 On this topic, see Wilson (1967), p. 7. 33 Corte (1573); Caracciolo (1567). 34 De Ornellas (2014). 35 G. B. Ferraro in P. A. Ferraro (1612), p. 78. 36 Morgan (1620), pp. 11–12. 37 “È una bestia umana”: BAV, Carte Salviati 79, letter 264, 27 april 1776, unnumbered f., in Deriu (2023), p. 34, 411. 38 “Il Cavallo deve essere nominato del nome della razza [...] o vero nominalo quando è donato ò compro del cognome de ch’il dà, ò vero de che Provincia è nato, cioè ginnetto al Caval di Spagna, Frigione al Caval d’Alemagna,

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Turco e Barbaro al Caval di tal paese, o vero Calabrese, Pugliese, Abbruzzese à Caval nati à tal parte, e sopr’al tutto non poner nome contrario alla postura, et  all’essere del Cavallo, come nominare Belladonna, Gratioso, Nobile, Gentile, Amoroso, et altri simili nomi à Cavalli di brutto aspetto, e mal proportionato, come anco al cavallo di niun valore ponerli nome di molto merto, cioè Alfiero, Capitano, Bravo, Francalancia, Famoso, Gioia, Leone, ne a Cavallo vile, codardo nominarlo Animoso, Bucefalo, Elefante, Drago, Falcone, et  altri simili ne à Cavallo lento, pigro e greve nominarlo Saltamacchia, Leggiero, Capriolo, Veloce, il che facendo sarebbe d’occasione à molti di ridersene, e del cavallo e del poco giuditio di chi gli ha posto tal nome”: BAV, Barb. lat. 4330: Cinquini [1st half 16th century], f. 184 39 BAV, Arch. Chig. 16038, unnumbered f., in Deriu (2023), p. 34. 40 “Bella, che porta seco il nome”: BAV, Barb. lat. 4273, year 1639, f. 2r, in Deriu (2023), p. 34. 41 “Il primo cavallo ch’io feci fù un morello della razza di mio Padre stellato in fronte, e balzano di due piedi di dietro, e si chiamava Speranza, quale era molto bello et andava assai bene in terra, et a mezz’aria cioé in corvette, e fù venduto al Cavallerizzo del Gran Duca francesco de Medici per trecento venti scudi d’oro in oro”: BAV, Vat. lat. 15016, Cinquini [1st half 16th century], f. 251r, in Deriu (2023), p. 741. 42 Deriu (2023), pp. 71–72. 43 Gorteman (1957), pp. 101–120. 44 Deriu (2023), pp. 36–40. 45 Morgan (1620), pp. 66–67. 46 “[...] Siera tutta impiagata, e congnioscento che era spesa persa, e fatiche sprecate, per noveterla più patire, questa matina lo dato intesta, dispiacentome la perdita della metema”; “cerchero di giutarla quanto si puole per camparla, ma sera dificele”: BAV, Carte Salviati 79, letter 185, unnumbered f., in Deriu (2023), p. 38.

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References Arquint, Patrizia -­Gennero, Mario (eds.) 2001. Giovan Battista Pignatelli, L’arte veterale. Sopra il medicare et  altri secreti bellissimi de’ cavalli. Bracciano: Equilibri. Astley, John 1584. The art of riding: set foorth in a breefe treatise, with a due interpretation of certeine places alledged out of Xenophon, and Gryson, verie expert and excellent horssemen: wherein also the true vse of the hand by the said Grysons rules and precepts is speciallie touched: and how the author of this present worke hath put the same in practise, also what profit men maie reape thereby: without the knowledge whereof, all the residue of the order of riding is but vaine. Lastlie, is added a short discourse of the chaine or cauezzan, the trench, and the martingale: written by a gentleman of great skill and long experience in the said art. Imprinted at London, by Henrie Denham. Baret, Michael 1618. An hipponomie or the vineyard of horsemanship, deuided into three bookes. 1. The theorick part, intreating of the inward knowledge of the man. 2. The first practicke part, shewing how to worke according to that knowledge. 3. The second practicke part, declaring how to apply both hunting and running horses to the true grounds of this art. In which is plainly laid open the art of breeding, riding, training and dieting of the said horses. Wherein also many errors in this art, heretofore published, are manifestly detected. By Michaell Baret. London: Printed by George Eld. Blundeville, Thomas 1560. The Arte of Ryding and Breakinge Greate Horses. London (facsimile edition of the Cambridge University Library’s copy (Syn. 8.57.34), with illustrations from the Bodleian Library’s copy). Amsterdam-­ New York: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum & Da Capo Press, 1969. Browne, William 1628. The arte of riding the great horse, also a direct order to make a horse seruiceable for the warres, with the bitt, very necessary for these dangerous times, with the practice of riding the maze and ring [S.l., for R. Thrale, 1628?]. Caracciolo, Pascal 1567. La Gloria del Cavallo, opera dell’Illustre S. Pasqual Caracciolo, divisa in

dieci libri, ne’ quali, oltra gli ordini pertinenti alla Cavalleria, si descrivono tutti i particolari, che son necessari nell’allevare, custodire, maneggiare, et curar cavalli; accomodandovi essempi tratti da tutte l’historie antiche et moderne, con industria et giudicio dignissimo d’essere avvertito da ogni Cavalliero, con due tavole copiosissime, l’una delle cose notabili, l’altra delle cose medicinali. In Vinegia, appresso Gabriel Giolito de’ Ferrari. Cinquini, Lelio, Il Cavallo ammaestrato. Opera di Lelio Cinquini Nobile Romano Cameriero Secreto di Spada, e cappa della Santità di Nostro Signore Papa Pavolo Quinto, diviso in quattro libri libro 4° [1st half 17th century], manuscript. Corte, Claudio 1573. Il Cavallerizzo di Claudio Corte da Pavia, nel qual si tratta della natura de’ Cavalli, delle Razze, del modo di governarli, domarli, & frenarli. Et di tutto quello, che à Cavalli, & à buon Cavallerizzo s’appartiene. Di nuovo dall’Auttore stesso corretto & emendato, & aggiuntovi di molte cose necessarie, che nella prima impressione mancavano. In Venetia, appresso Giordano Ziletti (1st edition, 1562). Corte, Claudio 1584. The art of riding, conteining diuerse necessarie instructions, demonstrations, helps, and corrections apperteining to horssemanship, not herettofore expressed by anie other author: written at large in the Italian toong, by Maister Claudio Corte, a man most excellent in this art. Here brieflie reduced into certeine English discourses to the benefit of gentlemen and others desirous of such knowledge [translated and edited by Thomas Bedingfield], Imprinted at London, by H. Denham. Ferraro, Giovan Battista 1560. Delle Razze. Disciplina del cavalcare. Et altre cose pertinenti ad Essercitio così fatto. Per il S. Giovambattista Ferraro Cavallerizzo Napoletano. All’Illustrissimo signor Don Antonio di Aragona Duca di Mont’Alto. In Napoli, appresso Mattio Cancer. Ferraro, Pirro Antonio 1602. Cavallo Frenato di Pirro Antonio Ferraro Napolitano, cavallerizzo della Maestà Cattolica di Filippo II. Re di Spagna N.S. nella Real Cavallerizza di Napoli. Diviso in quattro libri. Con Discorsi notabili, sopra Briglie, Antiche &



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Moderne nel Primo; nel Secondo molte altre da lui inventate; nel Terzo un Dialogo trà l’Autore, & l’Illustriss. Sig. Don Diego di Cordova, Cavallerizzo Maggior di Sua Maestà; con un Discorso particolare sopra alcune Briglie Ginette. Et nel Quarto un altro Dialogo tra l’Autore, e l’Illustriss. Sig. Marchese di Sant’Eramo, Luocotenente del Cavallerizzo maggiore in questo Regno, & alcuni disegni di Briglie Polacche, & Turchesche. Et a questi quattro Libri suoi, precede l’opera di Gio.Battista Ferraro suo padre, Divisa in altri Quattro Libri, ridotta dall’Autore in quella forma, & intelligenza, che da lui si desiderava à tempo si stampò, dove si tratta il modo di conservar le Razze, disciplinar Cavalli, & il modo di curargli; vi sono anco aggiunte le figure delle loro anotomie, & un numero d’infiniti Cavalli fatti, & ammaestrati sotto la sua disciplina con l’obligo del Mastro di Stalla, In Napoli, appresso Antonio Pace. Fiaschi, Cesare 1556. Trattato dell’Imbrigliare, Maneggiare et Ferrare Cavalli, diviso in tre parti, con alcuni discorsi sopra la natura di Cavalli, con disegni di Briglie, Maneggi & di Cavalieri à cavallo, & de ferri d’esso, di M. Cesare Fiaschi Gentilhuomo Ferrarese. In Bologna, per Anselmo Giaccarelli. Grisone, Federigo 1550. Gli ordini di Cavalcare, Napoli. La Brouë, Salomon de 1602. Le cavalerice François, composé par Salomon de La Broue, Escuyer d’Escuirie du Roy et de Monseigneur le Duc d’Espernon. Contenant les Preceptes principaux qu’il faut observer exactement pour bien dresser les Chevaux aux exercices de la carrière et de la campagne, le tout divisé en trois livres. Le premier traicte de l’ordre general et plus facile des susdits exercices et de la proprieté du Cavalier. Le second des modernes et plus iustes proportions de tous les plus beaux airs et maneges. Le troisiesme des qualitez de toutes les parties de la bouche du Cheval et des divers effets de plusieurs brides differentes pourtraites et representees par leurs justes mesures aux lieux neceßaires. Seconde edition reveue et augmentee de beaucoup de leçons et figures. A Paris, Chez Abel l’Angelier, au premier pilier de la grand’Salle du Palais. Francesco Liberati 1639. La perfettione del cavallo, Libri tre di Francesco Liberati Romano. Dove si

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tratta del mantenimento del cavallo, e dell’osservazioni circa la generatione, suoi mali, e cure di essi, buon governo della stalla, qualità delle razze antiche, e moderne, che sono in diverse parti d’Italia, delli nomi, e loro merchi, e della natura ancora de’ Cavalli stranieri. Et insieme dell’arte di Cavalcare di Senofonte, tradotto dal Greco nel nostro idioma italiano. A Paolo Giordano II Duca di Bracciano. In Roma, Per gli Heredi di Francesco Corbelletti. Markham, Gervase 1607. Cauelarice, or The English horseman, contayning all the arte of horse-­manship, as much as is necessary for any man to vnderstand, whether he be horse-­breeder, horse-­ryder, horse-­hunter, horse-­runner, horse-­ambler, horse-­farrier, horse-­keeper, coachman, smith, or sadler. Together, with the discouery of the subtill trade or mistery of horse-­coursers, & an explanatio[n] of the excellency of a horses vndersta[n]ding, or how to teach them to doe trickes like Bankes his curtall: and that horses may be made to drawe drie-­foot like a hound. Secrets before vnpublished, & now carefully set down for the profit of this whole nation [London: Printed [by Edward Allde and W. Jaggard] for Edward White, and are to be solde at his shop neare the little north doore of Saint Paules Church at the signe of the Gun. Morgan, Nicholas 1620. The horse-­mans honour, or, The beautie of horsemanship, as the choise, natures, breeding, breaking, riding, and dieting, whether outlandish or English horses, with the true, easie, cheape, and most approued manner, how to know and cure all diseases in any horse whatsoeuer, not innented [sic] and drawne from forraigne nations, but by long experience and knowledge of many yeares practise, and now published at the request of diuers honourable and worthy persons, for the generall good of the noble nation of Great Britaine, London, printed for I. Marriott, and are to be sould at his Shop in St. Dunstons Churchyard un Fleetstreet. Raber, Karen-­Tucker and Treva, J. (eds.). 2005. The Culture of the Horse. Status, Discipline and Identity in the Early Modern World. Macmillan: Palgrave. Siliceo, Ottaviano 1598. Scuola de’ Cavalieri di Ottaviano Siliceo, Gentilhuomo Troiano. Nella quale principalmente si discorre delle maniere, & qualità de’

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Cavalli, in che modo si debbono disciplinare, & ­conservare, & anco di migliorar le razze; donde potranno anco facilmente cavar molto frutto coloro, che son vaghi del nobilissimo essercitio d’istruire i Cavalli, Orvieto, appresso Antonio Colaldi, e Ventura Aquilini. Vernon, John 1644. The young horse-­man, or, The honest plain-­ dealing cavalier. Wherein is plainly demonstrated, by figures and other-­wise, the exercise and discipline of the horse, very usefull for all those that desire the knowledge of warlike horse-­man-­ship. London: Printed by Andrew Coe.

Wilson, Dudley Butler 1967. Descriptive Poetry in France from Blason to Baroque. New  York: Manchester University Press, Manchester-­Banes & Nobles. Zen, Anania 1658. Il Cavallo di Razza, riconosciuto dal segno de’ merchi delle più perfette Razze del Venetiano, Lombardia et parte della Romagna. Raccolta fatta per Annania Zen, a commodo de’ professori, e diletanti di Cavalli. In Venezia, per il Valvasense.

Bibliography De Ornellas, Kevin 2014. The Horse in Early Modern English Culture. Bridled, Curbed and Tamed. Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, Plymouth. Deriu, Elisabetta 2008. Le cheval et la cour. Pratiques équestres et milieux curiaux, Italie et France (milieu du XVe-­milieu du XVIIe siècle). Doctoral thesis; Supervisor: J.-­ F. Dubost. Université de Paris Est-­Créteil Val de Marne, unpublished. Deriu, Elisabetta 2014. “An art in motion. The development and dissemination of equestrian knowledge in Europe (16th–17th centuries).” In Great Books on Horsemanship. Bibliotheca Hippologica Johan Dejager, 24–29. Brill; Hes & De Graaf, Leiden. Deriu, Elisabetta 2023. BibliothEques. Equestria delle famiglie Barberini, Borghese, Chigi, Salviati e del fondo Urbinate latino, Città del Vaticano, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana.

Gorteman, Claire 1957. “Sollicitude et amour pour les animaux dans l’Egypte gréco-­romaine.” In Chronique d’Egypte. Bulletin de la fondation égyptologique Reine Élisabeth, t. XXXII, 63 (63): 101–120. Montinaro, Antonio 2015. La tradizione del De medicina equorum di Giordano Ruffo. Ledizioni, Milano. Tobey, Elizabeth MacKenzie (ed.) 2014. Federico Grisone, The Rules of Riding: An Edited Translation of the First Renaissance Treatise on Classical Horsemanship, trans. Elizabeth MacKenzie Tobey and Francesca Brunori Deigan. Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe. Siegel, Rudolph Erich 1968. Galen’s System of Physiology and Medicine. An Analysis of his Doctrines and Observations on Bloodflow, Respiration, Humors and Internal Diseases. New  York: S. Karger.

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Reading Performance for the Values Underpinning Production Amanda Finch

Introduction This chapter begins by exploring the reasons for evaluating theater in performance, and what is meant by the values that underpin production. It continues with an overview of key processes that are available for the analysis of performances, including a consideration of theater semiotics, materialist conditions of production, audiences and reception theory, and the relationship between politics and form. In the second part of the chapter, these processes of analysis are put into practice with a discussion on Emma Rice’s 2016 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Shakespeare’s Globe.

Why Evaluate Theater in Performance? Theater is a live medium. The most literary form of play texts is, by default, incomplete until it is realized in performance. Its “fundamental function,” as Aston and Savona (1991: 2) describe, is “as blueprint for production, a theatrical event which is to be realised in two planes (time and space).” Performance is designed not only to be read, but also to be seen, heard, and felt. The dramatic text may constrain the performance in various ways, as Keir Elam (1980: 208) notes, but what he calls “the ‘incompleteness’ factor” of the text means that it is determined by its contextualization onstage. The analysis of the written play text may be very rewarding in itself; however, these texts are all open to considerable adaptation when they are realized in production. As Gay McAuley argues, “There is no single way to

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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produce a play or performance text, and each production constructs new meanings, reveals new things, creates a new entity” (McAuley 1999: 233). The context of each individual production can considerably alter the meanings that can be read in any text. Theater is also a communal process; multiple decision-­makers (creative, executive, administrative, and financial) have input into the final product and each of them will have some impact on the meanings that we can read therein. When preparing to develop a production, a diverse range of approaches may be taken to the text. Ric Knowles (2004: 10) describes this range of approaches as “a continuum from radical intervention and social transformation to radical containment.” According to the underlying values, a production may be anywhere from politically progressive to deeply conservative. The “containment” that Knowles mentions can be understood as “the control of transgressive elements in society in the interests of the reproduction of the dominant order” (Knowles 2004: 10). In theater, this can mean the unexamined reproduction of a limited canon of dramatic texts, in traditional or conservative styles that reproduce outdated politics without questioning or critiquing them. One form that this reproduction of the dominant order often takes is through a production’s stated aim to reproduce the perceived “intentions” of the writer. This aim is complex, however, as authorial intentions are impossible to fully know, even with living playwrights who may be in the meeting or rehearsal room. There is always a process of interpretation between text and stage, and that interpretation is shaped by certain values. With texts by writers long dead, these intentions are even more unknowable, and the act of interpretation is very clearly shaped by the values of those making that interpretation. Even the choice to attempt to reproduce some perceived authorial intention is a value-­ laden one. By contrast, the approach taken may be directed by an alternative vision or deliberately resistant reading. These can take many forms and will be driven by a set of underlying values or ideology that conflict with or challenge the dominant position. Before we consider how the text is being shaped by multiple production decisions that make up the complete production, it is important to explore why these values or ideologies matter in evaluating performance.

Values and Ideology Values and ideology play a significant role in both how plays are presented in production and what plays are staged at all. Ideology can be understood as a set of beliefs that structure society and culture. Terry Eagleton (1991: 29) notes that it does not matter if these beliefs are true or false as long as they “symbolize the conditions and life experiences of a specific, socially significant group or class.” Many overlapping ideologies can operate at the same time as people belong to different groups and subcultures. Theater and performance represent human experience, so they also represent ideology because “power relations are embedded in all cultural practices” (Kershaw 1996: 139). The values that underpin a production will be shaped by dominant ideologies, whether they are in accordance with them or react against them. Moreover, theatrical productions themselves feed into the discourse that shapes ideology. As Susan Bennett (1997: 2) argues, “Cultural assumptions



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affect performances, and performances rewrite cultural assumptions.” This is one of the reasons why analyzing theatrical productions for the values that underpin them is important: those values actively contribute to the structuring of ideologies that shape our society. This may not even be a conscious process or intention, as ideologies shape our understanding of and approach to the world and political issues on a very subconscious level. Knowles (2004: 10) addresses this aspect with his concept of the “political unconscious” of performance texts (or productions). This “political unconscious,” he proposes, is formed out of all the material conditions which go toward the creation of a production, including the histories, traditions, and working practices of each of these conditions. These conditions, he suggests, often work against any attempts the production makes to be radically subversive; there are so many conditions of production that are so deeply influenced by dominant ideologies that mere radical intentions are counteracted by hegemonic materialities. He also argues that whenever a production makes an appeal to being natural, authentic, or unpolitical, it is in fact intensely politically engaged in the maintenance of the status quo. As he says, “ideology abhors a vacuum” and where there is a vacuum of conscious values or politics, it is all too easily “filled by the unquestioned because naturalized assumptions of ideology” (Knowles 2004: 116–117). In other words, without a deliberately and consciously chosen underpinning of values that challenge the status quo, a theater production will tend to reproduce and reinforce the values of the dominant order. Understanding the importance of the intentionality of every production decision is the first step in reading theater for the values underpinning it. The next step is learning how to read performance.

Processes for Evaluating Theater in Performance Semiotics One of the most useful methodologies for reading performance is theater semiotics. Semiotic theory was developed in the early twentieth century in the study of language and was pioneered by Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure defined the concept of language as a sign system and elaborated the distinction between the signifier (a sound image) and the signified (the concept we understand as linked to that sound image). Crucially, he noted the arbitrariness of the links between signifier and signified, which allows for a creative “interplay of similarities and differences” in which meaning is created (Aston and Savona 1991: 6). According to the theory of semiotics, placing any object (and a person is a kind of object in this sense) on stage imbues it with an extra degree of signification than is attributed to that object in everyday life (Bogatyrev  1976). In theater semiotics, the definition of a signifier is expanded to include not only words, but also anything that can be apprehended onstage and sometimes even in the broader theater environment. Patrice Pavis (1985) identifies scenography, lighting, props, costumes, actors’ performances, music and sound effects, pace, interpretation of storyline, use of text, and the role of the audience as key elements for semiotic analysis. Considering each of these elements that make up

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a production can be a useful method for analyzing performance as a live event that takes place in time and space. Aston and Savona (1991), as well as focusing on the performance elements, break down the semiotic potential of text into structure, character, dialogue, and stage directions. This approach reminds us that a production of a play is always a unique combination of text and performance, and the meanings made available are conditioned both by the play text and the context of that specific interpretation into theatrical performance. This argument conforms to a structuralist approach, where the parts are considered in relation to the whole. Analyzing each part in turn can allow us to explore what values are being represented where. The sheer number of parts that contribute to this whole makes it clear how complex performance analysis is, especially as the elements to be analyzed occur and combine at the same time (synchronically) and change over time (diachronically). Indeed, what McAuley (1999: 35) calls the “problem” of performance analysis “is precisely the simultaneity and the range of possibilities of combination and selection that are available to the spectator at any given moment.” The emphasis that is given to different elements can also communicate value. The predominance of text over image, costume over bodies, or emotional response over analytical, to give a few examples, can all indicate different priorities that are driven by ideology. The interplay of similarities and differences between various signifiers and signifieds not only generates meaning, therefore, but also reveals underpinning political and ideological values. The usefulness of theater semiotics “lies in its potential to make us more aware of how drama and theatre are made” (Aston and Savona  1991: 5), but there are other elements beyond what can be encompassed by a semiotic reading of what is presented onstage that impact a production. These elements can be termed materialist conditions.

Materialist Conditions Cultural materialism “studies the implication of literary texts in history,” as Dollimore and Sinfield (1994: viii) define it, noting that this history encompasses not only the historical context of the writing of the text but also the historical context in which it is received; in the case of theater, the moment a production is staged. Taking Shakespeare as the focus of their analysis, they note that, because culture is continuously made and remade, “Shakespeare’s text is reconstructed, reappraised, reassigned all the time through diverse institutions in specific contexts” (Dollimore and Sinfield 1994: viii). Applying cultural materialism to performance analysis, Knowles (2004) argues that it is crucial to study not only the performance text (made up of all of those elements of a production available for semiotic analysis, as discussed above) but also the material conditions of production and reception. The conditions of production he identifies include the training and traditions of the actors, director, and designers; rehearsal processes and working conditions; theater architecture onstage and backstage; and the historical and cultural moment. The conditions of reception include publicity and reviews; the architecture and amenities in front of house and in the auditorium; the location and neighborhood of the theater building; transportation and ticket prices; and the historical and cultural moment of reception (which, given the length of time it can take to develop a theater production, can be somewhat different from the historical and cultural moment of production).



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The first step in analyzing material conditions of a production is to consider what theater is being produced. As Bennett (1997: 106) notes, “The selection or creation of a dramatic work for public performance obviously makes that work available for selection by potential audiences”; if it is not selected to be produced in the first place, it cannot be available for audiences to see, or for analysis. This selection process is value-­driven, as is the selection of who is allowed to make what theater and how. Kim Solga (2017) discusses the gender dimensions of this in relation to contemporary productions of Shakespeare, analyzing statistics for the Royal Shakespeare Company, Shakespeare’s Globe and the National Theatre. She points out that political gatekeeping by theater boards has limited the number of women directors, shaped the choice of plays they direct (frequently the more obscure histories and rarely the most well-­known and popular plays), and the spaces in which they are permitted to direct them (more usually smaller, secondary or studio theaters than main stages). Meanwhile, cultural gatekeeping from theater critics tends to judge productions on the notion of “clarity,” a term that “functions as a by-­word for the subsuming of gesture, action, and directorial interpretation to the authority of Shakespeare’s ‘text’, which reviewers often reference interchangeably with the idea of Shakespeare’s ‘intentions’” (Solga 2017: 108). This, somewhat manufactured, concept is, as Solga (2017: 108) notes, “powerfully, and influentially, raced, classed, and gendered,” and functions as a coercive tool of social control over whose interpretations of Shakespeare are considered worthy and whose not. Productions that work against the dominant ideology or value political interpretation over textual “clarity” or authorial “intentions” are frequently harshly critiqued, especially when they are directed by non-­traditional directors of Shakespeare. Funding systems, managerial structures, and working processes in a given theater, and in a theater culture as a whole, will also have an impact on what productions are made available for staging and how they are staged. In the United Kingdom, competitive and lengthy funding application processes, combined with a need for many theaters to secure corporate sponsorship and advertising income, as well as a certain amount of box office revenue, put pressure on theaters to seek some kind of economic security in their choice of productions. This can lead to a tendency toward producing what are perceived to be bankable, popular productions involving directors and creatives who are understood to be “safe bets” and at least a certain degree of star casting. This is particularly noticeable in the largest theaters, the economic and cultural giants of the system. In this kind of system, “Whatever the nature, content, or conscious theme of the production, as product  ...  its central and essentially capitalist message is inscribed virtually by necessity, within the system itself, and as such it tends to be overwhelmingly culturally affirmative” (Knowles  2004: 32). It is worth analyzing whether the values presented onstage are reflected in the working practices offstage and the financial structures on which a production rests. If not, the conflict between these two levels may very well have a diluting effect on the values a production may appear to project. The time frames involved in the process of developing a production also have an impact on the type of theater that is made. This is partly driven by economics and partly by the hierarchy of individuals involved in the process: who and what work is valued. As such, actors are usually the last to be brought into a process and will have to work within the constraints of not only the director’s vision and organization’s financial requirements but also costume and set design agreements that have been made long before the rehearsal

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p­ rocess began. This, for example, “limits them to the space and movement patterns that are thereby made available to them” (Knowles 2004: 31). This, in turn, limits the range of meanings available for them to generate and, thus, what is available for semiotic analysis. Theater architecture plays an often-­overlooked role in the determination of meaning. McAuley (1999: 27–28) insists that the “space the spectator is watching during the performance ... is always both stage and somewhere else” and that no matter how “convincing the fictional world may be, the stage itself is always also present at some level of our consciousness.” The architecture of the stage and auditorium will, therefore, have a considerable impact on the meanings available to read and may either reinforce or conflict with certain underlying values of the production. Bennett (1997: 139) argues that both the “physical arrangement of a theater as well as the degree of contact between performers and spectators” may structure “the interpretive strategies adopted by the collective audience.” Proscenium arch theaters create distance between performers and spectators, encouraging a passive absorbance of the spectacle presented. Thrust stages, theater in the round, or variations where the audience are more immersed in the performance space can encourage a more active engagement. Shakespeare’s Globe has often made much of the shared light in which many of their performances take place, as well as the standing groundlings in the yard, for fostering a unique and significant relationship between performers and audience (Conkie 2006; Carson and Karim-­Cooper 2008). However, Knowles (2004) cautions against some of the almost mythical rhetoric that arises around the stages of replica Elizabethan theaters in particular. He critiques the idea that these thrust stages are “empty spaces” that “allow “Shakespeare” to ... “speak for himself”’ as highly ideological and likely to result in the unquestioning reproduction of hegemonic values. Beyond the auditorium, the architecture of the theater building, and its location, will also communicate certain values and set up certain relationships with its audience before they even encounter the performance. “Theatre buildings incorporate within themselves indications of the practices they are designed to house,” and they curate an experience for an audience that is designed to be inviting and comfortable for certain groups of society and discouraging and uncomfortable for others (McAuley  1999: 37). Whether it is designed to welcome or impress, whether it is located within a commercial or tourist area or embedded in a community, in an economically secure or deprived area, and whether it is easy and affordable to access or not are all elements that will contribute to audience expectations of the kind of performance that will be staged there. Marketing is another example of how productions will create expectations for their audiences before they even enter the theater. Bennett (1997: 142) suggests, for example, that if “a play is publicized as serious drama, then the on-­stage signs will tend to be interpreted in light of this and comic elements devalued in the receptive process.” What values underpin a production can often be read in the marketing, publicity, and program materials that accompany it. To give an example from Shakespeare productions, the concept of radicalism was reclaimed in the mid 2010s as one of the prime marketing tools for cross-­ gender productions and those that involve other non-­traditional casting. Therefore, what had been considered risky or mere shock value in the 1990s and 2000s was then remarketed as “provocative,” “transgressive,” or offering a “fresh perspective.” This presented these techniques at a much higher value, suggesting that theaters and companies that employ such language are keen to be seen as cutting edge, concealing their perhaps much more conservative organizational structures.



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Reading these materialist elements will reveal values that underpin and influence the production regardless of whether they are in harmony or conflict with the thematic meanings of the play text or the performance itself. “All these elements of pre-­production will be emphasized or naturalized according to the ideology of the production itself” as Bennett (1997: 139) notes. Noting what is emphasized and what is de-­emphasized or obscured can also reveal key values. Reading performance closely, especially with an eye to its ideological underpinnings, means taking into account both the cultural materialist and the semiotic aspects. Meaning is not contained merely within the performance itself but influenced by these broader systemic issues and, ultimately, produced “through the discursive work of an interpretative community” (Knowles 2004: 17): an audience.

Audiences and Reception Theory Performance, as McAuley (1999: 125) asserts, is “a relationship between performer and spectator.” It does not only take place in space and time but, crucially, also takes place in front of an audience. How audiences experience, receive, or decode performance has been the basis of much study. Bennett (1997: 139) describes an audience as “an already constituted interpretive community, a group who bring to the performance their horizons of expectations” that consist of both their individual life experiences and histories with the theater, shaped by the pre-­production material discussed above. Brought together in the same space for the duration of the performance, they share an experience that creates specific conditions of production and reception comprising “the interactive relations between audience and stage” and between “spectator and spectator” (Bennett 1997: 139). In an interpretive community, some reactions at least tend to be shared. Strong emotional responses that can be physicalized or vocalized, such as “laughter, derision, and applause,” are “infectious” (Bennett 1997: 153). These communal reactions can be coercive; the pleasure of shared response and the fear of being othered or rejected by the group exert subtle pressures on individuals to conform to the majority’s reaction. This can result in avoidance of subversive or radical reactions and a tendency toward collective conservatism: “The audience, through homogeneity of reaction, receives confirmation of their decoding on an individual and private basis and is encouraged to suppress counter-­readings in favour of the reception generally shared” (Bennett 1997: 153).

Paying attention to when these emotional responses occur and how a production prompts or tries to control them can also point to the production’s underlying values. If, as Bergson (1980: 64) argues, “laughter is always the laughter of the group,” who is in that group and who is excluded? Who is laughing and who is laughed at? Knowles (2004: 110) argues that a theater “constructs its audiences” very specifically through the materials it presents to them based on an assumption of who they are. How a theater constructs its audience as a group of people who laugh at certain things (or certain others) can be a telling indication of the politics behind a production. Shakespeare’s Globe is a theatre that

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is particularly well known for the interactive relationship between audience and stage so it provides an interesting focus for the study of audience reactions. The audience there is constructed as an “unruly body” (Conkie 2006: 52) that is “particularly challenging and discerning” (Carson and Karim-­Cooper 2008: 122). This makes the Globe a place where laughter and other audience responses can have enormous power. The pressure this exerts can even, at times, shape the actors’ performances and the tone of the production (Conkie 2006). The actors are exposed to a gaze that is not merely passive and absorbing but actively engaged in constructing meaning through interaction. These meanings are, of course, then reabsorbed by that same audience.

Politics, Form, and Style It may seem odd to assert the importance of the form of a performance when much of that will be governed by the text, especially when using the plays of Shakespeare as examples. However, there is a certain amount of space between text and performance where choices about form can be made that reveal underlying values and politics. This is most obvious when a text is taken as the basis for adaptation and considerable deviation is made from the original. For example, Jo Clifford’s The Taming of the Shrew (2019), a co-­production between the Sherman Theatre, Cardiff, and Glasgow’s Tron Theatre, followed the story of Shakespeare’s Shrew and used chunks of the original text, but it also included interjections in contemporary language that spoke back to the text, and a range of Brechtian-­feminist techniques to disrupt the flow of the narrative: music and song, direct address with the use of microphones, multi-­rolling, and switching characters onstage. These changes in form challenged the text and directly addressed issues of gender and power, in order to create an explicitly feminist and queer revision of the play. The use of Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt can also be incorporated into productions that make less interventions into the actual text of the plays. These may seem at first glance to be more traditional, “straight” versions, but the use of techniques that distance or alienate the text can contribute a political commentary without adding or changing any language. Elements that contribute to such a distancing and encourage the audience to take an analytic standpoint can include music and song, movement and dance, comedy, and aspects of set and costume design. These same elements, however, can also be used to create other formal effects so must be analyzed carefully. Shakespeare arguably began as populist theater or at least theater that aimed to appeal to a popular, working-­class audience as much as to a refined, upper-­class one. However, its co-­option into the canon has meant that perceptions of it have shifted over the centuries to a position of serious culture. “‘Shakespeare’ in the UK is a cultural commodity first and foremost,” as Solga (2017: 108) and many others have observed, and who Shakespeare is for is a contentious political question. The form and style of a production can be indicators of that production’s answer to it. John McGrath (1996) outlines a number of differences between working-­class and middle-­class theaters, codifying what he sees as the essential components of working-­class theater. These include directness, comedy, lively and popular music, emotion, variety, moment-­by-­moment effect, immediacy and relevance to people’s lives, localism, and a sense of identity with the performer (McGrath  1996: 54–58).



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A production that aims to appeal to a working-­class or populist audience will likely include some or all of these elements, whether through rewriting, or adaptation, or alongside the unedited play text. A production that contains few or none of these elements, but rather their opposites, will be more likely to be aimed at a middle-­class audience and conform to the idea that Shakespeare belongs to the elite.

Production Analysis in Practice In this section, the processes discussed above are put into practice to analyze a relatively recent production of a Shakespeare play. The enduring popularity of Shakespeare means that there are constantly new performances being produced which reveal many different approaches to the text and, consequently, different values shaping those approaches. Although I concentrate my analysis on one production here, it should be possible to compare with other, very different productions of the same play that have taken place in the past number of years, each of which will reveal different underlying values. This analysis includes a consideration of some of the materialist conditions that underpinned the production; the production’s approach to text, form and style; audience interaction; the use of space and technology; and a semiotic analysis of selected moments that illustrate key aspects of the production’s presentation of gender and sexuality.

Contextual and Materialist Conditions In 2016, the then newly appointed Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe, Emma Rice, directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream for that theater’s summer season, dubbed the #WonderSeason. Shakespeare’s Globe is a replica Elizabethan theater that opened on London’s Bankside in 1997. It was conceived as a space for research into historical practices and, in its early days, it was highly concerned with “authenticity” and “original practices,” although it always made space for productions in other styles (Conkie  2006). It has a history of cross-­gender performances as well as at least some racially diverse casting, although the implications of this were not always progressive (Thompson 2006). It quickly became a key tourist site, known for its groundlings—­spectators who stand in the yard—­ and highly interactive relationship between stage and audience. Shakespeare’s Globe is a charitable organization that receives no regular government funding but is maintained through a combination of box office revenue, guided tours, education workshops, private donations, catering, and corporate sponsorship. When Emma Rice took over leadership, she was only the third Artistic Director in the theater’s history and the first woman to take on the role. She was considered by some to be a surprise choice as, despite being a prolific theater director, she had little experience with directing Shakespeare. She was known as a “popular female auteur” (Solga 2017: 117) with extensive experience in directing inventive physical theater adaptations, particularly of fairy tales and myths. The critical reaction to her appointment was mixed, with some praising the boldness of this selection (Gardner 2015) and others adopting a cautionary tone about a need to respect the classics (Billington 2015). It is worth noting, as we are

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analyzing this production with the benefit of several years’ hindsight, that Rice resigned from her position shortly after this production over conflicts with the theater’s board over her creative choices (Solga 2017). A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a formally complex comedy built on “a series of presumptive fictions ... nested” within one another (Chaudhuri 2017: 103) that repeatedly raises questions about the reality of the fictions it stages. Melissa Sanchez (2019: 112) suggests that the “sheer range of sexual possibilities” that the play stages also makes it particularly open to queer readings, and Rice leans into these queer possibilities by regendering Helena to Helenus and presenting an androgynous Puck with pansexual desires. In the first two decades of this century, Dream was one of the most frequently staged of Shakespeare’s plays and the most frequently staged comedy, making it an unsurprising choice for a director’s first season at the tourist-­oriented Globe, where box office revenue makes up a significant part of their income. The title of the season (Wonder) and the choice of this play suggest a focus on fantasy and romance, which is reinforced in Rice’s program introduction where she emphasizes the importance of storytelling and “tales of love, identity, ambition, home, fear and hope” (Shakespeare’s Globe 2016: 4). It is not surprising either that a director who made her name with Kneehigh theater company’s productions of The Red Shoes and Angela Carter’s Nights at the Circus would choose to direct a play that focuses on magic, fairies, love affairs, and the process of performance.

Form, Populism, and Multiculturalism Rice’s production took a considered approach to Shakespeare’s text, employing Tanika Gupta as dramaturg but ultimately keeping most of the original text unaltered. The regendering of several characters led to the changing of various pronouns, and slight adaptations to place names were made throughout to situate the production in a localized, contemporary context. All of the references to Athens were changed to Bankside, for example. A few colloquialisms and insults were updated to contemporary language. There was also a new prologue, delivered by Quince and Bottom dressed as Globe volunteer stewards, with other Mechanicals popping up all around the yard. This took the form of a front-­of-­house briefing, introduced the conceit of the Mechanicals being Globe volunteers, thus reinforcing the localization, and set up the level of audience interaction and mixing of performance and audience space that continued throughout the production. There was some additional background commentary in some of the scenes, particularly between the Mechanicals and when the nobles formed the audience for their performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe.” These small textual freedoms scattered throughout the performance created an overall impression of more changes than were actually observable upon close reading. The production included a considerable amount of music, dance, gymnastics, and circus elements that created a sense of variety performance. There was a multicultural cast with a range of accents and an eclectic mix of musical and design styles that also contributed to the impression of a contemporary, multicultural London setting. There was a noticeable Indian stylistic influence that carried through from the program and marketing imagery to the music, dance, set and costume design. Reviewers noted that this “strong Bollywood flavor” risked straying “into empty exoticism” (Swain  2016), but that, alongside the



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repeated references to Bankside and “Hoxton hipsters,” it was perhaps “closer to Brick Lane than Bollywood” (Norman  2016). Given the racially mixed population of contemporary London, it does beg the question whether these Indian influences were intended to make the production more “exotic” or more specific and localized. These formal and stylistic choices gave the production a populist, contemporary feel that appealed to a large audience—­ as evidenced by its sellout run and daily queues for returns (Mooney  2016)—­ but also specifically constructed that audience as young, fun, multicultural, Londoners with liberal values. While this is not necessarily the working-­ class audience McGrath (1996) envisions, the production contained many of the qualities he attributes to working-­class theater, and the audience it constructed, and obviously appealed to, was certainly not the traditional middle-­class Shakespearean audience.

Technology, Audience Interaction, and Use of Space The production’s technological interventions, audience interaction, and spatial dynamics combined to create an atmosphere of playfulness and possibility, which interestingly destabilized the space and traditions of the Globe Theatre. Shakespeare’s Globe was created as a space for experimentation, but it was specifically intended for experimentation with ideas of authenticity, originality, and the past, underpinned by “the assumption that Shakespeare  ...  always knew exactly what he was doing” and, therefore, that “a fresh approach to the original staging of his plays ... should be able to show us a lot more of his practical genius” (Gurr 2008: xvii–xviii, my emphasis). While the Globe has used artificial lighting for many years, in order to give evening performances, this was limited to the minimum required for visibility and aimed to mimic the daylight that would have been traditional. In short, limited lanterns and plain white light, although the conceit that this limited lighting rig made it authentic is dubious: “‘authentic’ (as if),” as one critic commented (Brown  2016). Rice’s production, by contrast, used multiple colored lighting effects, sound effects, amplification, and recorded music as well as live musicians. This horrified the Shakespearean purists to such an extent that it was cited as the reason for her early departure from the role of Artistic Director (Mooney 2016). The use of this technology, which is standard in almost every other theater, was so unprecedented at the Globe that it took on deeply subversive connotations. The use of microphones in Rice’s Dream was criticized for “losing direction and adding to confusion” (Fisher 2016), but this worked with the actors’ extensive use of the yard to create a subtly unsettling effect. Although the use of the yard for performers has no historical basis (Carson and Karim-­Cooper 2008: 48), it has often been incorporated into productions at Shakespeare’s Globe, just as interaction with the groundlings has, in attempts to capitalize on the special relationship that the Globe fosters with its audience. While this use of the yard has taken on a quasi-­authentic status through repetition over the years, Rice took it even further. Not only did characters enter and exit the stage through the yard, but three round platforms acted as extensions of the playing area. Characters popped up on these unexpectedly, crossed from one to another and up and down through the audience in between, sat there to join as audience to other characters, and engaged individual audience members in physical interactions. Edmund Derrington (2016), who

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played Lysander, noted that this created a sense of trepidation in the audience as well as enjoyment, so that even if they knew what to expect, they never knew quite where to expect it. This, combined with the use of microphones, worked to unsettle audience expectations, decentralize the stage, and change the way the performance was experienced on a sensory level. As sound became more generalized, visual perspectives were diversified, and experience became particularized as proxemic, and even tactile, relations between (some) cast members and (some) audience members were reconfigured. Puck, Helenus, Cobweb, Titania, and Oberon all, variously, held hands, flirted with, kissed, squirted water at, fell into, asked for help undressing from, and offered drinks to, members of the audience. This high level of tactile interaction, combined with the use of lighting and music, created a sensory experience that slipped away from theater: “the music and the dance seems to really take the audience into some other place, which lots of people say they come out of here and feel like they’ve been at a festival” (Derrington 2016). Although the Globe has always fostered its relationship between performer and audience and has emphasized the uniqueness of this, that relationship has always been part of what made the Globe “The Globe,” with all the historical and authentic connotations that name carries with it (Carson and Karim-­ Cooper 2008). In Rice’s production, the use of these tactics destabilized the sense of place to such an extent that it almost ceased to signify as the Globe, becoming layered with a sense of another place (outside the fictional locations of the play), making the auditorium a festival field: at once a space of new possibilities and a less-­specific, less-­rarefied environment.

Costume One of the most noticeable functions of costume in this production was to create a distinction between the world of the city and the world of the forest. Contemporary costumes for the city characters contributed to the siting of the performance on Bankside, particularly with the Mechanicals wearing Globe Volunteer uniforms. The costuming of the fairies, meanwhile, emphasized the fantastical and the queer as they wore a form of temporal drag, suggesting that they have been partying for over four hundred years by combining early modern aesthetics with those of contemporary cabaret and club scenes. Rice deliberately intended the fairies to inhabit a different temporality from the world of the city, Lovers and Mechanicals. This was made visually clear in the costuming of all the fairy characters. Skin colored leotards with white sequin nipple tassels were worn with gold ruffs, long white stockings were worn over fishnet tights, and overskirts with a renaissance outline were made out of strips of colored silk and open at the front, without petticoats or underskirts. There was no reverence in this adoption of elements of early modern costuming either. The costumes were noticeably distressed; “coated in a fine layer of dirt” and sometimes “literally slashed to pieces” (Waugh 2016), they created an overall impression not of the beautiful and authentic costuming for which the Globe is famed, but rather of a slightly tatty, though nevertheless “glorious clash of the modern and Elizabethan worlds” (Shakespeare’s Globe 2016: 9). The original practices of Globe costuming neither continue smoothly here nor are totally repudiated. Instead, elements of these original



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practices continue to circulate, bringing with them connotations of history, beauty, craftsmanship, and class; however, these elements are combined with others that are, typically, totally dissociated from them, to form a very disjunctive whole. The inclusion of traditional elements only emphasizes the disruption of that tradition.

Cross-­gender Performance and Representation Rice’s production employed a number of examples of cross-­gender performance, with Helena regendered to male, most of the Mechanicals regendered to female, and both male and female actors playing ambiguously gendered fairies, as well as an androgynous Puck. The regendering of Helena to Helenus (Ankur Bahl) also created the image of Helenus and Demetrius (Ncuti Gatwa) as a gay couple. In the program, Rice describes her choice to regender Helenus as a way of dealing with the difficulty of the Demetrius/Helena relationship. She suggests that “making it a gay relationship” makes sense of “why [Demetrius] has been pushing Helenus away” under the “social pressure to make a ‘good marriage’” (Shakespeare’s Globe 2016: 9). She also argues that this alteration makes Demetrius’s assertion that he has returned to his “natural taste” (4.1:173) at the end of the play even more meaningful, by implying that this taste is not just for an individual but a broader matter of embracing his sexuality. Rice’s production implies that internalized homophobia is the root cause of Demetrius’s violence and rejection of Helenus in the earlier part of the play. This reading would make their marriage at the end of the play a triumph for a marginalized couple over a strictly normative society. As such, this regendering choice can be read as a triumph for increasing diversity and representation (Harrison  2016). However, like many productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Rice’s production glosses over the fact that the influence of the magic flower is never removed from Demetrius, in the way it is removed from Lysander and Titania, which leaves it open to criticism that Demetrius has in fact been “turned” gay by magic, in the application of the flower. The negative connotations of this representation are troubling. Rice’s program notes are obviously an attempt to address this risk, and the production does its best to obscure the problem of the unremoved spell by emphasizing the sincerity of the romance between the couple. It does, however, only gloss over this issue, not going so far as to change the text or storyline to specifically remove the magic or address the issue within the world of the play.

Puck, Queerness, and Audience Interaction The representation of Puck took the production in a rather queerer direction, offering an opportunity to explore the possibilities created by crossing genders differently, toward androgyny in performance. There is a history of associating certain supernatural characters in Shakespeare with androgyny, particularly Puck and Ariel (Chaudhuri 2017). This has meant that the cross-­gender performance of these roles has become almost standard and is often considered separate from deliberate attempts to question gender roles with human characters. However, there is also a tendency to view their androgyny in these situations as

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sexless, desireless, and romantically and idealistically childlike. There was indeed something childlike about Owen’s Puck, though it was not an innocent or idealistic childishness but rather one of unsocialized violence, boundless energy, and lack of boundaries. Dashing about both stage and yard in light-­up trainers, making noises, shooting characters, and audience with a water pistol, they were repeatedly described as juvenile: “a crazy club kid” (Waugh 2016) or “a mini-­Pan on Ritalin” (Norman 2016). Although childish, this Puck is explicitly sexual and often violent, which draws attention to the fact that the possibilities opened up by queerness in this production are not always nice. What makes Katy Owen’s Puck particularly interesting is that the character’s androgyny is tied to a broad-­ranging and physical pansexual desire, suggested by Puck sexually pursuing, teasing, pining over, or assaulting characters of every gender, sexuality, species, and almost every age group. Together, these two elements make for a very queer Puck at the heart of a production that goes to some lengths to signal its commitment to gender and sexual diversity. Puck’s violence is repeatedly played as comedy, and the production skillfully makes the audience complicit in this. In their first appearance, the scene change between act 1, scene 2 and act 2, scene 1, Puck seems to be invisible to Quince (Lucy Thackeray) who is attempting to clear two large tables. They use this invisibility to mock and torment her over her efforts at lifting these, then hold up an index finger to the audience, turn and run at Quince as she is exiting, assaulting her with the finger, and then turning to the audience to laugh gleefully. Puck then deepens the connection with the audience as well as emphasizing the sexual element by widening their eyes and theatrically sniffing their finger, and then sticking out their tongue and waggling it as if about to lick it. The audience laughs at these antics that combine the immature, the violent, and the sexual, thereby sealing their complicity in the assault. The audience are not immune from Puck’s semi-­violent, quasi-­sexual attacks either. Moments later, Puck runs around spraying them with a water gun and kneels on the edge of the stage to target one individual right in front of them, and the audience laugh again. Puck continues to push the boundaries of the audience–performer relationship with more and more direct and invasive engagements. They take an audience member’s coffee and drink from it; they pull a man’s head against their chest, hold it there, and shake it slightly; they make an audience member eat half a banana and kiss them. These actions can arguably be described as performative examples of queer “counterintimacies,” a term that Berlant and Warner (1998: 562) use to distinguish queer “forms of affective, erotic, and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained through collective activity” from heteronormative intimacies that are confined to the private sphere. Owen (2016) describes how, on one occasion, she “went in for a kiss” with a “very elderly” man and “snogged him.” At least one critic found this moment disturbing, describing it as “intrusive not subversive” (Liversedge 2016). Implicit in this criticism is the sense that this interaction stretched the unwritten rules around consent inherent to the audience–performer contract. It is worth noting that Puck kissing an audience member seems to have generally been received with applause, and the man Owen (2016) snogged in the example above is described as looking “delighted that he was (a) kissed and (b) then applauded for his reaction to the kiss.” Berlant and Warner (1998) argue that what is considered “nice” or permissible in public is a heteronormative concept, with intimacy limited to the private sphere and no space allowed for visible queerness. This production clearly pushes those boundaries.



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Conclusion By destabilizing the sense of tradition attached to the Globe, layering it with a sense of other place and time, that is at once the here and now of Bankside 2016 and fantastically indeterminate, making space for queerness, and keeping the audience uncertain of what will happen next, Rice’s production constructs a public that allows for, welcomes, and appreciates these “counterintimacies” (Berlant and Warner 1998: 562). The sense that anything can happen, and probably will, coalesces in the figure of Puck whose sexuality refuses to be private but continues to spread into expanding spheres of the public. Making space for a gay couple in the quartet of lovers, and for more women in the Mechanicals, by selective regendering, alongside racially diverse casting, suggests underlying liberal and progressive values. However, there are limits to the radicalism of this production. It runs up against the fixed story of the text in portraying Demetrius as still under the influence of the magic flower; its Indian influences teeter on the brink of stereotype; despite its attempts to suggest a production grounded in the locality, given the Globe’s reputation, marketing strategies, and typical income streams, the majority of the audience it attracted were more likely to be tourists seeking a fleeting sense of connection to the city than locals, or middle class young hipsters, enjoying flirting with the idea of shaking up Shakespeare, without being radically politically challenged. Ironically, while being situated in the Globe may limit it in some ways, it is thanks to that specific setting that the production gains some of its radical destabilizing power. If it were not situated in that venue, its use of technology would not have been considered remarkable, and it could not, perhaps, have created quite the relationship with the audience which made it as unsettling (and exciting) as it was. By applying a combination of theater semiotics, analysis of the materialist context, consideration of audience reception, and what the form and style of the production can tell us about its politics, this close reading has revealed the complexity of values that underpin Rice’s Dream. Drawing together so many analytic processes makes reading performance for the values underpinning production complex, but it is important for exploring the cultural work that these performances do. As “theatre exists within a culture that it helps to construct” (McAuley 1999: 7), the importance of analyzing a production for these underlying values is in understanding not only how they are shaped by those values, but also how those values, filtered through that production, shape the culture we analyze.

References Aston, Elaine and George Savona 1991. Theatre as Sign-­System: A Semiotics of Text and Performance. London: Routledge. Bennett, Susan 1997. Theatre Audiences: A Theory of Production and Reception, 2nd edition. London: Routledge. Bergson, Henri 1980. Laughter. In Comedy, ed. W. Sypher, 58–180. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

Berlant, Lauren and Michael Warner 1998. “Sex in Public.” Critical Inquiry, 24 (2): 547–566. Billington, Michael 2015. “At Shakespeare’s Globe, Emma Rice Must Both Respect and Deconstruct the Classics.” The Guardian [Online], 1  May. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2015/may/01/shakespeares-­globe-­emma-­ rice-­kneehigh-­respect-­deconstruct-­the-­classics (accessed 20 January 2023).

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Bogatyrev, Petr 1976. “Semiotics in the Folk Theater.” In Semiotics of Art: Prague School Contributions, eds. L. Metejka and I. Titunik, 33–49. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Brown, Georgina 2016. “A Raunchy Dream of a Dream!” Event Magazine [Online], 14  May. Available from: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/ home/event/article-­3589384/A-­Midsummer-­ Night-­s-­Dream-­review-­raunchy-­dream-­dream-­ Emma-­Rice-­s-­inaugural-­production-­Globe-­s-­ artistic-­director-­exuberant-­boisterous-­illuminating­Midsummer-­Night-­s-­Dream.html (accessed 16 January 2023). Carson, Christie and Farah Karim-­Cooper (eds.) 2008. Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chaudhuri, Sukantha 2017. “Introduction.” In Shakespeare, W. (2017) “A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Sukantha Chaudhuri, 3rd edition (The Arden Shakespeare). London: Bloomsbury. Clifford, Jo 2019. “The Taming of the Shrew.” Directed by Michael Fentiman. Cardiff: Sherman Theatre, 28 Feb–16 March. Conkie, Rob 2006. The Globe Theatre Project: Shakespeare and Authenticity. Lampeter: Edwin Mellon Press. Derrington, Edmund 2016. “Performance Interviews, 21–22  July.” Available from Shakespeare’s Globe archive: https://archive. shakespearesglobe.com/CalmView/Record. aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog&id=GB+3316+ SGT%2fED%2fLRN%2f2%2f93%2f1 (accessed 21 September 2023). Dollimore, Jonathan and Alan Sinfield (eds.) 1994. Political Shakespeare: Essays in Cultural Materialism, 2nd edition. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Eagleton, Terry 1991. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso. Elam, Keir 1980. The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama. London: Routledge. Fisher, Philip 2016. “Theatre Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Shakespeare’s Globe.” British Theatre Guide [Online] May.

Available from: https://www.britishtheatreguide. info/reviews/a-­m idsummer-­n ig-­s hakespeare-­ s-­g-­12843 (accessed 16 April 2022). Gardner, Lyn 2015. “Emma Rice Will Have Them Swinging from the Chandeliers at Shakespeare’s Globe.” The Guardian [Online] 1 May. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/­ t h e a t r e b l o g / 2 0 1 5 / m a y / 0 1 / e m m a -­r i c e -­ shakespeares-­globe (accessed 20 January 2023). Gurr, Andrew 2008. Foreword. In Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment, eds. C. Carson and F. Karim-­ Cooper, xvii–xx. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, Daniella 2016. “Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Globe).” The Mortal Fool 28 June. Available from: https://themortalfool. com/2016/06/28/a-­midsummer-­nights-­dream-­ is-­a-­wonder/ (accessed 16 April 2022). Knowles, Ric 2004. Reading the Material Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Liversedge, Belinda 2016. “Review: A Mad and Beautiful Dream at the Globe.” Londonist [Online] May. Available from: https://londonist. com/2016/05/midsummer-­n ight-­s -­d ream (accessed 16 April 2022). McAuley, Gay 1999. Space in Performance: Making Meaning in the Theatre. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. McGrath, John 1996. A Good Night Out: Popular Theatre, Audience, Class and Form, 2nd edition. London: Nick Hern Books. Mooney, Lauren 2016. “Emma Rice Tried to Shake Up the Globe. Sadly It’s Chosen to Cling to the Past.” The Guardian [Online] 26 October. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/­ commentisfree/2016/oct/26/emma-­rice-­globe-­ theatres-­artistic-­director (accessed 22  January 2023). Norman, Neil 2016. “Theatre Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Shakespeare’s Globe.” Daily Express [Online] 13 May. Available from: https://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/ theatre/669708/Theatre-­review-­A-­Midsummer-­ Night-­s -­D ream-­a t-­t he-­S hakespeare-­s -­G lobe (accessed 22 April 2022).



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Owen, Katy 2016. “Performance Interview 1, 24 August.” Available from Shakespeare’s Globe archive: https://archive.shakespearesglobe.com/ CalmView/Record.aspx?src=CalmView.Catalog& id=GB+3316+SGT%2fED%2fLRN%2f2% 2f93%2f2&pos=2 (accessed 10 September 2022). Pavis, Patrice 1985. “Theatre Analysis: Some Questions and a Questionnaire.” New Theatre Quarterly 1 (2): 208–212. Sanchez, Melissa 2019. Shakespeare and Queer Theory. London: The Arden Shakespeare. Shakespeare, William 2016. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Directed by Emma Rice. London: Shakespeare’s Globe. 30 April–11 September. Shakespeare’s Globe 2016. A Midsummer Night’s Dream Programme. London: Shakespeare’s Globe.

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Solga, Kim 2017. “Shakespeare’s Property Ladder: Women Directors and the Politics of Ownership.” In The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, ed. J. Bulman, 104–121. Swain, Marianka 2016. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s Globe.” The Arts Desk [Online] 6 May. Available from: https://­theartsdesk. com/theatre/midsummer-­n ights-­d ream-­ shakespeares-­globe-­0 (accessed 22 April 2022). Thompson, Ayanna (ed.) 2006. Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance. London: Routledge. Waugh, Rosemary 2016. “Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe.” Exeunt [Online] 30 April. Available from: http://exeuntmagazine. com/reviews/review-­a -­m idsummer-­n ights-­ dream-­at-­the-­globe/ (accessed 16 April 2022).

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Bridging the Gap between Page and Performance Poetry Karen Simecek

Introduction In academic discussions of the value of poetry, it is often assumed that poetry is encountered in the private reading space with little attention given to the experience of poetry in performance at a time when performance poetry (whether on the stage or on video) is increasing in popularity, with poets such as Kae Tempest, George the Poet, and Benjamin Zephaniah becoming household names through their performances. Take, for instance, the recent book The Value of Poetry by Eric Falci (2020). In his account, he places great emphasis on the role of form in poetry. He writes, “The good poem asks its reader to look closely at the configuration of words that constitute it rather than to see straight through them to their denotations” (Falci 2020: 5). We see the same emphasis on the need to “look” at a poem, rather than experience the poem, in many philosophical analyses of poetry. For instance, Prinz and Mandelbaum consider the poem as an “aesthetic object” (2015: 84) and argue that “In poetry words are objects of attention in their own right, independent of what they express” (2015: 69). Equally, in poet Don Patterson’s analysis of lyric poetry, he offers the following: “Our formal patterning most often supplies a powerful typographical advertisement. What it advertises most conspicuously is that the poem has not taken up the whole page, and considers itself somewhat important  ...  Silence—­both invoked and symbolized by the white page, and specifically directed by the gaps left by lineation, stanza and poem—­ underwrites the status of the poem as significant mark” (2007: 62). His emphasis on “white space” here prioritizes the page poem in understanding how lyric poetry functions and consequently its value (even though he appeals to the performative notion of silence, which

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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he treats metaphorically). Of course, such an approach to poetry does capture much of how we experience reading poetry and reflects how many literature courses train future critics to engage with the text, that is, to look for those features of the work that are common to all reading experiences in an attempt to universalize our understanding of poetry. However, does such prioritization of the look of the poem and the formal features of the work obscure other important aspects of poetry and its value? Does such analysis prevent a fuller analysis of how poetry works and what it has to offer? Consider the notion of voice. When we focus solely on the look of the poem, it is difficult to take seriously the role of an actual voice, speaker, or addresser in the poem. Returning again to Falci, he argues that “The notion that a poem has a ‘voice’ is a fiction—­ there’s no body or self threaded into the page, just inky (or digitized) marks ... Poems are often construed as confected acts of speech, as potentially vocalizable, but poems as we have them tend to be written: their vocalization is always disjointed, at odds with whatever we might understand to be their original voicing (itself another kind of fiction) ... The chimerical quality of poetry, then, also inheres in its incessant ventriloquizing of a voice that has no source” (Falci 2020: 9–10). For Falci, any sense that the page poem makes use of voice in a literal sense is illusory. Consequently, he argues that in page poetry, the words of the poem are disembodied, cut off from their authors, and therefore ought to be appreciated as simply “marks on the page.” As a direct challenge to such analysis of poetry as an aesthetic object (including the prioritization of form in analysis), I argue that we must appreciate the relationship between the page poem and its relation in performance, focusing on three areas of connection: the significance of body and voice, the lyric quality of presentness, and the role of the body in meaning making. We must not only acknowledge poetry’s evolution from the oral poetry of antiquity, but also appreciate the way in which contemporary poetry is practiced, which means embracing the role of the embodied voice in both performed poetry and page poetry. The argument that I present in this chapter does not seek to address the value of poetry in its totality for there is much to be gained from appreciating many works of poetry in visual terms. Instead, I wish to highlight a particular relationship between performed poetry and lyric poetry as a way of highlighting aspects of value, namely those concerning the affective quality of poetry, which has been overlooked. We need to shift our appreciation of what counts as the paradigm of engagement with poetry. Rather than exclusively looking at poetry on the page, we ought instead to broaden our view to consider the relationship between poetry on the page and poetry in performance, and such a broadening will help to deepen our appreciation of poetry on the page.

Body and Voice In the performance of a poem, the embodied voice of the performer and their identity is foregrounded. When a poet stands on stage with the microphone in front of them, it is undeniable who is speaking the words. Not only does the audience appreciate the connection between the speaker and the words, but the body of the performer adds to the aesthetics of the poem by virtue of the texture of their voice (timbre and pitch), the pace of delivery (tempo, rhythm, and use of silence), and their intonation (which expresses their

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relationship to the words spoken, e.g., spoken intimately, as endorsed and sincere or spoken with a sense of distance, as invoking another’s voice or through irony). The poem performed on stage therefore brings an additional layer of aesthetic and affective richness as well as expressive control of the performer. However, further to this, the embodied voice also provides context for the words spoken in that it places the words spoken in relation to the speaker. As Somers-­Willett comments, “the act of live performance  ...  hinges on the author’s body and its visible markers. The author’s physical presence ensures that certain aspects of his or her identity are rendered visible as they are performed in and through the body, particularly race and gender but extending to class, sexuality and even regionality. Embodied aspects of identity provide lenses through which the audience receives the poem” (2012: 69–70). For instance, consider Neil Hilborn’s “OCD” that makes reference to his neurodiversity, Elizabeth Acevedo’s “Hair” that relates to her racial identity, and Lee Mokobe’s poem about his experience as a trans man in “Toilets, Bowties, Gender and Me.” As philosopher Sherri Irvin comments, “A crucial thing about bodies is that they are not detachable from the persons whose bodies they are. The body is deeply intertwined with one’s identity and sense of self, and aesthetic consideration of bodies thus raises acute ethical questions” (Irvin  2016: 1). In particular, we have an ethical responsibility to acknowledge the context of the body as part of the work. The body of the performer is an undeniable part of the poetic experience, and to attempt to engage with performance poetry blind to the body of the performer is to fail to acknowledge the speaker of the words. Such a failure is an ethical failure. As I have argued elsewhere, “Hearing the voice of the poet is relational: one encounters the voice of another—­it is externally located both in the sense of being centred in the poet on the stage but also in how their voice reverberates around the room—­but one always hears in relation to oneself (the location of the hearer). As a consequence, the audience must resist separating the sound of the words from the speaker and actively attend to the words as centred in another” (Kirkpatrick et al. 2021: 176). The ethical significance of the voice is located in the importance of acknowledging others as speakers and hearing what they have to say, which is central to treating one another with dignity. Similarly, Peter Middleton argues that “performance stages the presence of the author as a challenge to the audience to listen and confront what it means to assert these words, or depart, literally or figuratively withdrawing from the negotiations enforced by the presence of the author alongside and not only within, the text” (2009: 228–229). This marks an important difference in the expectations an audience has of page poetry and performance poetry; in the case of the latter, the audience expects the poem performed to be spoken in the author’s voice. However, as noted by Somers-­Willett, this still allows for the possibility of the poet creating a persona through their performance, but such a persona is never divorced from their voice and so always bears some relationality to their body. In her discussion, Somers-­Willett offers the example of Patricia Smith’s poem Skinhead in which Smith, a Black American woman, gives voice to the persona of a White supremacist. The audience are not able to divorce the words spoken from the context of Smith’s body and the resulting tension between the two perspectives. From this analysis, it seems on the surface that the poem in performance functions in a distinctive way from poetry read off the page in virtue of the visibility of the body of the performer. Middleton argues that in the public reading of a work, the presence of the body



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contributes to what is expressed or communicated through the poem: “Communication is not limited to mental acts mediated by language. It has many other material routes through matter and movement. Poetry readings are powerful reminders that sign systems are also dynamic material structures, because sound is a material phenomenon experienced as vibration in the body, as well as a mental perception” (240). Here, Middleton highlights the way in which words spoken aloud enrich communication through the relationship between body text and audio text. What happens when we hear someone speak is that we hear the words as embodied, that is, as located in the body of another. In the private reading, the body of the poet is absent, thereby presenting the words of the poem as “voiceless” until the reader brings them to life. Middleton goes on to add “The audible sound of a voice performing a poem literally amplifies the words, and in doing so can make evident features likely to be less evident in the near-­silence of private reading which will produce only mentally imagined sounds (or possibly words muttered quietly under the breath). When a word is vocalized, much more than the larynx and a small part of the mouth are involved: the entire body resonates with it, as it does with all audible sound waves” (240). This idea of amplification is important since what the embodied voice brings with it is a sense that there is a person behind the words, and therefore we receive the words of the poem with that context in play. However, according to Middleton, the contribution of the body in aesthetics of the live performance marks an important distinction between page poetry and poetry in performance. For Middleton, the silent (or near-­silent) reading that may only involve imagined sounds will lack bodily resonance. It seems right to say that there is such a difference in the involvement of bodies in the live performance compared with the private reading experience, but it does not mean that the body and voice do not contribute to the private reading experience at all, only that their involvement differs in degree. As Robert Von Hallberg argues, “Poetry and music collaborate deeply and darkly. Sounds warrant what poets say by giving words palpable form: one hears the orders, senses achievement, and extends credence. Musicality underwrites the authority of a proposition (Pope’s “Whatever is, is right”) or of an observation (Eliot’s “I had not thought death had undone so many”), but the collaboration of sound and sense goes further” (2008: 228). Many poets writing primarily for the page consider the deep relationship between sound and sense and aural aesthetics in the construction of their works; in other words, they take into account how the words of their poem feel as spoken by them (even if this is imagined).1 As Louis Zukofsky proclaimed, “the sound of the words is sometimes 95% of poetic presentation.” Poetic devices such as assonance, consonance, and alliteration all make use of the heard quality of the words in supporting the structure of the work and enhancing the affective quality of the poem. However, the poet’s own voice—­that is their natural rhythm, way of forming phrases and their choice of words—­informs their poetic style. In reading a whole collection by the same author, we can begin to appreciate their distinctive voice in the language of their poems, especially in cases where a poet also invokes the voice of other poets; the contrast is often very clear and helps create a sense of dialogue within the work (take TS Eliot as an example here). Furthermore, many textbooks about how to read poetry emphasize the role of sound in page poetry and argue that poetry is meant to be heard (even if such experience afforded only informs part of what the poem can do) and speak of the importance of “hearing the voice of the speaker.”2

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In her book, Voicing American Poetry, Lesley Wheeler attempts to bring the analysis of performance poetry together with page poetry, noting the significance of sound and the involvement of the body in the writing and reception of both. She writes, “Physical voice and auditory processing are important to poetry’s composition, circulation and reception” (2009: 23). Citing research in neuroscience, she goes on to argue that silent reading off the page is an embodied activity in terms of the processes that underpin “subvocalization” (or “inner voice”). As Wheeler acknowledges, “Sound and voice exist, not in closed poetry collections, but in the act of reading silently. Any act of silent reading engages our physical selves, but poetry’s strategies of sound saturation, and the very expectations of sound saturation we bring to poetry, may intensify how the silent reading of poetry involves our bodies” (27). Although appreciation of the role of sound in both performance and silent reading is significant and begins to help us appreciate the connection between these two modes of poetic text, it still weds us to an understanding of poetry in which the audience and reader are mere hearers of the work rather than acknowledging the ways in which their bodies contribute to how the poem works.

The Poem as an Object and the Poem as an Event As mentioned in the introduction, another way in which page poetry is treated as distinct from performance poetry is that the former is considered an object and the latter an event. The tools for analysis are therefore treated as distinct, with the page poem being treated in the manner of visual art and the performance poem drawing on tools from the world of theater. Such a distinction has been embedded as a result of the advent of New Criticism in the twentieth century, which emphasized the close reading approach to texts in revealing the relationship between form and content. Wimsatt and Beardsley’s argument for the affective fallacy in literary criticism was influential on the movement and declared the primacy of the written text: “The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its results” (1949: 31). According to such a view, to consider the role of the reader or the poet in how the poem functions is to turn away from the poem, the very thing that was supposed to be under study. As the argument goes, the poem therefore ought to be treated in the manner of a visual artwork, i.e., as an aesthetic object. In contrast, we can see that there is much in common between the theater performance and the performed poem. The performer typically stands on stage, the audience remain quiet, and the words of the poem unfold in time (the audience are not in a position to return to a previous line but have to go with the delivery of the performer). However, such poetry is not merely temporal but also spatial: it unfolds in a (performance) space and necessarily involves a social dimension between performer/poet and audience. The audience are placed in the role of witness (which may or may not be the addressee), and consequently, they are placed in a position where demands on their attention and response are made visible (whether the audience meet those demands is another matter). The idea of the aesthetic object does not deny the role of experience in our engagement and enjoyment with a work, but rather in the analysis of how it functions and its value. According to such a view, the work is self-­contained and does not depend on an audience or reader to



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contribute in order to realize the work. There is no action. The work exists independently of any audience or reader. The work has a spatial but undefined temporal existence. In the case of understanding poetry as an event, this entails that the poem is a happening (it unfolds in space and time—­it has a location and a defined beginning and end), and in order for it to be realized, it requires a performer (or reader) and observer (a role that is fulfilled minimally by the performer). In the case of understanding a work as an aesthetic event, the results are as much a part of the work as the text; we appreciate the text in its spatial and temporal context. Returning again to Peter Middleton, in his essay “Poetry’s Oral Stage,” he discusses Allen Ginsberg’s public reading of Howl at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in the 1950s. Middleton writes, “The most notable feature of the entire reading was undoubtedly Allen Ginsberg’s sheer presence as he performed his testimony, beginning with the emphatic first-­person assertion: ‘I saw the best minds of my generation etc.’ Ginsberg’s magnificent assertion of prophetic judgment filled the first person with his substantial presence, closing the gap between author and text, saying in effect, ‘I, Allen Ginsberg saw these things and am telling you now’” (216). In the live performance, Ginsberg was taken to have performed an action, that of testimony. This not only drew attention to his embodied voice and fulfilment of the lyric I, but it also drew attention to the present quality of the work; the testimony is now taking place in this space. In his discussion, Middleton goes on to comment: “the semantic repertoire of the written text was extended by its performance in several notable ways: by the location of the poem in a particular place within a defined ritual, by the force of the poet’s presence as he read, by the addition of sound to the act of reception, and by the enfolding intersubjective drama generated as the lines were spoken” (218). For Middleton, there is an asymmetrical relationship between the poem on the page and the one performed by Ginsberg: in the live performance, additional context was provided that enhanced the page version. The live performance opened up a social role for the poem in creating a dynamic between audience, performer, and the poem. Another example can be found in Joelle Taylor’s performance of her poem C+NTO. In particular, the performance of the line “I can’t remember [pause] the names [pause] of all my dead friends.” The way the audience receive the line “I can’t remember” is heard as a declaration of forgetting and is felt as the poet on stage wants to but cannot. The live quality of the performed poem heightens this sense that in this moment the poet cannot bring these names to mind. In contrast, when read on the page, the reader is more aware of the line in its structural context, so loses some of its declarative power. However, there are still moments of the performative when read on the page. In the print version of the poem, the opposite page simply contains the words “remember this,” which recreates to some degree the same declarative power because the reader does not have surrounding text to contextualize the words, so the reader experiences the words as being directed at them. The next lines appear alone on the next two pages. The page turns recreate the pauses that Taylor puts in her own performance. By requiring the reader to turn the page, the pause and silence is forced upon them in their reading experience. This raises the question: are the analytic tools from theater and performance relevant to understanding the value of poetry on the page? Or in the case of poems such as Howl and C+NTO, was the poem transformed into another type of work on reading it aloud to an audience? In his Theory of the Lyric, Jonathan Culler argues that lyric poetry ought to be understood in terms of being an event. Culler’s paradigm is neither performance poetry nor page

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poetry read aloud but the stuff of poetry collections. He argues that lyric poetry is the “iterative and iterable performance of an event in the lyric present, in the special ‘now’, or lyric articulation ... Fiction is about what happened next; lyric is about what happens now” (Culler 2015: 226). By referring to poetry as an event, he does not insist that the poem must be read aloud in order to be realized, but attempts to highlight the same phenomenon Middleton identifies in his analysis of Ginsberg’s performance of Howl, namely, the way in which the lyric poem is able to use language declaratively and is constructed around the act of address. To address another is to perform a particular kind of action. It is a spatial relationship that puts the speaker in a directional relationship with the addressee (and according to Culler’s notion of the triangulation of address, the reader as a witness of that speaker–addressee relationship). Performing an action also has the quality of a defined temporality and therefore qualifies as a happening (and we can think of everyday examples where the written word is capable of having an event like quality such as my text message to my partner asking that he puts the bin out; in this case, my words have a relational quality; I am addressing him and such address has a temporal quality). He goes on to add, “Nothing need happen in the poem because the poem itself is a happening” (226). Culler offers the example of Shelley’s “Adonais” in support: Oh weep for Adonais—­he is dead! Wake, melancholy Mother, wake and weep! Yet wherefore? Quench within their burning bed Thy fiery tears

The power of poetic address is in the present quality of invocation. The commands of “weep,” “wake,” and “quench” are not presented as past and complete but as present action. It is precisely the way in which the lyric captures the present through a language imbued with illocutionary and perlocutionary force that connects it with performed poetry. By experiencing poetry read aloud and in performance, the audience become more sensitive to what the poem demands of them. From Culler, it seems that the page poem also places demands on the reader, but the reader must come to the poem sensitive to such demands. Our experiences of engaging with poetry in the live performance can therefore help us to become more sensitive readers to the presentness in page poetry and to appreciate poetry’s distinctiveness from narrative forms. As critic Susan Stewart writes, “the sound of poetry is heard in the way that a promise is heard. A promise is an action made in speech ... something that ‘happens’, that ‘occurs’, as an event and can be continually called on, called to mind, in the unfolding present” (2002: 104). By prioritizing the importance of sound, we can begin to appreciate the illocutionary and perlocutionary force of the poetic use of language because the words are being said both with intention and make demands on the hearer of those words. Furthermore, poet and critic James Longenbach (2004) argues that we ought to pay attention to the role of sound in expressing the unfolding of thought: “the sound of thinking in poetry—­not the sound of finished thought but the sound of a mind alive in the syntactical process of discovering what it might be thinking” (73–74). This point is also echoed by poet and critic Angela Leighton (2009), who emphasizes the experience of the poem as being that of a mode of discovering rather than discovery. The poem is not



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fixed, complete, or final; instead, the poem is dynamic, process-­driven, and alive. Treating a poem as an object (and therefore focusing on its formal features and structure) encourages the treatment of the poem as final, completed, and closed. What Stewart, Longenbach, and Leighton all highlight is the need to view poetry as open-­ended and ongoing. In other words, an active happening that can only be experienced in the moment of engagement. Bringing together the discussion of voice and body (above) with this understanding of presentness in poetry, we can begin to see a deep connection between page poetry and performed poetry. The importance of sound in poetry (both on the page and on the stage) is not merely the way in which the body contributes to the sounding of words but also to understanding the poem as a happening, i.e., as an event. When we hear a sound, this sets up a relationship between a speaker and a listener (or between the origin of the sound and the receiver), which is central to both the experience and the value of the work.

Embodied Meaning In performance, it is clear that the body contributes meaning (at least insofar it provides context to the words). As Julia Novak highlights, “Seeing a poetry performance on video without the sound will reveal very little about the contents of a poem: body communication is meaningful in live poetry only in its verbal and paralinguistic context. However, body behaviour can modify the meaning suggested by the verbal text ... the body’s contribution in a live poetry performance is not simply a redundant add-­on to the verbal” (Novak 2011: 147). There are many examples where bodily gestures serve to undermine or reinforce the meaning of the work. In this section, I want to continue forging my bridge between performed poetry and page poetry by considering the role of the body in meaning making. What I argue here is that in the context of performance, the role of the body of both the poet and the audience is foregrounded in appreciation and interpretation of the work. In the case of the page poem, the embodiment of meaning is left incomplete and must be completed by the reader. The body dynamics in the reading experience are therefore less obvious, but it does not mean that they are not present and necessary in the work. In his book, The Meaning of the Body, Mark Johnson argues that philosophers of language have prioritized spoken and written words and sentences in their analyses of meaning making and failed to consider the “deepest roots of meaning,” which includes bodily meaning. He goes on to argue that “emotion and feeling lie at the heart of our capacity to experience meaning” (2007: 53). To support his claim, he gives the example of doubt, which he argues cannot be properly understood without felt experience: “The meaning of doubt is precisely [the] bodily experience of holding back assent and feeling a blockage of the free flow of experience toward new thoughts, feelings and experiences” (53). On such a view of meaning, it is clear that we ought to acknowledge the role of the embodied experience in the reception and value of poetry, whether experienced in the live performance or in private reading. To better appreciate the role of the body in our engagement with poetry on the page, we can look to performed poetry where the

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embodied experience is more explicitly drawn into our understanding of the work. In particular, it is in the live performance that we are most keenly aware of the feedback loop that places the audience in a dynamic relation to the poet and poem. However, this is also true of our engagement with poetry on the page, and it is just less obviously the case since we are not encountering other bodies in the moment of reading. What is happening in the private reading experience is responding and making meaning that is the result of the reader’s embodied engagement with the work. In other words, affect is as much a part of our engagement with and appreciation of a page poem as it is in the live performance. In order to develop this thought, Ken Wilder’s notion of beholding will be helpful in articulating the nature of the bodily dynamics between the work and the audience/reader in meaning making. Although Wilder is focused on understanding situated art (that is, artworks that are site-­specific or drawn on the context of their physical place), his view applies more generally. He argues that “the beholder—­as an anticipated presence—­must do something: she has a role to play, namely, to complete the work. Not because the work is somehow lacking, but rather because such imaginative and ideational acts are not only anticipated by the artist (and thus licensed) but also necessary in order to be able to uncover semantic content” (2020: 1). There is a crucial role for the audience/reader in the realization of meaning in the aesthetic experience of the work. The word depends on its being engaged with. Wilder’s notion of beholding is indebted to Wolfgang Iser’s reader response view. Iser argued that a work of literature has no meaning outside of its realization in the mind of the reader. He writes: As a literary text can only produce a response when it is read, it is virtually impossible to describe this response without also analyzing the reading process. Reading ... sets in motion a whole chain of activities that depend both on the text and on the exercise of certain basic human faculties. Effects and responses are properties neither of the text nor of the reader; the text represents a potential effect that is realized in the reading process. (1978: ix)

A literary work is meant to be read and therefore must be considered in this context by examining the response of the reader through the reading experience. Iser argues, “The work is more than the text, for the text only takes on life when it is realized, and furthermore the realization is by no means independent of the individual disposition of the reader—­ though this in turn is acted upon by the different patterns of the text” (1972: 279). Such realization involves the embodied engagement of the reader. Literary works, particularly many poetic examples, contain cues or signs to aid the reader in discovering for herself the meaning of the work, for instance, by involving certain images, attending to sound, and calling for response. Because the reader is involved in creating meaning in this way (through their experience and interpretation of the work), the meaning has more weight and significance for the reader. Particularly, it is because the reader must consider the possible associations, connections, and their emotional responses in making sense of the work; it crucially makes sense to that reader. This involvement of the reader is what sustains the reader’s interest in the work: “A literary text must therefore be conceived in such a way that it will engage the reader’s



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imagination in the task of working things out for himself, for reading is only a pleasure when it is active and creative” (Iser 1972: 280). In other words, engaging the reader in the right way allows the reader to be creative and active by forging connections, evoking the imagination, and grasping the meaning, which sustains the reader’s interest in the work. As Iser states, the overarching reader-­response approach “lays full stress on the idea that, in considering a literary work, one must take into account not only the actual text but also, and in equal measure, the actions involved in responding to that text” (1972: 279). In his preface, Wilder notes that his view is focused on situated art, i.e., “artworks that are sensitive to their site and anticipated audience and, while not necessarily in situ in a strong sense, are purposively sited within specific contexts, drawing aspects of that situation—­not only spatial but also institutional—­into the remit of the encounter” (xvii). Wilder’s concern is with artworks that draw on context in their meaning-­ making affordances. Although he is discussing visual art, this is applicable to the case of poetry, in particular spoken-­word poetry where the body and the staging bring the context to the words of the poem and provide the situation in which the audience engages with the work. The poet performs the work to the audience and presents the work with the expectation of the contribution of the audience (this should not merely be understood in terms of audience participation, although that does form a large part of the practice of performance poetry but simply in the affective atmosphere the audience provide, including silence). As Wilder highlights, a consequence of such a view is that “to remove a work from its original context will, indeed, change its meaning” (xv). Wilder therefore places an important role on the “beholder” or audience in that they must complete the work so that the work must be experienced rather than being an object. Wilder holds that “situated works therefore perform a locative function, in terms of providing indexical cues as to the position the beholder must adopt in order to place herself in the requisite experiential connection to the work’s meaning. As such, they facilitate demonstrative or, more generally, indexical thought with respect to the virtual real of the artwork” (xv). Of course, there is no body movement of the poet in the case of reading off the page, so how does the body contribute context? Returning to Mark Johnson’s analysis, he argues that the philosophy of art and aesthetics ought to be concerned with meaning in experience. He writes, “aesthetics is about the conditions of experience as such, and art is a culmination of the possibility of meaning in experience” (213). He further adds that “linguistic meaning is parasitic on the primordial structures and processes of embodied interaction, quality and feeling” (218). In other words, we must shift away from a separation of analysis of the meaning of works purely in terms of their words and sentences but to attend to the linguistic in the context of embodied experience. Johnson argues that it is in the use of images, metaphors, rhythm, rhyme, etc., which creates an experience that is not only cognitive but affective, and both dimensions of experience are equally relevant to the meaning-­ making potential of the work. Part of the issue with the treatment of the poem as an object is that it sets up the relationship between the poem and reader in terms of subject and observer. On such a model of engagement with a poem, the reader does not contribute anything of themselves to the work. The meaning is fixed, and it is for the reader to simply identify that meaning

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contained within. When thinking of the poem as an event, the reader is drawn into the re-­creation of the work (through their active reading) and engages with the emergence of meaning to which they are a necessary part.

A More Inclusive Poetics In this final section, I wish to explore an important consequence of this re-­evaluation of lyric poetry as bringing together words and bodies, namely, how such a conception of lyric poetry can lead to more inclusive poetics. The potential for greater inclusivity runs in two dimensions: first, as discussed above, by bringing the body into the significance of the work, we are in a position to properly acknowledge the contribution of unjustly marginalized voices not only where the poem explicitly addresses identity but also for all contributions made. Second, and relatedly, this also opens up our understanding of lyric poetry to include Deaf poetics and forms of Deaf poetry, including both braille (where the primary mode of engagement is bodily through the sense of touch) and sign-­language poetry (where the primary mode of engagement is through bodily movement). In these final remarks, I focus on Deaf poetry as a way of teasing out one of the upshots of the chapter, that is, what we ought to look to develop is a cluster concept of poetry that seeks links between different poetic categories rather than narrowing down our analysis to just one sub-­set of poetic practice and engagement. In the case of Deaf poetry, the separation of performance and page poetry leaves such works without an adequate framework for analysis. On the page, the poem is treated as an object. In the case of performance, the emphasis is placed on the relationship between sound, text, and body. However, in the case of sign-­language poetry, sound does not form part of the performance; instead, movement is central. In the case of braille poetry, touch is the medium of engagement that precludes a formal textual analysis of the work. The argument presented in this chapter seeks to connect different modes of poetic expression through a cluster understanding of poetry where we look for connections between different poetic modes rather than attempting to divide. Jim Cohn in his 1986 article “The New Deaf Poetics: Visible poetry” argues that what connects Deaf poetry with hearing poetry is the centrality of images and imagery. Cohn argues that what connects Deaf and hearing poetry cannot be musicality and wordplay since both appeal to the sound and experience of sound of language. He writes, “Too much is lost in translation, lost to senses of them that do not have hearing. The English language poetry of the Deaf using meter and rhyme seems imitative, unnatural, at best tied to some nostalgia for sound heard before deafness occurred, or tied to a traditional poetics buried in the past, not of the present” (Cohn 1986: 264). Such analysis helps to reveal the way in which the body and present quality of the poem is central to understanding Deaf poetry without needing to rely on notions of sound and hearing. He further argues that “Handshape is undoubtedly a quick, vivid shorthand picture or image of a thing itself in nature, with features that convey what is necessary to suggest the meaning. This point cannot be stressed too much. The classifier system serves the aesthetic as well as the lexical use of ASL; therefore, the purpose of iconicity is essentially creative in the sense of making through language images that represent the natural world around us” (Cohn 1986: 273).



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What Cohn emphasizes here is the way in which language, including sign language, can be used to make deeper connections between a system of signs and meaning through the creation of images. However, Deaf–blind poet John Lee Clark views hearing and Deaf poetry as being connected through a different kind of relationship. Rather than looking for direct commonality (such as the poetic emphasis on images, imagery, and embodied meaning), Clark points to the way in which Deaf poets respond to the dominance of sound in hearing poetry: “[The work of Deaf poets] is a collective subversion of the sound—­or, to them, unsound—­theory of poetry. Breaking the most ground are the Deaf poets who do not write. After all, writing is not native to Deaf culture as is signing. They make poetry out of handfuls of air, their lexicon cinematic and giving rise to a new poetics. Others work with both written and signed languages, with a full range of pidgin and experimental work on and off the page, opening boundaries between languages” (Clark  2005: n.p.). What therefore connects Deaf and hearing poetry is the need to break open language through the embodied voice (where voice is not interpreted as being limited to the heard voice but to include one’s individual ways of gesturing and movement in expressing meaning). An understanding of poetry as an event, which unfolds in dynamic and affective spaces, is better equipped to include the diverse range of poetry, in particular, sign-­language poetry. Poetry is often closely associated with spoken words, but it need not be restricted to the spoken words; all that is needed is language and communication. Sign-­language poetry plays an important role in investigating the expressive aspects of poetry in performance. Embodiment is central to understanding sign-­language poetry, in which language and body are inseparable. Paul Scott’s “Tree” and “Five Senses” are both good examples of how poetic structures can be given embodied form with their use of metaphor, repetition, and rhythm, making both works easily recognizable as poetry. Take, for example, the use of symmetry in Scott’s “Five Senses.” In this poem, he uses his hand to gesture at balance even when it does not directly contribute to the meaning, thereby offering a useful illustration of how the cognitive and affective aspects of the poem (and performance) work together, with the affective aspects not merely offering the form but also affecting the meaning-­making space created for the audience: A certain balance can be maintained in signed poems even when one of the hands is not actively involved in signing anything new. One hand holds the final part of the sign while the other hand articulates a new sign. This maintenance of a sign on the non-­dominant hand while the dominant hand signs something new is not exceptional in everyday signing. It is a way to create units of meaning that are more closely related than signs that are articulated in simple sequences. However, in poetry it allows the poet to keep both hands in the poetic frame and maintain the balanced use of space, even if the signs are not otherwise symmetrical. On top of this aesthetic discipline of keeping balance, maintaining the presence of the nondominant hand can increase the effectiveness of the visual images that are being created. (Sutton-­Spence and Kaneko 2007: 288)

The physical symmetry supports a conceptual connection, thereby visibly making connections between symbol, meaning, and expression. The poetry performance also highlights what it is to “hear” another’s voice through language and what it is to truly attend to another’s expression.

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Conclusion My argument in this chapter has been to take seriously the dynamics of the relationship between poet–poem–audience/reader through an analysis of the role of voice, presentness (i.e., understanding the poem as an event), and embodied meaning. Of course, the body of the poet does not contribute meaning to the same degree on the page as it does on the stage. However, the embodied dynamic between poem and audience/reader is present in both. Conceiving of page poetry as an event brings certain contextual features into the evaluative frame which are acknowledged in the case of performance. For instance, the embodiment of words, the poet’s intentions, and, most importantly, the dynamics between the poet, poem, and audience (including the reader). This, of course, is against the grain of the ‘death of the author’ and the rise of New Criticism, but performance poetry helps us to see poetry in the context of contemporary culture, which suggests a powerful need to be heard and acknowledged. Ultimately, I have argued that there is a deep need to consider the broad range of poetic modes of writing and delivery to include page poetry, braille poetry, spoken word poetry, and sign-­language poetry to deliver a richer understanding of how poetry functions and its value in our lives. Such broadening in analysis helps us to pay attention to a different set of poetic devices and characteristics essential to poetry’s power. This approach of evaluating poetry need not be taken to conflict with traditional approaches that prioritize the visual and formal aspects of the work, but to enhance it through appreciation of the significance of the voice and body, the present quality of language use, and the role of the body in making meaning.

Notes 1 See, for instance, Fiona Sampson’s Lyric Cousins (2016); Charles Olsen “Projective Verse” (1950); Anne Stevenson’s About poems (2017). 2 In Julia Novak’s Live Poetry, she notes a number of texts that present the importance of hearing the voice of the poem in how we ought to read page poetry, such as Barnet et al.’s Introduction

to Literature, Matterson and Jones’s Study Poetry, Laurence Perrine’s Sound and Sense: An Introduction to Poetry. We can also see this emphasis on the importance of sound in recent works that promote the significance of reading aloud such as Joan Shelly Rubin’s Songs of Ourselves (2007).

References Clark, John Lee 2005. “Melodies Unheard.” Poetry Foundation. Available at: https://www.­ poetry foundation.org/poetrymagazine/­articles/68287/ melodies-­unheard Cohn, Jim 1986. "The New Deaf Poetics: Visible Poetry." Sign Language Studies 51 (50): 263. Culler, Jonathan 2015. The Theory of the Lyric. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Falci, Eric 2020. The Value of Poetry. Cambridge, UK and New  York: Cambridge University Press. Johnson, Mark 2007. The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kirkpatrick, Kate, Rafe McGregor, and Karen Simecek 2021. “Literary Interventions in



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Justice: A Symposium.” Estetika: The European Journal of Aesthetics 58 (2): 160–178. Longenbach, James 2004. The Resistance to Poetry. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Novak, Julia 2011. Live Poetry: An Integrated Approach to Poetry in Performance. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Von Hallberg, Robert 2008. Lyric Powers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Irvin, Sherri 2016. Body Aesthetics. Oxford, UK and New York: Oxford University Press. Iser, Wolfgang 1972. “The Reading Process: A Phenomenological Approach.” New Literary History 3 (2), On Interpretation: 279–299. Iser, Wolfgang 1978. The Act of Reading. London: Routledge. Lamarque, Peter 2015. “Semantic Finegrainedness and Poetic Value.” In The Philosophy of Poetry, ed. John Gibson, 18–36. Oxford and New  York: Oxford University Press. Lamarque, Peter 2009. “The Elusiveness of Poetic Meaning.” Ratio 22 (4): 398–420. Leighton, Angela 2009. “About About: On Poetry and Paraphrase.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 33 (1): 167–176. Middleton, Peter 2009. “Poetry’s Oral Stage.” In Performance and Authenticity in the Arts, eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, 215–253. Cambridge, UK and New York: Cambridge University Press. Paterson, Don 2007. “The Lyric Principle Part 1: The Sense of Sound.” Poetry Review 97 (2): 56–72.

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Prinz, Jesse and Eric Mandelbaum 2015. “Poetic Opacity: How to Paint Things with Words.” In The Philosophy of Poetry, ed. John Gibson, 63–87. Oxford, UK and New  York: Oxford University Press. Rubin, Joan Shelley 2007. Songs of Ourselves: The Uses of Poetry in America. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Sampson, Fiona 2016. Lyric Cousins: Poetry and Musical Form. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Somers-­Willett, Susan 2012. The Cultural Politics of Slam Poetry: Race, Identity and the Performance of Popular Verse in America. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Stevenson, Anne 2017. About Poems and How Poems Are Not About. Hexham: Bloodaxe Books. Stewart, Susan 2002. Poetry and the Fate of the Senses. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Sutton-­Spence, Rachel and Michiko Kaneko 2007. “Symmetry in sign language poetry.” Sign Language Studies 7 (3): 284–318. Wilder, Ken 2020. Beholding: Situated Art and the Aesthetics of Reception. London: Bloomsbury. Wimsatt, William K. and Monroe C. Beardsley 1949. “The Affective Fallacy.” The Sewanee Review 57 (1): 31–55. Wheeler, Lesley 2009. Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present. New York: Cornell University Press.

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Aesthetics and Efficacy in Applied and Community Theater Dónall Mac Cathmhaoill

Case Study: YFCU Tyrone Rose Bowl In a hall outside a small village in rural County Tyrone, farmers and their families gather for a good night out. The event is the Rose Bowl, the final of a drama competition run by one of the largest drama-­producing organizations in the region: the Young Farmers’ Clubs of Ulster (YFCU). Family members and friends cram the hall to see the young people perform, and the atmosphere is jovial and supportive. Over the next two hours, around a dozen groups took to the stage, and their efforts were judged by a panel of experts: two YFCU officials, a teacher, and a representative of the professional theater sector. With over 700 clubs across Britain and many thousands of members, the Young Farmers are prolific producers of dramatic performance, but they manage to draw comparatively little critical and academic attention. There are good reasons for this. There can be little doubt that the work on show would be accounted poor quality by the critic and the drama academic. Aesthetic considerations come far behind the importance of getting a laugh from friends, family, and other club members in the audience. The emphasis is on telegraphed in-­jokes and broad knockabout humor. Cross-­dressing and campery strongly feature in many of the pieces. Ultimately, the work is evaluated by the judges. They make decisions about what was good, what was not so good, and what is deserving of prizes. However, the criteria activated in this evaluative process substantially differ from those one might think of as “literary evaluation.”

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.



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This work does not function the way the productions of the professional theater company or producing theater do. Its purpose is different. It might be said to be less an example of literary or theatrical production and more a community ritual. This is not to say that it is less culturally important—­merely that it holds a different cultural valence.

Disrupting Definitions Community theater and applied theater (AT) are apt to trouble dominant ideas of quality in the evaluation of theatrical production. They demand to be judged by different metrics, and even then are likely to confound attempts to arrive at definitive criteria. For this very reason, they serve as an interesting comparative case. It is the intention of this chapter to examine how the consideration of quality in community and applied theater might be usefully applied to broader questions of literary evaluation. An important distinction must be made at the outset between the two broad categories above: community theater and applied theater. The work cited above, made by Tyrone’s Young Farmers’ Clubs, is clearly community theater: a theater production made by and for a discrete community. It takes place with no participation of the theater professional. It is analogous to what Sandra Jeppesen, in her categorization of production, calls “Community and Citizen Media” (2016: 56). Applied theater, by contrast, has a professional involvement. Typically, the production management, direction, and/or authorship of the piece may be undertaken by the professional. It is theater production by professional theater workers, generally in partnership with non-­professionals—­but not in every case. It is a slippery concept. Academic writers usually point out the difficulty in reaching a simple definition of the work (Nicholson  2005; Prentki and Preston  2009; Van Erven  2015; Hughes and Nicholson 2016), but many note a common purpose: the intention of generating change. This may be regarded as a product of its applicative nature—­the work applies artistic “instruments” to solving, ameliorating, or addressing a given personal, social, or community problem. Therefore, it is close to Jeppesen’s fourth category of alternative media production: “Autonomous and Radical Media.” Theater makers work with migrants to explore issues of human rights, with survivors of conflict to promote reconciliation, and with minority communities to combat discrimination. Self-­evidently, this makes the work instrumental, and often this implies a focus on outcomes at the expense of quality of the work. Taylor (2003: xviii) notes that the instrumental aspect of applied theater distinguishes it from theater made for paying audiences in the traditional theatrical venues. Nicholson (2005: 2) and Prentki and Preston (2009: 9) define AT by its differences from this “mainstream theater.” The distinction is between works that are solely made for their aesthetic qualities and work that is socially purposeful. The analogy used (by Nicolson 2005; White 2015) is between pure maths and applied maths, and pure science and applied science, where the one has a practical application to a specific problem and the other is more theoretical—­and is often perceived to have higher status. This analogy tends to foreground the practical over the aesthetic in applied theater. It implicitly defines AT as work that is primarily instrumental. I propose that a better analogy (and one that describes productions that bear greater similarity to literary works)

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is between fine arts and applied arts. There is no doubt that there is a clear difference between a David Smith sculpture and a mid-­century glasswork. An ashtray by the Higgins Studio is clearly a practical object. However, that does not preclude its being an object of great aesthetic achievement. AT similarly occupies a space between high art and plain functionality, and likewise aspires to the aesthetic status of the former while having the practical value of the latter. Though (often) made with communities and aiming to have a social purpose, it is also a professional theater production and seeks to have affective power: to move an audience and to provide a satisfying experience. The two are of course linked: these works of theater aim to generate change by giving audiences a powerful theatrical experience. Clearly, this cannot happen if the work is bad. Therefore, how does one evaluate this work? What are the qualities it must have if it is to succeed? These are questions that are considered here, and thereby it is hoped that some light can be shed on evaluative processes and values as applied to literature more generally. The attempt to apply evaluative frames to applied theater first of all demands that we arrive, if not at a definition, then at a definition of some of its conditions. If it seeks to produce change, to promote a view, or combat one, this brings to bear certain requirements, and plainly these impose conditions on the work. • • • • •

As it seeks to speak to a public, therefore, it must have a public performance. As it aims to advocate for a given view, it must have ideology. It must produce change, and therefore it must have an instrumental purpose It must produce an effect on the audience, and therefore it must have affective power. It must have some aesthetic value (and values); otherwise, it will fail as theater.

In the conjunction and intersection of these considerations, one might hope to find criteria that can be used to measure quality. It is clear that the work presents qualities that are different from much other literary production. The instrumental aspect of AT renders it fundamentally different from the vast bulk of literary works. However, it also has aspects and intentions that overlap with those of the professional theater production for a paying audience. The professional theater maker or professional playwright working on AT likely wants to achieve some of the same results and effects as their colleagues in mainstream theater production: they hope to reach an appreciative public; they might hope their work produces a change in the spectator; they may intend that it is a moving experience for the audience; they undoubtedly intend that it is aesthetically coherent. Generally, the challenge in the evaluation of quality in applied and community theater is a magnification of the problems in evaluating literature. A printed literary text is a fixed entity and “lisible,” whereas a theater production is a fluid reinterpretation of a performance text, and changeable and contingent on the elements of production, the place of performance, and the contribution of audience in its co-­creation. Therefore, the evaluation of theater is perhaps an especially challenging species of literary evaluation. Applied theater magnifies these problems: it does not do (and does not intend to do) what other forms of literature—­or even of theater—­do.



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It has been noted that theater troubles a critical process because of its affective tendency, which is necessarily subjective. In applied theater, this is magnified by the applicative intention of the work. It intends to use the process of affective response to promote a message, tell a specific story, or address an issue. Typically, funded to produce (preferably measurable) benefits to society, it is trapped between the demands of the form (aesthetic and practical challenges) and the demands of the funder (the instrumental challenge). Operating simultaneously at the outer edges of both the aesthetic imperative in dramatic art and the instrumental intention of the paymaster, aiming to succeed in its social purpose and demanding to be regarded as art, the tension always exists between questions of quality and questions of efficacy, between process and product, and between a purely aesthetic valuation and one contingent on impact. Moreover, in any attempt to arrive at a Kantian assessment of aesthetic worth, the nature of the work again problematizes the issue. AT breaks the barriers between audience and theater maker, between professional and community participant, between performance and actuality, and so creates a disrupted and disruptive subject for the aesthetician. The person who approaches AT with the hope of making objective evaluations struggles to pin the form down. As Gareth White puts it, “They ask the wrong questions, and start from the wrong place” (2015: 25).

Autonomy and Heteronomy These qualities of applied theater inform any evaluation of the work. Clearly, an approach that is founded on the disinterested judgment of Kantian aesthetics will be inadequate. This approach assumes a consideration of the work as an autonomous object of sense perception. By definition, this circumstance cannot exist in applied theater. Nonetheless, while the content of the work of AT is invariably heteronomous, the structure of the theatrical event—­going to a space, whether a formal theater setting or a non-­ traditional performance venue, to have a discrete experience, sequestered from quotidian reality, that represents a set of themes and events using performance—­is in itself creative of an autonomous aesthetic experience. In Raymond Williams’ definition, this aesthetics is “... a key formation in a group of meanings which at once emphasized and isolated SUBJECTIVE (q.v.) sense-­activity as the basis of art and beauty” (1983: 33, capitalization in original). For Williams, these formations emphasize the aesthetic value of a work by distinction from social or practical value, an approach he criticizes, citing the inevitable relation of the aesthetic to the social. Jacques Rancière sums up the effect of this aesthetics as analogous with life but in singular and separate relation to it: The aesthetic regime asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity. It simultaneously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself (2013: 19) This is when art ceases to imply its processes but is only available to perception as itself. The problem of aesthetic judgment of this type when applied to AT is that AT does not operate in this disconnected way. It does not take place in the kind of socially discrete

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vacuum of autonomy: it rejects the very concept of autonomy. A question relating to the quality of a work of applied theater which seeks to assess its merits as an autonomous entity is, as White insists, clearly the wrong question. Indeed, White makes the point that it resists the very notion of autonomy in its foundation. Applied theater  ...  takes for granted a heteronomy, a connection with that which surrounds it, whereas much of academic aesthetics is concerned with the autonomy of aesthetic judgements and of the art that gives rise to them. The values implied in uses of the words are troublesome to applied theater because they can suggest a conservative understanding of art and its purposes (23). This points to a set of problems and tensions between the applied artist and those who would seek to evaluate it, whether critic, funder, or academic. The condition of heteronomy in applied theater is a matter both of form and of intention. For the first, we can say with certainty that applied theater forms are uncertain: there is no template. Attempts to define it begin with its effects, not the works themselves. Beyond that, they are invariably preoccupied with qualifications, caveats, and contingent definitions. Two brief examples will suffice to show just how heterogeneous the works are. The performance of DUPed by the author, John McCann, made the case for engaging with the most right-­wing political party with a presence in the UK parliament. It was premiered at the 2018 Edinburgh Fringe Festival. McCann, a highly regarded playwright and multiple award winner, talked for an hour and a bit about the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), with projected images and a selection of audio clips, mostly of interviewees. The piece questioned how we ought to respond to their reactionary politics, making a case for engagement rather than isolation. The party was at that time exercising substantial political influence, out of all proportion to its size, through the confidence and supply agreement with the Conservative government of Theresa May. There were no characters in the performance, no actors. The only presence on stage was the author. The work was largely historical in content—­looking at the formation and development of the DUP—­and speculative in its consideration of how party politics in Ireland and Britain might evolve. It was clearly applied theater, in that it sought to use a non-­traditional form, in a non-­traditional venue (the Grassmarket Hotel), to advocate for a particular political position. It eschewed almost all of the elements of what Nicholson calls a “mainstream” theater production. This performance locates in an undefined area between commentary, show, discourse, and disquisition. It cannot be classified. The play Soho Streets (Theresa Shiban 2009) by contrast had characters, narrative, and an arc that ultimately led to a resolution. It was produced by the Soho Theater, directed by Suzanne Gorman, and performed on the streets of Soho in central London, taking audiences on a promenade through the district on a weekend evening where they witnessed an unspecified number of scenes and conversations between actors. Importantly, audiences also witnessed conversations and scenes featuring people who were not in the production: members of the public, socializing, having drinks with their friends, and playing themselves. The dividing line between the two was often not clear. The play, which sought to show the rich, culturally diverse history of the area and to make the case for its inclusiveness as a magnet for immigrant communities, also, inevitably, showed Soho as it was in the present. Its porosity was both intended and full of unintended elements.



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It is fair to say that, in the case of the latter production, no two groups of audience members had the same experience, and any kind of objective judgment would therefore be impossible. Inevitably, it divided opinions and critical responses. In the former case, McCann’s author-­narrated work, a show but perhaps not a play, won a Fringe First at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2018. Clearly, one would struggle to compare like with like in assessing works such as these. Form confounds the attempt. Clearly, both these works aimed to keep audiences amused and entertained. However, they used forms that would also challenge audiences, asking them that they engage with themes through a disruptive and disrupting use of form. The heteronomous and heterogeneous qualities of AT extend beyond form to intention: applied theater works cannot be judged independently of their purpose, and the purposes to which they are put are innumerable. While the works may be primarily created to please audiences in much the same way as other productions of the professional theater, they do so with an intentionality that is predicated on change. They are purposeful beyond their wish to produce a satisfied spectator by the curtain call. This fundamental purpose of generating change (in the spectator, in the society, in the law, or in policing) defines the work. Where literature in general can be defined as having a “lack of accountability to fact and actuality” (Bradford  2015, p.13), AT is different. While its status as a performed version of reality qualifies it as fictional and thus undermines any claim it may make to factuality or actuality, it is always considered accountable to it. This then enables a reconceptualization of quality in the evaluation of theater. The ineluctable instrumental purposes of AT, disclosing aspects of the real representationally, for the purpose of change, with accountability to actuality, are fundamental to any attempt to judge its success as literature. This implies that efficacy, a core consideration in AT, is an indispensable measure of its literary quality. Indeed, there is a case to make that this measure of quality in cultural production, here used to evaluate a contemporary theater form, is by no means a new thing. Carey (2005: 5) argues that this value-­through-­efficacy is in fact the natural condition of art: that across the great swathes of human history, art was woven into the fabric of the social and that, to the citizen of all previous cultures, the idea of an autonomous judgment of an artwork would have been utterly confusing. This aligns with Turner’s argument regarding theater as ritual with social purpose in his book From Ritual to Theatre (1982), where theater-­as-­ritual can offer redress in the context of conflict. For Turner, “the perennial and primordial agonistic mode is the social drama” (11). Turner sees in theater the possibility of providing humanity with a special type of trans-­ cultural understanding based on the capacity it furnishes to “live” the experience of the other (1982: 18–19). Thus, the use of theater in agonistic ritual contexts (or AT, we might say) is a process of restoring to these theater practices their original socially useful function, “to something like their pristine affectual contouring” (19). Clearly, what Turner describes is both explicitly a socially useful form of performance and one that depends on affective power for its value. In the arguments of Carey and Turner, there is the idea that for much of human history, what we think of as art (high or low) would have been differently understood: as functional object, more ashtray than sculpture. In many cases, if not all, these objects would have  been  understood exclusively in terms of their function. Their value as an object

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would have been contingent on their effectiveness, and their effectiveness would often have been measured in terms of aesthetic power and their ability to create change through feeling in response to an object, whether a fetish in a pre-­industrial community, a religious icon, or a ritual performance. The case of the Mother-­of-­God of Kazan, the pre-­eminent palladium of Russian orthodox religion, is a useful instance. We now consider this as a uniquely important work of medieval painting, though we only know it from its copies, and there are an unknown number of these. To judge it solely by the technique of the artists(s), on the evidence of the copies, it cannot be said to be a very well-­made work. The proportions are all wrong, for a start; the Mother massively out of proportion to the Christ child, who looks like a fully formed miniature man. However, it is, even in our age of aesthetic sophistication and materialist rationality, regarded as an early artistic masterpiece and a talisman of Russian cultural identity. The loss of the original is said to have resulted in the defeat by Japan, the First World War, the 70+ years of state communism of the USSR, and the loss of the republics that constituted the Russian empire for most of the twentieth century (DiPippo 2021). This painting and its many copies, whatever their quality or lack of it, have an importance not for any intrinsic value judged autonomously but for the function they serve to the society and for the feelings they provoke in the populace. Therefore, with AT, any work that sets out to advocate for a given view, or to argue for an ideology, or to tell a story that will cause audience identification, must by definition have affective power and social efficacy. Importantly, it must have aesthetic worth to be efficacious. It cannot be considered good work unless it is provocative of an aesthetic response and effective at engaging the audience with the social issues at its heart. The two cannot be separated, and both must be present if it is to succeed—­in other words, to be considered “good.”

Aesthetics, Affect, and Effect The problem for applied theater is that these prerequisites for quality are often in tension, if not in direct competition with one another. With AT, unlike other forms of dramatic performance, a message is permitted. The bon mot most often attributed to Samuel Goldwyn1 about leaving the business of messages to the Western Union does not apply in this case. The audience for an applied theater performance knows that the show interrogates and responds to a social issue, and that a message is likely (if not guaranteed). Nonetheless, there is an obvious conflict in play between the professional artists, who want to be regarded as artists; the community or individual non-­professionals involved, who want the work to express their views, advocate for their position, or tell their stories; and the funders, who want to see measurable results for their investment. This situation is a consequence of the production model on which applied, social and community theater is made: it is work that is loss-­making, almost always. Generally, it is funded for the benefit it confers on the advocating community, and it is understood that the cost is worth the benefit, in terms of beneficial social change. For the most part, the funders fall into two broad categories: charitable funds, trusts, and foundations, whose raison d’être is to provide funds for projects with communities; and local, regional, and national governments.



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In both cases, the funds are typically disbursed through competitive tendering processes where each arts organization applies with a description of their intended project framed in terms of how it will succeed in managing the social issue in question, with promises to measure and provide evidence of this success in addressing the problem. The negative cycle of inflated promises of social change and an ever-­rising demand from funders of proofs has been much written about (Holden 2004; Etherton and Prentki 2006; Balfour 2009). John Holden (2004: 15) lays much of the blame at the door of the Conservative government of the 1980s, which introduced an economic, value-­for-­money approach to funding cultural activity. Culture had to show it was earning its keep. The New Labour government, post-­ 1997, brought new requirements to the list of demands so that culture was required to show that it had social as well as economic value. New Labour also promoted the widespread use of metrics of value through mandatory reporting processes. The instrumentalizing approach to arts practice thus became embedded through the culture of reporting. It became a requirement to offer proof of value, in short, to evaluate. Projects might be made without a formal script, but they could not be made without an evaluation form. There are a number of problems with this approach, as Holden shows: arts organizations’ aims become subverted by the need to report and secure funding; systems are put in place to produce consistency whereas artistic outcomes are not consistent; and funding systems tend to become risk averse which has a detrimental effect on artists and the work they make. In addition, the data resulting from processes designed to obtain funding cannot be trusted, given the motives with which the data is produced (19–20). Ultimately, this imposition of measures of instrumental value is in character not much different from the criteria used in the investor culture of the money markets. Obviously, this process also has no method (and often no intention, perhaps) of discovering the aesthetic impact of the work. This is more than a major flaw. It is simplification ad absurdum. It is to enumerate the number of copies of the Mother of God of Kazan in every home and chapel in Russia, but not to consider the subjects, or the pictorial qualities, or techniques in the reproductions, or the spiritual intentions with which the work was made, or the feelings it produces in the devout and the patriotic. It is the case that most theatergoers, even those attending applied theater performances, primarily go to theater to have an experience: this will typically involve the presentation of a fictional, or performative version of actuality, often involving performers recreating narrative in a multisensory realization. In short, it is an aesthetic experience, one that is provocative of feelings, using the senses, and attendant emotional and neural processing of sensation. Bradford (2015: 134), considering John Crowe Ransom’s lists of affective responses that are excluded from a truly aesthetic appreciation of literature, acknowledges that these responses are exactly what the reader might seek in a work of literature, particularly readers of novels. It is surely beyond doubt that they are exactly what people go to the theater for. Furthermore, if one rules out the affective responses to theater denigrated by Ransom, one is left with very little. In fact, this residue, a detached admiration of the work, shorn of all emotional engagement, that conforms to some sterile notion of what constitutes a piece well done according to the good aesthetic sense of the cultured theatergoer looks very similar to Brook’s “deadly theatre”: work that exists merely to confirm in the theatergoer their own refined knowledge of the form (Brook 1972: 8–9).

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Bradford notes that among the motives for the promotion of this sterility is a fear of contamination of literary art by the “tarnished realm of popular entertainment.” I am afraid so: theater, and especially AT, are more than tarnished in this sense. They are thoroughly oxidized. He tracks a development where the modernists arrogated the power of literature for elitist ends and an educated readership, extending the interiorizing tendency of the Romantics. He also notes that the Augustans had an “almost puritanical fear of poetry and drama, Shakespeare in particular” stemming from wariness of the emotional use of language that was to be found in these forms, the affective power of this, and the consequent effect on the general public (2015: 42). This points to the sense, still prevalent at some level, that drama is a degraded populist form, working on the basest emotional responses of the mass audience, and so lower in status than other forms of literary art that retain some of the elitist aura of the modernists. It can be fairly stated that AT wants no truck with a sterile, unemotional elitism. Thompson (2009: 111) maintains that the affective qualities of theater are fundamental even where there are pressing social and political intentions in the work: “Participatory theater should focus on affect rather than effect. This would seek to avoid the anticipation or extraction of meaning as the primary impulse of an applied theater process.” John McGrath’s (1996) A Good Night Out takes issue with the resistance to the affective in theater, while making the case for work that exactly offers the kinds of thrills that Ransom criticizes: comedy, music, dramatic action, and feats of physical performance, creating excitement, amusement, and desire. For McGrath, the resistance to such registrations is an act of class prejudice, and he posits the view that we assign white middle-­class values as the critical norm of theater, and thereby consider alternative theater, audiences, and critical standpoints as of inferior status: they are worth less, and often worthless. These working-­class audiences are then in need of betterment and that is what the middle-­class “mainstream” theater offers.

Paternalism and the Deadly This accusation, of the tendency of the dominant culture to support works that have as an intention the betterment of the audience, is one that can be leveled at AT with a fairness at least equal to McGrath’s criticism of the “middle-­class” or mainstream theater. After all, it is explicit in the funder’s approach to cash flowing the work, the chief metric by which the application for funds will be judged. This is another sense in which applied theater projects are evaluated to see if they will be “good.” Is it good for the participants and their community? Ultimately, does it improve the indices that the funder has prioritized for action? Given also that this question of improvement is dependent on the funder’s own values, and those of their superiors, and the policymakers who set the targets, there is a sense in which this targeting of funding based on values might lead to the question that McGrath identifies: is it morally improving? This is inherent in the processes used to evaluate applied theater, according to Holden. Given the diversity of the arts sector and the range of imperatives to which different artists and organizations work, a generalized description of value is impossible, and attempts to define value in generalized ways are counterproductive. They do not take into



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account of the range of productions, the range of artistic intentions, and the range of subjective responses possible (23). Thus, it comes down to a reductive assessment of value (informed by values): “The concept is open to challenge on the grounds that it is a reversion to patrician and patronising attitudes. We will decide what has intrinsic merit and you will take two teaspoons a day” (24, italics in original). In the absence of what he terms “the Arnoldian, and indeed Fabian, idea” of arts as improving of the working classes, it becomes difficult for the policymaker and the funder to make justifications for the cost of the work in the perennial scramble for subsidy. Thus, rather than something that is necessary for society, arts (and in the current case, AT) become reduced to the status of the benefit scrounger, soaking up monies that the society desperately needs for “essential services.” Holden points out that the current language engenders ideas of patronage and supplication, which of course casts AT and social arts in a negative light: “subsidized sector,” “grant applications,” “patronage,” and “private philanthropy,” all suggestive of a lack of entitlement. The language is markedly different in other areas of expenditure. Armies are not described as subsidized or schools. Only the arts are seen as being in receipt of (it is implied, ill-­deserved) discretionary funding (26–27). The suggestion is that the arts ought to be able to pay for themselves as business but cannot, and thus have to get a handout. The corollary point is that if they must have the handout, then they must also show their worth. This is a message that has been encoded into our attitudes to literature and arts at a very deep level. It is evidenced in the periodic tabloid outrages over the funding of a given arts project, or artist, all the way back to the “Lady Chatterley Trial.” The trial where the arguments for and against the banning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover were heard is in one sense the watershed moment in the battle between the dominant culture and the artist on the question of improving literature. Condemned for its “license” (an interesting double meaning) and causing prosecutor Mervyn Griffith-­Jones to ask the (all-­male) jury if it was something “you would even wish your wife or servants to read”, the argument was that art should only be permitted to exist if it encourages good behavior. By this argument, Lawrence’s novel should not be allowed to exist because of its deleterious effect on women and the lower classes. While it is tempting to think that with the victory of Penguin Books, Lawrence’s publisher, in the trial, that literature was thereby liberated from the control of the patrician elite, this is true only for arts that are not funded from the public purse. The application of public funding to a controversial artwork can still cause scandal. The case of the DubbelJoint play Forced Upon Us (Hammond 1999; Hill 1999a; Hill 1999b) is instructive. Staged by Pam Brighton, theater director, lawyer, and human rights campaigner, the play tackled the vexed issue of sectarian policing in Northern Ireland. Initially, funded by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) as part of the program of the DubbelJoint Theatre company, the play was condemned by unionist politicians and commentators and was the subject of a very public scandal. Ultimately, the ACNI withdrew funding, effectively censoring the play. As AT very often operates on budgets from bodies that are spending taxpayers money, it is especially vulnerable to the instinct of policymakers and funders to impose their own agendas. Sadly, for AT, Lady Chatterley was not the end point for literature that serves to improve, or for government using its powers to ensure that only literature that encourages good behavior is permitted to exist. This remains a critical issue in AT, relating to how funding gives the arms of government a whip hand (and a veto) over what gets made.

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Social Value and Cultural Value Clearly, an approach to evaluating quality in AT is required, which does not look merely at its supposed efficacy in solving social problems and takes into account its capacity for quality. Applied and community theater can produce works of superlative excellence, as gauged by the aesthetic standards of the work, the efficacy of the work in engaging communities on important issues, and the critical responses. It is important to make this point, and, as examples, I cite three productions. The Passion staged by the National Theatre of Wales in 2011 in Port Talbot directed by Bill Mitchell and Michael Sheen, with over a thousand members of the community as cast and production staff, succeeded in drawing “over 22000 people to the town”.2 Lyn Gardner in The Guardian described it as “thrilling ... its mix of tenderness and mucky grandeur, its majestic sweep and careful attention to small, everyday details”,3 and the Wales Arts Review characterized it as “a remarkable national moment.”4 Another community play produced by Soho Theatre and again directed by Suzanne Gorman, the 2007 production Moonwalking in Chinatown, was made with central London’s Chinese community supported by a professional production team, and was a critical and commercial success, selling out its original run, and added dates. It was described as “a unique pleasure” by The Londonist,5 and “how arts and culture can impact on placemaking and identity” by funders Westminster City Council.6 The Belfast community play, Crimea Square, produced by Jo Egan at the Spectrum Centre on Belfast’s Shankill Road was entirely written by four local people working with historical records and starred a cast made up of locals supported by professional actors. It played at the 2013 Belfast International Festival where it won the prestigious Audience Prize and was a sell-­out. The Belfast Telegraph described it as “the pick of the festival.”7 These works motivated large numbers of ordinary people to become active in the production of a theatrical event. They changed the communities that took part and served as a touchstone for those who were not involved. Clearly, they were also quality works, drawing the praise of the fourth estate and selling out to delighted audiences. Moreover, it can be argued that these plays offered something more, some quality inherent in the community engagement and personal transformation that they provided for those involved—­a quality that could not be found in a professional production of a canonical play in a mainstream theater venue, regarded with Ransomian detachment akin to Brook’s “deadly theatre.” Turner (1982), Thompson and Schechner (2004), Holden (2004) Nicholson (2005), and others make the case that this work has value beyond questions of efficacy in addressing social problems, and yet it is often considered of lower status than the work of the mainstream theater. This, as noted, can be viewed as a consequence of its economic model of production: it soaks up public funds and is often not very good at giving a satisfactory account of its value. Invariably, funders must consider value for money. Like Turner and Schechner, Holden finds useful comparison on questions of value and values with concepts from anthropology. He notes that in assessing social value, other qualities have been cataloged, and in his typology lists “historical value,” “social value,” “symbolic value,” “aesthetic value,” and “spiritual value.” Using the example of the purchase of Raphael’s Madonna of the Pinks at a cost to the nation of £11.5 million, he argues that this exceptionally expensive investment, which can hardly be shown to produce social



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benefit, expresses all of the values in the list above. It is a good investment, and can be said to be such, without considering its economic value, and the relation between price paid, and social worth. It has what he calls “cultural value” (35–36). This cultural value is analogous to the value that resides in natural resources. He argues that like them, cultural productions are finite, unreproducible once lost and therefore demand equity in terms of husbandry, use, preservation, and sustainability. The analogy does not end there. As with resources in the environment, diversity is essential, and he argues for a homeostatic ecosystem that has room for new and traditional artforms and artifacts (37–39). The economic considerations, which propose some spurious balance sheet where the cost of an arts project is set against the saving that might be generated by keeping young people off the streets or getting elderly people active in the creation of a community project, are thus shown to be fundamentally flawed. Holden notes that a more apt comparison is with the valuation of intangible assets in business, such as brand recognition and reputation. Within the matrix of values that constitute cultural value, these intangible elements wherein quality resides, one can discern the criteria for evaluating worth. The solution is perhaps not a measure of quality, but many measures, and an understanding that the work must have several of these, to be regarded as having “Quality.” Importantly, such a matrix of qualities need not rule out work that is made by communities, or for communities, or by people who have an agenda, a cause for which they wish to advocate, or a specific story that they want to tell. They can define their work as artistically valid solely by framing it with concepts of cultural value and working to make it productive: not solely of efficacy, or of aesthetic impact, but of intentionality. Rancière makes the point that the quotidian can be as aesthetically affective as “high art,” using the photography of Evans, Strand, and Stieglitz as a case in point: “In order for a technological mode of action and production, i.e. a way of doing and making, to be qualified as falling within the domain of art—­be it a certain use of words or of a camera—­it is first necessary for its subject matter to be defined as such.” (2004: 29). Indeed, he sees this as a product of a refocusing of history on the lives of the ordinary at the expense of kings and princes: “the ordinary becomes beautiful as a trace of the true” (30). This stands as a persuasive argument for the aesthetic potential of the community play, or applied theater production, expressive of cultural value through the employment of a kind of authenticity: an intention to truthfulness in the representation of the lives of the community.

Authenticity, Authorship, and Authority Any discussion of authenticity raises some problems. While the emotional content of a work of literature is understood to be fictional, and thus the authenticity of the emotions is not in question (they are not the authentic representation of the feelings of the author), they may evoke feelings in readers (or spectators) who are definably authentic. This is perhaps most true in something like The Colour of Justice (Richard Norton-­Taylor  1999) for an audience member who, for the sake of argument, identifies as a young black British person. Conversely, if the emotion generated is not authentic, if it is in nature cathartic, productive of a sense of emotional release on the Aristotelian model, then it might be regarded as

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operating against the intentions of AT, for while AT may not always use Brechtian techniques, it always has a Brechtian intention. A work of the Aristotelian type, producing what we might call a Verkenntniseffekt, recognition rather than alienation, could be regarded as having failed an applied theater audience. The conditions identified so far require that for a work of AT to be effective, it needs to be authentic (the voice of the author) and defamiliarizing. Indeed, Aristotle’s Poetics (Part IV) makes the explicit claim that the mimetic impulse in humankind is an inherent facility that has always been employed for the purpose of learning, which is a form of pleasure. Therefore, AT often uses fictional form to address a social issue. However, AT does not aim for a purgation, or catharsis, of emotion. The use of the mimetic effect is never solely for artistic purposes and to produce pleasure. Implicit in Aristotle’s notion of purgation is an awareness that the staged fiction, while offering a moment of learning, is ultimately a fiction: that we can safely walk away from the theater and leave our concerns there. This is evidently not true of AT, where the work is always aiming at a relation to real-­world problems and at truthfulness through authenticity, even given that it is created in a medium that is understood to be inherently mimetic. At the heart of this reading of quality in AT lies the principle of authenticity: the work of AT has no claim to quality if it cannot claim to be authentic. Nor can it justify its costs, and its often-­ complex structures, involving professionals and non-­ professionals, necessitating, typically, many hours of work in community halls or classrooms or workshop spaces, and many months of the theater worker’s precious and ill-­paid time in drama games, exercises, and devising processes. If the work does not gain authenticity from this collaboration of community and professional, or from the flexible, contingent, and porous techniques with which it is made, then there can be no justification for the effort. The question remains: how is this authenticity vouchsafed? I have elsewhere argued that authenticity is about the expression of primacy in the creative process, framed as auctoritas (Mac Cathmhaoill 2021: 261). This finds expression as both authorship and authority: authorship in turn can be both the discharge of the role of author, creating a text, and participation in the wider practice of authoring a performance, involving multiple modes, forms, and practices of creation. Authority also has two important and distinct meanings: control through the occupation of a position of authority and the exercise of expertise as an authority in an area where one has specialized knowledge or experience. In her 2016 essay on the Crimea Square production, described above, Alison Jeffers shows how the play was made with this participant authority and makes the case that the quality of the work was the result of this exercise of this authority through authorship. The obvious conclusion to draw is that the particular benefit of the structures and modes of creation in AT lies in the ability of the professional to engage those possessing authority in a specific area and who, through the exercise of this, confer authenticity. In this fusion of the aesthetic and practical skills of the professional, and the expertise, lived experience, and authorial contribution of the participant, quality is generated. I contend that this is where quality might be looked for in literature generally: in the imitation that Aristotle calls an intrinsic part of our being, as nature’s most imitative animal, and in the pleasure and learning to be found in the contemplation of imitation; in the application of these mimetic processes to questions of personal and social moment; and in the construction of this mimesis using a process that is imbued with the authenticity of authority, expressed in authorship.



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Thus, far from occupying a place of low esteem based on a poor ability to produce quality, as applied art, AT and other forms of collective literary creation stand well placed to make work of uniquely affective quality: they have the capacity to restore literary forms “to something like their pristine affectual contouring.” Ultimately, this might seem to be rather bad news for the single author: his death having been announced some time ago. Barthes, in his celebrated essay, points not only to the possibilities of multi-­author and polyvocal text creation (with more than a passing similarity to AT) but also to how they bring about “... the desacrilization of the image of the Author” (1977: 144). Barthes points out that our conception of the author is “a modern figure, a product of our society insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation” (142–143). It hinges on a historically determined idea of authorship, one where the technologies of authorship are singular rather than collective, and increasingly this is not the world in which authors operate. In fact, it turns on a rather quaintly old-­fashioned notion that the work has to be “written,” by which we understand created on a page or a computer in a (single and solitary) author’s studio or office. It takes no account of the possibility of work that is written in collective ways, using technologies that can be accessed from multiple points, and where ownership is not determined. It works with a limited idea of “author”—­one where the word is synonymous with “writer” rather than one where it implies “authority”: it denies expertise as a core component in authorship and authority. In fiction, reframing the concept of authorship might be problematic. The market (as much as the academy) has a preference for the single author model and single author work: it is unitary, contained, susceptible to focused scholarly study, and marketable. However, drama is a very different case: it requires more co-­creation in its process of production than works of literature created and consumed in private. The poem or work of fiction, even if written in an oblique or expressionistic style, stands to contain elements that are lisible. Drama, even where it has a realist staging or production style, will require that the audience is activated in some measure to create the work. If the play operates without a ‘scriptible’ element—­without activation of the audience—­then it is not drama because it engenders no conflict in the spectator. Drama, being contingent on the shared process of creation, between the production team and the authors (in the broadest sense), between production and audience, between fictive presentation and actuality, and between performance and presence, is always co-­created. Thus, AT is merely the most explicit expression of the given attributes of the form.

Balancing Intentionality and Aesthetics Questions of autonomy and heteronomy, and the tension between the useful and the aesthetically satisfying, discussed at length here, offer a set of criteria that, in their conjunction, present the possibility of judgments of quality. Taken together, they offer a means of evaluating quality in AT. At the core of this evaluative matrix are qualities of efficacy, affective power, aesthetic value, and authenticity.

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If we can say, having witnessed an applied theater production, that the work was effective instrumentally in promoting a particular view, telling an important story that ought to be heard, or combatting negative prejudice, then we know it has served its applicative purpose. If we can say, with that in mind, that it would have been a worthwhile theater work even if it did not have these targets, or objectives, and had no instrumental international whatever, then we can say it possesses quality. How one might gauge this question presents an entirely different difficulty. A solution might relate to audience: if it works for the target audience, and often in AT productions there is a very specific target audience—­be that policymakers, an ethnoreligious other, or young people in high school who have taken up smoking tobacco—­then it fulfils its objective. If it works for an audience outside the target audience (let us say theatergoers at Trafalgar Studios in central London), then it has passed some kind of aesthetic test. That said, this process, using a rationale that depends on assessing the worth of the work using a theory, is most probably by its definition not a truly Kantian judgment, relying more, as it does, on a reasoned calculation and less on the unconscious response. Clearly, AT cannot be judged by the same metrics (or qualitatively) as one would judge other dramatic or literary productions. It is concerned with different things. Any AT production will have a different set of aims and will be made with different priorities (or balance of priorities) than any other. How these qualities interact constitutes not the measure of quality but the yardstick one uses to measure quality. Therefore, the case of AT suggests that there is no definitive answer to questions of literary evaluation. There are only possibilities for selecting and calibrating the yardsticks used for measurement, and the process of measurement will necessarily be contingent and mutable and to some extent subjective. Literature is fluid, amorphous, mercurially mutable and protean. Not only do all works of literature differ from each other (even with two poems by the same author in the same sequence), but even a single work will create a different effect in two readers. Works of literature are in a state of continual relativity, and a state therefore of continual evaluation. There are no absolute values; there is only continual metrical adjustment and repositioning. Ultimately, this may be why some works seem to be canonically excellent, and others, once considered canonical, become irrelevant with the passage of time. They are incrementally re-­evaluated out of the canon over many years.

Summary Ultimately, this leaves us with Janet Wolff’s challenge, to answer the most difficult question in relation to a work of applied theater or literature: is it any good? (2008: 33). When the young people of the YFCU take to the stage, the question “is it any good?” has multiple meanings. For the judges on the panel, the question relates to how the performances created an affective and entertaining performance event, in conjunction and co-­creation with the audience. For the young actors, the question might imply a comparative process, where the work performed is compared with how it ran in rehearsal or by comparison with the other works performed.



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For the friends and family in the audience, the measure of quality might well be how near the mark the jokes and lampoons landed and how much entertainment the performance produced. Finally, when the young actor goes home, and their parent asks, “How was it? Was it any good?” They most likely mean, “did you enjoy it?” This is also a measure of value. The questions of evaluation of quality, of worth, cover a multitude of meanings; if a work is of the first quality, it likely qualifies as good on many or all of these measures. The plays on the stage at the YFCU Rose Bowl in Tyrone are patchy, piecemeal sketches of the lives of the young people who make them. They are full of leaden plotting, corny humor, and nudge-­and-­wink double entendre. The comedy is anything but subtle, and the writing is not particularly polished or well structured or innovative. However, the audience loves it. They roar with laughter and hoot at the references to the people they know, both locals and fellow members. They cheer at the lampoons of public figures. By its own standards, the work is a success, and the young people surely think so judging by the backslapping and congratulation that goes on after each sketch. However, in ten or twenty years, these dramatic performances will not work. The public figures lampooned will be largely forgotten, and the in-­jokes about recent local events will have lost their humor. The work has been created to satisfy the crowd for one night only. It is the definition of the evanescent nature of theatrical performance. It has no pretentions as drama. In a year or ten years, there will be new plays and new players. New members will have new public figures to mock. They will do so by making works such as these, with similar standards of value, and the audiences that come to see them will likely judge the work to have been good.

Notes Accessed 31/10/22 12:37. 1 https://quoteinvestigator.com/2019/05/11/ 5 https://londonist.com/2007/09/review_­moon send/ accessed 30/10/22 14:44 walk Accessed 31/10/22 12:52. 2 https://www.nationaltheatrewales.org/ntw_ 6 https://mayaproductions.co.uk/about-­maya/ shows/the-­passion/ Accessed 31/10/22 12:32. suzanne-­gorman-­maya-­artistic-­director/ accessed 3 https://amp.theguardian.com/stage/­t heatre 31/10/22 12:52. blog/2011/apr/26/michael-­sheen-­the-­passion-­ 7 https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/­entertainment/ port-­talbot accessed 31/10/22 13:02. shankill-­play-­pick-­of-­festival-­29721483.html 4 https://www.walesartsreview.org/national-­ accessed 31/10/22 12:58. theatre-­wales-­news-­reviews-­and-­interviews/

References Aristotle (c.335 BCE) Poetics. Barthes, Roland 1977. Image Music Text, trans. S. Heath. London: Fontana Press. Balfour, Michael 2009 “The politics of intention: looking for a theatre of little changes.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 14 (3): 347–359.

Bradford, Richard 2015. Is Shakespeare Any Good? Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Brook, Peter 1972. The Empty Space. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Carey, John 2005. What Good Are The Arts. London: Faber and Faber.

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Cochrane, S. et  al. 2013. Crimea Square. Belfast: Spectrum Centre. DiPippo, Gregory 2021. “The Icon of Our Lady of Kazan.” The New Liturgical Movement. Available at: https://www.­n ewliturgicalmovement.org/ 2021/07/the-­icon-­of-­our-­lady-­of-­kazan.html#. Y4faGn3P200 [Accessed 6 October 2022]. Etherton, Michael and Tim Prentki 2006. “Drama for change? Prove it! Impact assessment in applied theatre.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 11 (2): 139–155. Gorman, Suzanne and cast 2007. Moonwalking in Chinatown. London: Soho Theatre. Hammond, Philip. 1999. “Forced Upon Us.” Irish Times [online], 2 August. Available from: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/letters/ forced-­upon-­us-­1.212762 [Accessed 24 January 2020]. Hill, Ian 1999a. “Dubble Trouble.” Fortnight 380: 21–22. Hill, Ian 1999b. “Forced Upon Us.” Irish Times [online], 2 August. Available from: https:// www.irishtimes.com/news/forced-­u pon-­ us-­1.212565 [Accessed 24 January 2020]. Holden, John 2004. Capturing Cultural Value. London: Demos. Hughes, Jenny and Helen Nicholson (eds.) 2016. Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jeffers, Alison 2016. “Authority, Authorisation and Authorship: Participation in Community Plays in Belfast.” In: Performance and Participation: Practices, Audiences, Politics, eds. A. Harpin and H. Nicholson, 209–229. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jeppesen, Sandra 2016. “Understanding Alternative Media Power: Mapping Content & Practice to Theory, Ideology, and Political Action.” Democratic Communiqué 27: 54–77. Mac Cathmhaoill, Dónall 2021. Modes of Authorship in Applied Theatre for Community Advocacy in

Northern Ireland 1998–2018. Thesis (PhD). Ulster University. McCann, John 2018. DUPed. Edinburgh: Grassmarket Hotel. McGrath, John 1996. A Good Night Out. Popular Theatre: Audience, Class and Form, 2nd edition. London: Nick Hern. Nicholson, Helen 2005. Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Norton-­Taylor, Richard 1999. The Colour of Justice. London: Tricycle Theatre. Prentki, Tim and Sheila Preston 2009. The Applied Theatre Reader. Abingdon: Routledge. Rancière, Jacques 2013. Politics of Aesthetics, ed. G. Rockhill. London: Bloomsbury. Sheers, Owen 2011. The Passion. National Theatre of Wales. Shiban, Theresa 2009. Soho Streets. London: Soho Theatre. Taylor, Phillip 2003. Applied Theatre: Creating Transformative Encounters in the Community. Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann. Thompson, James 2009. Performance Affects: Applied Theatre and the End of Effect. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Thompson, James and Richard Schechner 2004. “Why ‘Social Theatre’?” TDR 48 (3): 11–16. Turner, Victor 1982. From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play. New York: Performing Arts Journal. van Erven, Eugène 2015. “The Tension Between Community and Art.” Research in Drama Education: The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance 20 (3): 407–410. White, Gareth 2015. Applied Theatre: Aesthetics. London: Bloomsbury. Williams, Raymond 1983. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wolff, Janet 2008. The Aesthetics of Uncertainty. Chichester: University of Columbia Press.

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Antonin Artaud Beyond Judgment: A Radio Reading of “To Have Done With The Judgement of God” with Local Prisoners Gary Anderson and Niamh Malone

Introduction “Antonin Artaud Beyond Judgment” is a critical community engagement project with local prisoners which culminated in a performed reading of Antonin Artaud’s seminal final radio work, on its 75th anniversary, “To be Done with the Judgement of God (1947).” Artaud died a month after the radio project was pulled from French radio in 1948, and this represents a UK premier (perhaps even a world-­first) of Artaud’s work in a prison setting, by and for prisoners. Artaud himself spent the last years of his life in and out of incarcerated spaces, battling, in his own inimitable way, against judgment locally (within the psychiatric institution at Ivry-­sur-­Seine), and in Rodez, his final space of incarceration in 1948. Anderson and Malone, facilitators and researchers at Liverpool Hope University, theorize their work using “affective encounters” (after Gilles Deleuze and Rosi Braidotti) and the context of prison radio work in today’s prison settings. The main concern here was co-­inventing a workable radio performance with prisoners while playing with the paradox of delivering “judgment” culture (taking in definitions from criminology through to Deleuzian and Braidottian philosophy) to a prison population who have suffered multiple deprivations in terms of formal education. The project has been committed to retaining a sharp focus on the ethics of encounters within the power structures of the prison system as they pertain to the apparatuses of judgment and their subsequent inhumanities. We found that moving beyond judgment, or in Artaud’s phrase being “Done with the Judgement of God,” (Artaud 1995) is particularly useful in a prison setting for a number of reasons that are explained in this chapter. “Beyond Judgment” is one of the endeavors under the umbrella of a larger series of projects called HMP2Hope and is part of the education outreach provision at the Liverpool

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Hope University (Anderson and Malone 2023). The chapter concludes by making a case for vernacular “affective encounters” in applied theater in prison settings à la Artaud instead of the usual reliance on the “praxis of judgment” (after conservative cultural theorists such as Harold Bloom whose views remain stubbornly popular and relevant inside the prison walls—­ see Anderson and Malone 2023): all of which make for problematic readings of normative judgment and its centrality in modern European thought. In Anderson and Malone’s experience, working with “affective encounters” in applied prison settings presents the almost ideal conditions with which to leave our cultural judgments, literally, at the prison gate in the hope of more affirmative, even joyous cooperation with incarcerated men—­ something we believe Artaud was already convinced of 75 years ago.

Artaud and the Radio Play We explain why a radio play written in 1947 by the French surrealist Antonin Artaud, “To Be Done with the Judgement of God,” (Artaud 1976) was selected to be performed by a group of prisoners in a UK-­based prison in April 2022. Artaud is famed for pioneering a form of theater practice known as Theatre of Cruelty (Basirizadeh et al 2022), articulated in his seminal work Le Théâtre et con Double [The Theatre and its Double] (1938). This type of practice places an emphasis on gesture, movement, sound effects, and symbolism rather than on a logocentric coherency of language, plot development, character, etc. Artaud stresses the need for the relationship between actor and audience to be reconsidered where a “magic exorcism” (“It all seems like an exorcism to make our devils flow.” (Artaud 2013, 43)) should take place, which results in shocking the audience through a bombardment of the senses employing supposedly unsettling sounds (cries, screams, white noise, etc.). The goal for Artaud was to embed a sense of suffering and pain in the lived experience of the audience in order for them to re-­evaluate their relationship with their own lives. While the mechanism of theater making (actors, lighting, sound, set, etc.) makes this experimental type of theater very possible, the medium of radio presents much more of a challenge, being devoid of the power of the visual, olfactory, and “live” presence of the performer(s), while at the same time repositioning language as the principal form of communication. Radio plays, while enabling a dramatic and experimental soundtrack to be employed, seem to run contrary to Artaud’s teachings, especially with his work “To Be Done with the Judgement of God,” where language appears to take center stage, at least in the published form in his collected works. This play was recorded by Radiodiffusion Française (RDF) and scheduled to be aired on 2 February 1948; however, it was shelved a day before release for political reasons. The head of drama and literature at RDF Fernand Pouey commissioned Artaud for the series “La Voix des Poétes,” but the withdrawal of the broadcast by the director general of the radio caused a scandal in which prominent artists of the day (including filmmakers Rene Clair and Jean Cocteau) protested. The piece was eventually aired in a radio studio four days later for a committee including the protesters, but the director general refused to lift the ban. Artaud, because of this and his friends’ unfavorable response to the work, was deeply hurt and entered what turned out to be his final depression. He died a month later. Fernand Pouey resigned in protest at the banning of the piece, but the original recording, which features one of



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Jean Cocteau’s lead actors in Orphée (Dir. Jean Cocteau, 1950), Maria Casares, is available online at the wonderful resource, we feel sure Artaud would have loved, UBUweb (https://ubuweb.com/sound/artaud.html).

Artaud Prefigures Deleuze and Braidotti At the heart of Artaud’s oeuvre (see Artaud 1968, 1974, 1976) is the desire to move beyond the limits of what has hitherto been seen as acceptable in the interests of a collectivized liberation (Deleuze 1997, 2004, 2019). In theorizing this work, we look to the current debates surrounding the post-­human as a form of “delimiting,” in an Artaudian fashion, what it has become possible to think. Rosi Braidotti talks of “The posthuman convergence of post-­humanism (critique of ‘man’) and post-­anthropocentrism (critique of Anthropos—­or species supremacy)” and its fundamental quarrel with the category of “the human” (Braidotti 2023). She warns that current debates around the posthuman need to be mindful of the distinction between a critique of “man” as the phallogocentric and a critique of Anthropos as species supremo. Two different camps of thought offering valuable, even necessary, ammunition against normative thinking. Although Artaud would not have been aware of these debates, it is arguable that he senses them and even prefigures them in “To Have Done With The Judgement of God.” The suspicion of the militaristic, capitalist United States of America, against the wisdom of the other species, Artaud writes, “one must by all possible means of activity replace nature wherever it can be replaced [...] No more fruit, no more trees, no more vegetables, no more plants pharmaceutical or otherwise and consequently no more food ...” (Artaud 1947/1995). Braidotti goes on to claim that this sort of transversal thinking (evident in Artaud) produces a chain of theoretical, social, and political effects (Braidotti 2023). Artaud, in a sort of post-­broadcast interview within the play, says “what has been called microbes is god, and do you know what the Americans and the Russians use to make their atoms? They make them with the microbes of god.” (Artaud 1947/1995).

This is an example of neo-­Spinozist substance monism (a theory that originates with 17th century Dutch philosopher Spinoza, which claims that everything is made from the one infinite substance (Spinoza  1985), whereby there is no theoretical room for species supremacy. Under this regime, it would not make sense to say that there is a hierarchy of beings or that there are universal rights that govern human behavior. Artaud, like Braidotti, takes us down a different path of understanding both a human’s place in the universe (which is not central) and what it might be capable of (not what are its rights might be). This results in doubts about the sanctity of judgment. It follows that it is not possible to judge something according to a universal law—­because the law itself is part of the same substance as the human makes judgment and is incapable of standing outside it (Deleuze 1988, 1998). This is the same point Deleuze’s other student (Braidotti was one of Deleuze’s students in the 1970s) François Laruelle makes in proposing that philosophy should stand down as the master of the other disciplines (see Laruelle’s essay in Shakespeare, Malone, Anderson 2021). Artaud, like Laruelle and Braidotti, disavowed the centrality of

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the power of judgment for humans and further complained that the apparatus of judgment only ever succeeds in reducing one to “be human enough or not human enough.” This, Braidotti claims, is an unfair “indexation of power and access to power” (Braidotti 2023). What is required is a “qualitative leap in new conceptual directions” (Braidotti  2023). According to Braidotti, this would include a transversality: “the future is in the transversality of almost everything” (Braidotti 2023). Artaud seems to embody this transversality inside his radio play, which attacks the sanctity of judgment as well as the artificial divide between “man” and nature. However, Braidotti warns, and this is where perhaps Artaud could be best understood, that this sort of project requires the need to be grounded in the locality of where you are. If not, we run the risk of not taking seriously enough the politics of immanence. Braidotti calls for respect for the place where one is speaking from, and ultimately inclusion of that positionality within the very claim one wishes to make (Braidotti 2023). Artaud writes this piece, in Deleuze’s phrase “in the place of” prisoners, from the locale of an incarcerated space. It seems reasonable to assume that one of the chief influences on his work was the incarcerated spaces he spent his time while composing the work itself. Braidotti warns that “To enter the convergence you need to do your own cartographies; your own analysis of your point of entry” (Braidotti 2023). In order for us to make this leap, it is necessary to bring to bear the locality of our own work in relation to radical immanence and Artaud’s vision for a post-­judgmental life. It seems clear that this cannot happen all at once, and once the argument has been made, it is most unlikely to persist forever. It seems to depend on the moment of its utterance and on the convergence of the strands of thought coming together in a way that works. Is not this Artaud’s purpose? Is Artaud after the convergence of various waves of radical thought in order to enact a moment of liberation for himself and his fellow incarcerated beings (literally and figuratively)? Braidotti says “How to enter the convergence ethically is quite another matter (in terms of discourse it is relatively straightforward)” (Braidotti 2023). We argue here, that inspired by Artaud, the prison might be the closest to an ideal site for the entry to convergence of posthuman and post-­Anthropos in that the notion of the human or species supremacism unravels most easily or rapidly, it seems to us, at that site. Therefore, we enter a propositional mode of discourse making where we engage in affirmative ethics with the centralizing of what is possible or what the men are capable of rather than a reductionist program of “becoming more human” (i.e., obtaining level 1  maths and English—­the normative education programs currently run inside most UK Her Majesty’s Prisons (HMPs)). To put it in Deleuzean terms, and from his important essay on prison reform “What our prisoners want from us,” Deleuze writes, “Something new is happening in and around our prisons. Inmates are deciding what form they wish to give their collective action within the context of each particular prison” (Deleuze 2002: 204).

The context of each particular prison helps us go some of the way to the grounded locality which Braidotti insists. At our local HMP, the men insisted we look at Artaud’s piece



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“To Have Done With The Judgement of God” sensing as Deleuze did that judgment might be the mechanism by which certain forms of structural and societal repression are carried out: “The fact itself of punishment and imprisonment has not yet been called into question; still, a front of political struggle has already moved into the prisons. The realization that prison is essentially about class, that it concerns above all the working class, and that it also has to do with the labor market (repression will be all the more harsh, especially on the young, to the extent that unemployment is a threat and their labor superfluous on the market)—­these realizations are becoming more and more clear in the prisons.” (Deleuze 2002: 204).

Deleuze was no stranger to prison activism. He joined the Group for Information for Prisoners (GIP) in 1971 and later the Association for the Defence of the Rights of Prisoners (ADDD) working alongside Michel Foucault for prison reform, including a public sit-­in the halls of the ministry of justice. Deleuze was also busy publicizing the plight of prisoners in local newspapers foregrounding the notion of judgment as outdated and harmful to those inside the prison system. This footnote appears in Deleuze’s essay and is worth citing in full, “In December 1971 and January 1972, more than thirty riots broke out in the prisons at Toul, Nancy, and Lille. On January 18, 1972, Deleuze participated with Jean-­Paul Sartre, Claude Mauriac, Michele Vian, Alain Jaubert, and many others in a sit-­in organized by Michel Foucault, in the great hall of the Ministry of Justice.”  (Deleuze 2002: 204).

Arguably, not much has changed in the prison systems across France and the United Kingdom in the following half a century except perhaps their numbers have more or less quadrupled. However, it is the critique of judgment which motivates Deleuze and Artaud, and this is well exemplified in Deleuze’s comments on Artaud’s work and in the radio play itself. Deleuze says, “From Greek tragedy to modern philosophy, an entire doctrine of judgment has been elaborated and developed ... Breaking with that Judeo-­Christian tradition, it was Spinoza who carried out the critique [of judgment], and he had four great disciples to take it up again and push it further: Nietzsche, D.H. Lawrence, Kafka, Artaud.” (Deleuze 2002: 126). How does this doctrine of judgment actually work? According to Deleuze, it works surreptitiously: “In the doctrine of judgment, our debts are inscribed in an autonomous book without our even realizing it, so that we are no longer able to pay off an account that has become infinite” (Deleuze, 2002: 128). He goes on to say that it is probably Artaud himself who has suffered most by this particular form, being incarcerated in institutions throughout his life subject as he was to the judgment of the psychiatrist, “[w]ho suffered more from judgment in its harshest form, the terror of psychiatric expertise, than Artaud? (Deleuze 2002:126). The men we worked with spoke openly of the ways some of the prison staff judge them on an everyday basis—­how many of them have made their minds up before they even meet you. One of the men said, memorably: “I suppose you can’t help it in here. We are in prison, aren’t we though? We are here for a reason and it’s not up to them to give us a second chance, is it?” (Prisoner#1).

It is often startling to us how ready the men are to articulate something philosophically profound directly from their lived experiences. What the prisoner above states here, for us, is an articulation of the mechanism of judgment—­the infinite debt (no “second chance”)

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under which he labors night and day in order to be treated fairly. With a quick swap over Nietzsche’s idea of the priest with the prison officer, the following seems to map itself perfectly well onto the prisoner’s experiences: “the logic of judgment merges with the psychology of the priest, as the inventor of the most somber organization: I want to judge, I have to judge ... It is not as if the judgment itself were postponed, put off until tomorrow, pushed back to infinity; on the contrary, it is the act of postponing, of carrying to infinity, that makes judgment possible.” (Deleuze 2002: 127).

Theoretically, it seems there is no way out, no exit. It appears to be a dead end, like a prison. What is to be done? It seems, according to Deleuze, that Artaud already had a few ideas: “Artaud, [...] will constantly bear witness to this confrontation between forces and powers as so many becomings: becoming-­mineral, becoming-­vegetable, becoming-­animal. The way to escape judgment is to make yourself a body without organs, to find your body without organs.” (Deleuze 2002:131).

It is here that we can demonstrate Artaud’s visionary practice, which lays the foundation for Braidotti’s posthuman (meaning both post-­Kantian judgment and post-­Anthropos). Artaud makes way for the body without organs and invites, it seems, all the incarcerated to participate, he states “When you will have made him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions and restored him to his true freedom.” (Artaud 1947). For Artaud, “automatic reactions” are not only the bodily excretions that he is so fond of shocking his audiences with, but also the technologies that make a person subject to judgment both by others and by themselves. Self-­judgment in this sense takes precedence when a person reflects on their own situation, sense of self, and self-­worth. Perhaps inevitably, an incarcerated man is likely to reflect the judgment of others in any opinion of themselves. We have seen this time and again in the local prison. A prisoner admits they are “not human enough”; it’s an automatic reaction. Artaud foresees this in his radio play when he calls for us all to move beyond the “automatic reactions.” The issue becomes how to create a body without organs; it is an obvious physical impossibility unless we redefine what a human is, what they extend onto and into, how humans are not self-­identical, fixed examples of themselves, but more dependent on the relationships they form (on a molecular and molar level to put it in Deleuzean terminology) with the rest of the universe. To do this, Artaud and Deleuze advocate “combat.” Deleuze will later, in 1987, go on to define combat as “resistance” bringing together the work of art and the act of resistance, but at this point, his and Artaud’s vision of moving beyond the judgment of God is through combat, “Combat is not a judgment of God, but the way to have done with God and with judgment. No one develops through judgment, but through a combat that implies no judgment [...] Combat, by contrast, is a powerful, nonorganic vitality that supplements force with force, and enriches whatever it takes hold of.” (Deleuze 1995: 134).

It appears to be in the act of combat that a body without organs is created, fabricated, and built. The act of resistance, it seems, is momentary, but it allows or even promotes new



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ways of being or becoming. Typical of both Deleuze and Artaud’s approach, the point in getting out of repression is to build new forms, “It [combat] brings the new combination into existence. Herein, perhaps, lies the secret: to bring into existence and not to judge. If it is so disgusting to judge, it is not because everything is of equal value, but on the contrary because what has value can be made or distinguished only by defying judgement.” (Deleuze 1995: 135).

Theater artist and critic Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca (2009, 2011) has perhaps gone furthest in exploring the overlap between Deleuze and Artaud for contemporary theater (see also Frida Beckmen 2009 for some fascinating insights into Deleuze and Artaud). Her work on theater and radical immanence has been very valuable for us. After Ó Maoilearca, we attempt to make a space for “how Artaud’s broadcast attempts to perform an ethics of creation with respect to its listeners, by affirming differential presence in performance as the forcing of thought rather than the communication of a message; as the making of a ‘theatre without organs’ based on the primacy of force over form.” (Cull Ó Maoilearca 2011, online). A final note on theory before we get into the practicalities of what we actually did: What we are particularly focused on is “the responsibility of a philosophy [or performance] that validates experiences of extreme intensity, acute affect and becoming or what Deleuze calls ‘pure lived experience’ in Ó Maoilearca’s words.”

As the relationship developed with the men, so did the focus on theory. Theory became necessary in order for us to be able to navigate the treacherous terrain of judgment. We would argue that it is more or less impossible to avoid judgment per se in entering a prison full of so-­called “convicted criminals,” given the austere, Victorian architecture, the solid bars of the wing gates, and the complicated and convoluted security clearance procedures. It all adds up to force you to feel judgmental—­the act of judgment, we would admit, empowers a visitor to understand what they are encountering (horrible men, horrible prison, and horrible conditions). The act of having a definitive position is empowering, and therefore all the more difficult to avoid. However, the men, combined with Artaud, Braidotti, and Deleuze, force you to go further, to resist, to combat, to build as best you can a body without organs for yourself. And that, it seems to us, requires encounters with “theory.” For us, the decision (by the men) to perform “To Have Done With The Judgement of God” was an act of combat. Therein, for us, is the crux of the issue. We witnessed an explosion of new relations between ourselves and the incarcerated men. However, in the prison and Artaud’s play, we discovered for ourselves new relations between Deleuze and Artaud, and Braidotti and Artaud, and the relation between their ideas and the incarcerated men. For a moment, we went some of the way to making ourselves a body without organs, capable of forging relations across previously unconnected terrains. It all happened because, on a wet April morning in 2022, the men were in yet another COVID-­19 lockdown and we, the facilitators, were not allowed on site, but nonetheless at 9 a.m. that Friday morning, we read Artaud’s play silently together. We were outside the prison walls in the

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rain, they (around 12 of them) were inside their dry (yet damp) cells. We like to think that we offered up our thoughts to the prison walls, cells, bars, the rain outside, and the spirit of Artaud, who seems to be, at least for us, there wherever incarcerated men are. The reading lasted approximately one hour. It is discussed later in the chapter, but first we need to consider the following broader question.

Why This Art(form) and Why Now? Criminology, according to Lippens and Van Claster (2023), is undergoing a radical rethink in terms of defining what “crime” might be—­the object of the study of criminology or whether “assemblage theory” (after Deleuze and Guattari  1987) supports criminology’s radical rethink. Inside this problem of definitions, we think there is a call for radical education projects inside prison settings, which are prisoner-­led with an open focus, moving away from a universalist positivist approach to the study of crime and “criminals.” An arts-­based approach, with a theoretical dependence on neo-­Spinozism (Artaud, Deleuze, and Braidotti), is the context within which we situate this practice. In our approach to this project, we ended up thinking that the Solomon R. Guggenheim in New York (est. 1939), the Pompidou Centre in Paris (est. 1977), and Tate Modern in London (est. 2000) were in many ways a useful opposite to the context we had involved in a local Her Majesty’s Prison. Three flagship contemporary arts institutions in major political and economic centers of the Global North and home to cutting-­edge thinking in contemporary arts and cultural theory sit in stark contrast to the J wing, at our local HMP (est. 1855) and the makeshift classroom and arts center, whose resources consist of a conjoined table (which doubles as a table tennis table) and some plastic bubble chairs. In the latest fascinating developments taking place in the major arts centers in the world, there is perhaps a parallel lack of development in prison settings and education provision. What strikes us as being noteworthy is the speed at which developments take place in international centers of contemporary arts; each year seems to produce a new set of insights that feed into academic criticism; annual groundbreaking exhibitions or retrospectives on major artists and schools of art which transform our way of thinking; and new ways of looking at how the arts interface with everyday life. This contrast with the slowness with which ideas around the arts in prison settings circulate inside prison settings themselves. For example, and without deviating too far from the topic under discussion here, we came across an article on The Guggenheim who recently commissioned a project, Time Based Media, which works to collect, preserve, and exhibit works of art from the technical and digital age. This includes works from video, film, audio, and computer technologies, all of which are referred to as time-­based media works. They suggest that these kinds of arts “have a duration as a dimension and unfold to the viewer over time” (guggenheim.org). This project recognizes how artworks of this nature are entirely susceptible to technological fails and equipment becoming obsolete. This pioneering conservation laboratory, which is developing new practices for art conservation internationally, while arguably overdue, raises certain questions about why particular art forms resurface at certain times. What is it about the art form that, even though arguably obsolete in terms of its production value, be it TV, film, or audio, continues to resonate with a contemporary audience and finds



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a  way of being reframed? Questions such as this have long occupied art conservation policies and practices and tend to be legitimized through public “high art” institutions that have all the cultural capital to enact such projects. With conservation comfortably in the hands of the experts in such prestigious public institutions, what is the role of similar art forms in other public institutions and those that fail to carry any of the esteem of a museum such as the Guggenheim? What place is there for the arts in our prisons? What place is there for Time Based Media particularly in prisons, where both resources and the status of the arts struggle for recognition at a very basic level, let  alone art forms that require advanced technical support. Is there something to be done? Is there a way to make sense of what happens in the fast-­moving world of contemporary arts, or the arts generally, inside a prison? We asked the men on the J wing. What follows is what they came up with.

Prison Radio Today For context, prison radio has become common practice in most UK-­based prisons. National initiatives, such as The Prison Radio Association (PRA est. 2006) responsible for the National Prison Radio project, have elevated the status of radio as one of the most important forms of communication, entertainment, and education in the prison system. The PRA makes and broadcasts programs made by and for prisoners in over 100 prisons (see mixcloud.com/nationalprisonradio/). Radio is part of a larger initiative that recognizes the potential for art programs in the prison setting. According to Nick Hardwick (2014), a former HM Inspector of Prisons for England and Wales, “One small but important part of the ‘total experience of imprisonment’ is the arts activities available in prisons ... The arts are a lifeline from despair for some prisoners, a gateway to improvement for others and an antidote to both tedium and tension for many.” This statement reflects the growing status of arts in the prison setting and how arts participation can offer affective encounters that can have a positive impact on the prison population. Arts in prison falls under the collective banner of applied arts whereby the use of the arts is seen as instrumental in enabling personal growth for prisoners. An appreciation and understanding of the aesthetic qualities of the arts is neither ignored nor side tracked, but it is seen as an integral part of the programs. The relationship between the art form and the art content is particularly interesting in the prison setting, where in our experience, the art form is often compromised by the lack of services to support its execution, such as specialized equipment, materials, access to expertise, information, etc. National organizations, such as the National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance (www. artsincriminaljustice.org.uk) that supports over 900  individuals, arts organizations that deliver creative interventions for people in prisons and on probation, and Koestler Arts (www.koestlerarts.org.uk) that believes in the transformative power of the arts to help people to have creative, positive, and productive lives, play an important part in sustaining an infrastructure, whereby the status of arts in the judicial system continues to be recognized. The rise in commissioned reports and evaluations within the last twenty years in the United Kingdom alone, all accessible through the Arts Alliance Evidence Library (www.artsevidence.org.uk), demonstrates the growth in this sector. Unlike mainstream arts practice, many of which are (in)validated through commercial success or failure,

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applied arts’ programs tend to be not-­for-­profit and modestly funded. This brings with it a built-­in “suspicion” regarding the neoliberal mantra of “value for money.” For example, initiatives such as the Arts Alliance Evidence Library deflect such arrested understandings of the value of arts and prove to be an essential online resource that houses all the most recent key research and evaluation documents on the impact of arts-­based programs within the judicial system. The focus tends not to be on monetary gain but on the personal development of its participants. Saying that, reports such as “Unlocking the Value” (2011) play an important role in charting not only the social and cultural benefits associated with arts participation for prisoners but also the economic impact especially in relation to reductions in re-­offending. In contrast, countries such as those in Scandinavia—­whose criminal justice system seems to be light years ahead of the UK system—­are renowned for implementing progressive, prisoner-­centered rehabilitation programs that result in an extremely low level of re-­offending in comparison to UK-­based rates of reoffending. This is most obvious with the 20% reoffending rate in Norway, where the United Kingdom currently stands at 60% (see www.brightblue.org.uk). Most arts participation programs for prisoners will concern themselves in trying to address, either directly or indirectly, the prospect of reoffending. A report commissioned by the Arts Alliance in 2014 Re-­imagining Futures: Exploring Arts Interventions and the Process of Desistance specifically focused on this issue and documented a process called “desistance” and how it needs to be implemented nationally. Desistance is the process by which people who have offended stop offending (primary desistance) and then take on a personal narrative (Maruna 2001) that supports a continuing non-­offending lifestyle (secondary desistance). Change is not a linear process rather some will zigzag and will offend again on the journey to secondary desistance. In order for desistance from crime to take place, Giordano et al (2002: 999–1002) suggest that there is a four-­stage process that includes an openness to change, exposure and reaction to “hooks” for change (or turning points), imagining and believing in a “replacement self,” and a change in the way that offending and deviant behavior is viewed. Maruna (2007: 652) notes that “desistance is typically understood to be more than just an absence of crime. Desistance is the maintenance of crime-­free behaviour and is an active process in itself [which] involves the pursuit of a positive life.” We would like to think that part of the HMP2Hope project is about working toward “desistance,” where the accumulation of participation in a range of small arts intervention projects, in this case “the silent radio project” we are, as two facilitators, plays small role in embracing the future of prisoners and the ability to desist. The overall aim for us and our projects is to demystify third-­level (university) education for prisoners and to encourage those in prison settings to consider university education during incarceration or on release. According to leading criminologist Coates, “42% of adult prisoners report having been permanently excluded from school” (Coates  2016). Therefore, having two associate professors on site weekly, often accompanied by undergraduate university students and other visiting professors, helps in providing the prisoners a first-­hand experience of what it might be like to be taught at university. This educational setting is designed to give the men the confidence to see themselves as being part of a university community. The project is prisoner-­led, and the topics covered reflect the interests of the men. The project is inclusive in design and



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discussion-­based seminars that encourage prisoners to research certain topics, followed by an opportunity to voice their responses in class or privately (in their notebooks and sketchbooks provided by our research budget). All sets of learners, prisoners/university students/university professors, share the educational space and learn from each other. Artaud’s radio play was selected because of a class discussion about judgment and the possibility of moving beyond it. Arriving at an agreed theme is not straightforward in a prison setting. Normally, a teacher would follow a curriculum with agreed learning outcomes and pre-­agreed delivery methods (such as lectures consolidated by seminars and tutorials), but as facilitators we were reluctant to impose a system we had no say in, to men who might have been as mystified as we were about the actual function of a lecture, for example. Some detail about how we came to agree on a working method with the men is important here to dispel any concerns about the men having little or no agency in the process. The last thing we wanted to do was to impose repressive pedagogical ideologies, which served to minimize the men’s agency in their learning processes. We call the process prisoner-­led because three governing principles were observed during the process, all of which more or less guarantee the ownership of the learning process by the men. We asked: What do you want to learn? How do you want to learn it? How often do you want to have a class?

These questions gave rise to many debates about what education was for; why we force children to go to school; how writing is privileged over speaking; how class war seems to be alive and kicking in universities; how people in prisons tend to be from working-­class backgrounds; and how getting educated can help answer all of the above. One of the men said, “No matter what you do, you just get judged, don’t yer?!” (prisoner #1). A silence in the room. It was clear we had reached a moment of collective reflection, until one of the men said, “In universities, yeah? Can you teach like, how to judge and not judge? Do yer know what I mean?” (prisoner #2). We responded to the best of our abilities something like “Well, there’s a history of judgement in philosophy that we could look into and bring stuff in about, if you want?” This methodology grew out of discussions with the men who opened up with the general question: What expertise was in the room? What sort of etiquette should we adopt for the sessions, for example: Should people take turns to speak? Should everybody speak? Should people speak more than others? Should we give time slots to others? Should things be discussion based? Should we give ourselves homework? The group dynamic, which, at the time of writing, is quite settled and predictable, took a long time to establish, but it was only established after we could agree on what the men were interested in. It became clear that they were interested in “judgment,” both as a concept (with a history), as a judicial practice (which they had suffered at the hands of judge), and in an everyday sense (“no matter what we do, we can’t escape being judged—­all day long”). They really wanted to know what this was and how it could be understood, perhaps even overturned or at least argued against.

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We said we could get professors from all over the world to come and visit and talk about judgment. With some skepticism, they approved the plan. Professor Susan Feltch from Calvin University Grand Rapids, Michigan, who visited Liverpool Hope at the time, was asked to participate. Susan, mindful of the literacy levels inside the prison system, after her work in Michigan prisons, decided to fulfill the brief of “judgment” with a piece of work from Bruegel the Elder “Landscape and the Fall of Icarus” (circa. 1560). Feltch led the session with the question “What do you notice?” The discussions ranged far and wide, but memorably coincided with the idea of judgment and how the condemned man (Icarus) had hardly been noticed—­his fall, like many of the men inside the prison walls, had gone on unnoticed by everybody else. Feltch’s reference to the W. H. Auden 1938 ekphrastic poem “Musee des Beaux Arts”—­written about Bruegel’s painting—­reinforces this idea of being forgotten about. It chimed well with the men and left a lasting impression. When discussing judgment and how it plays out in the everyday lives of us all, the prisoners started to consider how judgment is portrayed, either overtly or subtly, in works of art. Artists such as Hieronymus Bosch (c1450–1516), Bruegel the Elder (c1525–1569), Michelangelo (1475–1564), and Vermeer (1632–1675) proved to be rich pickings for exploring judgment as a theme and provided an accessible base from which to launch discussions on judgment. During one of the sessions, one of the men asked if anybody had written anything like a play or a poem explicitly about judgment. We scratched our heads and said we would have another think about it. We talked a little about Shakespeare’s plays (mentioned Measure for Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well), some Chekhov short stories and plays (The Peasants, The Steppe, and The Cherry Orchard), Ibsen plays (Hedda Gabler and A Doll’s House), and a bit of Strindberg (Miss Julie). “No, no, no, no. I mean something more recent—­like from someone who lived in prison or something, or done some mad stuff and regretted it” (prisoner #3). The rest of the men nodded in approval. “You know, someone real who struggled in life and ended up in jail or a mental hospital. Isn’t there anybody like that?” (prisoner #4). “I bet there isn’t. They’re all rich, aren’t they? Someone always gave a toss about them.” (prisoner #5). “You don’t have to be poor to go mad though mate, I’m telling yer! I saw this thing on the telly last week about how madness runs in the Royal Family. I’m telling yer mate. Doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got, when you’re mad, you’re mad. Money won’t help yer! (prisoner #3).

Artaud’s clinically diagnosed “madness” for the majority of his short, albeit very productive life, has offered the prisoners a point of entry into his seemingly abstract radio play “To Be Done with the Judgement of God.” The prisoners were especially interested in knowing that this was their last work before they died and may well have had a say in their eventual demise. Direct comments from prisoners while the group reading the play were “What the fuck, this play wrecks your head. I can see what he’s trying to say but fuck me it’s so dark” (prisoner #6)



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and “I like it. It’s deep. He’s having a go, isn’t he? Having a go at the Americans. He knew the Americans love war. He’s trying to warn us. It’s boss, really. I’m not sure what he’s on about half the time, but I did get that!” (prisoner #2). “We’ve got prison radio in here, you know. It would be smart to listen to that live or something, wouldn’t it?” (prisoner#7).

There followed a discussion about whether or not our university students would perform it for the radio, if the students could come to the prison to record it for them. Whether or not we could get professional actors in to do it, if there existed a radio version of it already, and if we could get a copy passed the censors in the prison or not. “There are some swear words and sex references which the screws won’t like. I don’t think you’d get it passed them to be honest” (prisoner #8).

We gave each prisoner in the class a copy of Artaud’s radio play to take away to their cells and prepare for a group recording for the in-­house radio facilities that the prison currently houses. Despite the crises of confidence (of which there were several) in recording their voices for radio, we agreed we would limit the release of it just for the men involved. We organized a date and a time and asked the men to rehearse whenever they could, in pairs in their cells. In the words of Robert Burns, and like a lot of work with prison constituency groups, “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men/Gang aft a-­gley.” On the week of the radio recording, we were contacted by the prison to inform us that there had been COVID-­19 cases on one of the wings and that the prison was going into yet another strict lockdown where the men were, once again, confined to their cells for 23 hours a day, with no “non-­ essential staff” allowed on site. What could be done when access was denied to the facilitators, when the prison recording studio was out of bounds, and when the men were stuck in their cells for 23 hours and there’s a recording to do? What alternative spaces could be deployed to enable this affective encounter to take place? The show had to go on and it did, albeit with a changed format, and a “silent radio” project ensued, more out of lack of choice than design. We had run out of time, and we were not sure when the lockdown would be lifted. Momentum is everything in a prison education project, and we risked losing the project if the men were not provided opportunities to engage with the project. As with previous lockdowns (Anderson and Malone 2023), we entered the education prison office and called the men on the in-­cell telephone system, asking what we should do next. After lengthy discussions about the injustice of what the men saw as collective punishment for a few isolated cases of COVID-­19 on other wings, one of them had the idea of reading it together over the phone, a wonderful idea that was logistically implausible given that the phone system could only connect one person at a time with another. Then, we had another call, and the following exchange took place: Prisoner#3: Ah fuck it. Let’s just read it aloud in our own heads? Anderson/Malone: What do you mean?

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Prisoner#3: You know, let’s just sit in our cells—­we are there all day anyway—­and we’ll all read it instead of class on a Friday morning. It’ll give us something to do instead of staring at the walls. Anderson/Malone: Will you spread the word and tell everybody else on J wing that’s what we are doing? Prisoner#3: Yeah, I’ll see them when they let us out for an hour, I’ll tell them then. Friday morning 9 a.m. Everybody in their cells reads that mad bastard’s radio play “To Have Done With The Judgement of God,” aloud in their own heads. It’ll be a laugh ... What will you two do? Anderson/Malone: We will arrive Friday morning, park where we always do, outside the prison wall, and we’ll read it with you, aloud in our own heads. Prisoner#3: There you go, that way we will all be together for a bit and we won’t have missed class! Fuck COVID, that’s what I say!

Conclusion That rainy morning in April saw the partly surreal event of twelve men silently reading Antonin Artaud’s 75-­year-­old visionary masterpiece “To Have Done With The Judgement of God,” accompanied by us on the other side of the 30-­foot-­high brick wall. We do not know exactly what the effects have been on the men, it is for them to say. However, we do know that they are now more confident in class, arrive to class before we do, worry if we are late for class (in case we have not been allowed in for whatever reason), have asked on many occasions if they can come to university when they get out of prison, and that they have asked that we write about their experiences on the HMP2Hope course that we run every Friday morning (when allowed). For us, there is something meaningful in the silence of the voices of the prisoners and the silence of the “radio reading” they undertook. It resonates for us perhaps more than if we had got to the recording studio with the men and committed it to the prison radio schedule. For us, it has been a transformational experience and has succeeded in questioning our basic assumptions about prison and the men who currently live there, and the students we have in prison and the regime of judgment which features so prominently in their everyday lives. We think Artaud would have approved, not necessarily of our efforts but of the radicalism of the men, who, like Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca (2009) observed, in Deleuze’s words, are dealing with “pure lived experience.” We dedicate this chapter to the men of our local prison.

Bibliography Anderson, Gary and Niamh Malone 2023. “Odyssey on the Airwaves.” In Sonic Engagement: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Community Engaged Practice, eds. Sarah Woodland and Wolfgang Vachon, 246–264. London and New  York: Routledge.

Artaud, Antonin 1968. Collected Works, vol. 1, trans. Victor Corti. London: Calder and Boyars. Artaud, Antonin 1974. Collected Works, vol. 4, trans. Victor Corti. London: Calder and Boyars. Artaud, Antonin 1976. Selected Writings, ed. Susan Sontag. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.



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Artaud, Antonin 1995. Watchfiends & Rack Screams: Works from the Final Period, ed. and trans. Clayton Eshleman with Bernard Bador. Boston: Exact Change. “Arts Alliance in 2014 Re-­ imagining Futures: Exploring Arts Interventions and the Process of Desistance.” http://www.artsevidence.org.uk/ evaluations/re/. Last accessed 15 January 2023. Basirizadeh, Fatemeh Sadat, Narges Raoufzadeh, and Shiva Zaheri Birgani 2022. “The Study of Spurt of Blood in the lens of The Theatre of Cruelty.” LingLit Journal Scientific Journal for Linguistics and Literature 3 (1): 31–36 (Biar Publisher online). Beckman, Frida 2009. “The Idiocy of the Event: Between Antonin Artaud, Kathy Acker and Gilles Deleuze.” Deleuze Studies 13 (1): 54–72. London: Edinburgh University Press. Blanchot, Maurice 2003. Artaud in The Book to Come, trans. Charlotte Mandell, 34–40. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Braidotti, Rosi 2023. Posthuman Knowledge [video]. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=0CewnVzOg5w Last accessed 15 January 2023. Coates, Dame Sally 2016. Unlocking Potential: A Review of Education in Prison. https://assets.­ publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/ system/uploads/attachment_data/file/524013/ education-­review-­report.pdf. Last accessed 15 January 2023. Cull, Laura 2009. “How Do You Make Yourself a Theatre Without Organs? Deleuze, Artaud and the Concept of Differential Presence.” Theatre Research International 34 (3): 243–255. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cull, Laura 2011. “While Remaining on the Shore: Ethics in Deleuze’s Encounter with Antonin Artaud.” In Deleuze and Ethics, eds. Nathan Jun and Daniel Smith. Edinburgh. Online edn,  Edinburgh Scholarship Online, 20 September 2012, https://doi.org/10.3366/­edinb urgh/9780748641178.003.0004. Accessed 15 January 2023. Deleuze, Gilles 1988. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights.

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Maruna, Shadd 2001. Making Good: How Ex-­convicts Reform and Rebuild their Lives. American Psychological Association. Maruna, Shadd 2007. “Amputation or Reconstruction? Notes on the Concept of ‘Knifing Off’ and Desistance From Crime.” Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 23 (1): 104–124. Shaw, Jon K. 2016. “Athleticism Is Not Joy: Extricating Artaud from Deleuze’s Spinoza.” Deleuze Studies 10 (2): 162–185. London: Edinburgh University Press.

Smith, Daniel W. 2022. “The Concept of Sense in Gilles Deleuze’s Logic of Sense.” Deleuze and Guattari Studies, 16 (1): 3–23. London: Edinburgh University Press. Spinoza, Baruch 1985. Collected Works, Volume 1. trans. Edwin Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Visser, Joeri 2021. Antonin Artaud and the Healing Practices of Language: How Life Matters in Artaud’s Later Writings. London: Bloomsbury.

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“Chief of the Second Rate”: James Shirley and Dramatic Value Heidi Craig

In his dramatic bio-­ bibliography, An Account of the English Dramatick Poets, Gerard Langbaine singles out James Shirley as “the Chief of the Second-­rate Poets” (Langbaine 1691: 475).1 Shirley dips just below the “first-­rate poets,” usually William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and John Fletcher (sometimes named with his longtime collaborator, Francis Beaumont), who were consistently identified as the pinnacle of dramatic quality. Shirley dominates the next tier, the poets of the “second magnitude,” a group that also includes Thomas Heywood, Thomas Middleton, John Day, John Webster, and William Rowley (Langbaine 1691: 428). Placement right behind the three top dramatists called the “triumvirate of wit” was routine for Shirley. In his comprehensive dramatic catalog of 1671, the stationer Francis Kirkman explains his arrangement of play titles “in some methodical manner,” according to dramatists’ prominence, with Shirley in his usual position: “Although I took care and pains in my last Catalogue to place the Names yet I have now proceeded further in a better method, having thus placed them. First, I begin with Shakespear, who hath in all written forty eight. Then Beaumont and Fletcher fifty two, Johnson fifty, Shirley thirty eight” (Kirkman 1671: 39). (Note that the corpus size influences rank, but does not determine it, since Shakespeare outranks Fletcher and Jonson despite having fewer printed plays.) Even statements ostensibly designed to praise Shirley betray his middle rank. When Philip Massinger declares that “Few have outstrip’d thee, many halt behind,” he draws attention to both “the few” that outdo Shirley in addition to the many he exceeds (Massinger  1630: sig. A4). Despite the genre’s purpose to commend, John Hall’s commendatory poem for Shirley’s The Cardinal (staged in 1641 and printed in 1652) is similarly lukewarm: “Yet this I dare assert, when men have nam’d /Johnson (the Nations

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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Laureat,) the fam’d /Beaumont, and Fletcher, he, that will not see /Shirley, the fourth, must forfeit his best eye” (Hall 1652: sig. A4v). Fourth best, chief of the second-­rate poets, good but not great: it was Shirley’s fate to be compared to his celebrated predecessors and come up slightly short. This chapter examines the reasons for Shirley’s middling reputation, connecting it to his position as the “last” major professional dramatist working when the theaters closed in 1642. In the first section, I consider Shirley’s dramaturgy and reception in modern and early modern criticism. Shirley’s plays digest those of his dramatic predecessors who would eventually be made into his contemporaries, all but ensuring he would pale in comparison. As the “last” professional dramatist of the early modern period, it is fitting that we examine Shirley’s “last” professional play, The Court Secret, an intricate tragicomedy that heavily draws from earlier plays, especially those by John Fletcher. The Court Secret’s extraordinarily complex plot takes the ingenuity of Fletcherian tragicomedy and ramps up the complications: adding more love triangles, more baby swaps, more siblings who flirt with incest, more unhappy princes and princesses, and more reappearing fathers. However, whether this amplification actually improves on Fletcherian romance is questionable. The Court Secret’s theatrical and textual history also marks it as belated; it was the first known casualty of the theatrical prohibition, having its planned theatrical premiere of late summer 1642 scuttled by the parliamentary ordinance banning theater on 2 September 1642. The title page of The Court Secret (printed in Shirley’s Six New Plays of 1653) declares that the play was “Never Acted, But prepared for the Scene at Black-­friers,” gesturing to an extinguished theatrical tradition. How did Shirley’s status as the last gasp of English professional drama affect perceptions of his place in the broader canon? In the concluding section, I ask how dramatists deemed to be “second rate,” “third rate,” or even the outright “worst” can help us understand the related notions of dramatic value and periodization.

Shirley’s Reputation, Early Modern, and Modern Shirley emerged onto a theater scene ostensibly past its prime. Russell A. Fraser and Norman Rabkin note, “By the time of Shirley’s birth, in London, Marlowe, Greene and Kyd were already dead [. . .]. By the time his plays began to appear, in 1624/5, Shakespeare, Webster, and Fletcher were dead [. . .] and Jonson was writing his last major play” (Fraser and Rabkin 1979: 743). Jeremy Lopez, citing Fraser and Rabkin, observes that “Even at the moment he enters the world, professionally or biologically, Shirley is lost within the march of history and a parade of other, more famous names” (Lopez 2016: 19–21). To be clear, this is Shirley’s retrospective reputation. In his own time, Shirley was commercially and critically successful, and in the late-­seventeenth century Gerald Langbaine observed “the Value and Admiration that Persons of the first Rank had for him” (Langbaine 1691: 475). Likewise, Anthony a Wood’s early biographical sketch describes Shirley’s commercial and critical popularity, earning “not only a very considerable livelihood but also very great respect and encouragement from persons of quality” (Wood 1692: col. 261). Even with the high regard of eminent people, however, Shirley himself was aware of his position as a successor, and potentially an also-­ran, to Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Langbaine notes that “He had a great Veneration for his Predecessors, as may be seen by



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his Prologue to the Sisters,” (licensed for the stage in April 1642, printed in 1653) in which Shirley celebrates the triumvirate, praising “Shakespeare ... whose mirth did once beguile /Dull hours, and buskind, made even sorrow smile,” “Fletcher the Muses darling, and ‘Johnson, t’ whose name, wise Art did bow, and Wit /Is only justified by honouring it” (Langbaine  1691: 475). Jeremy Lopez notes Shirley’s “deep study and nearly complete internalisation of the drama that had preceded him” and his efforts to exert “himself in an attempt both to acknowledge his indebtedness to, and to move beyond, the dramatic tradition of which he was a belated part” (Lopez 2016: 21, 17). Below I describe, through a close reading of The Court Secret, Shirley’s particular debt to Fletcherian tragicomedy. Seemingly destined to be a rank-­and-­file member of the early modern dramatic corpus, appearing after the drama’s supposed “golden age,” the closure of the theaters in 1642 would eventually bestow another title on Shirley: the “last” English dramatist. In the commendatory poem where he characterizes Shirley as the “fourth” best, John Hall also gives him two other titles: “The Surviving Honour and Ornament of the English Scene” and the “last supporter of the dying scene.” Hall’s poem was published in 1652, a decade into the theatrical prohibition. The closure of the theaters obviously devastated Shirley’s ambitions and prospects, but it also accorded him new significance, not derived from his work but from a mere fluke of chronology. Hall’s characterization of Shirley has endured: modern references to Shirley usually describe him simply as the “last playwright” or “last great playwright” of the English Renaissance, while his plays have largely been excluded from dramatic anthologies of the last two centuries (Lopez 2016: 18).2 Shirley’s meaning is evident, without actually having to read his plays. Shirley’s status as the last playwright is a contingent historical position, but he is actually a perfect spokesperson for the end of English Renaissance drama. As I will show with a reading of The Court Secret, even before the theaters closed, Shirley embodied an entire tradition that would happen to conclude with him.

A Close Reading of The Court Secret A recent essay by Rebecca Bailey examines The Court Secret’s resonance with the political crises of the early-­1640s England (Bailey 2016: 72-85). Here, I would like to focus on Shirley’s deliberate renegotiation of the aesthetic and narrative strategies of his predecessors. The Court Secret recalls many earlier moments in early modern drama: Roderigo is an old-­ fashioned, machiavellian villain, reminiscent of villains from Marlowe and earlier Tudor drama. The scheming servant Pedro is constantly said to be “honest,” much like “honest Iago” in Othello. Barbara Ravelhofer observes that Shirley’s tragedies have affinities with those by Webster, Kyd, Middleton, and Chapman (Ravelhofer 2016: 7). However, for tragicomedy, it is above all Fletcher’s “winding plots,” founded on the elements of ingenious surprise and mistaken identity, from which Shirley draws. A.H. Nason describes Shirley’s The Constant Maid and The Doubtful Heir respectively as founded upon “surprise upon surprise” in the mode of Fletcher and a “capital bit of Fletcherian romance, swift, exciting, poetic” (Nason  1915 repr. 1967: xiii, 318). In the late-­ seventeenth century, Gerard Langbaine observed that Shirley “by some has been thought even equal to Fletcher himself.” The Court Secret is squarely in the Fletcherian vein: but does Shirley’s intricate plot rival

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Fletcher’s ingeniousness or simply overegg the pudding? Nason writes, “Rarely among the complicated plots of Shirley is the complication at once more elaborate and more finely knit  ...  Shirley, in The Court Secret, shows his greatest mastery”(Nason  1915 repr. 1967: 377–378). Forsythe notes the plot’s “extraordinary complexity” (Forsythe 1914: 249), and indeed one needs a scorecard to keep track of the various identities, rivalries, and romances of The Court Secret. Before proceeding, a summary of the play’s elaborate plot is provided. Piracquo, a Spanish nobleman banished from Spain, has made a successful career as a pirate off the coast of Portugal. Decades later, his exile is lifted by Prince Carlo, son of the King of Spain and heir to the throne, who is also a friend to Piracquo’s son, Don Manuel. Piracquo and Manuel return to Spain. Manuel falls in love with Clara, daughter of Duke Mendoza; she returns his love. Manuel and Clara are both sought after by others: the Spanish Princess Maria (daughter of the King, sister to Carlo, and close friend to Clara) also falls in love with Manuel. Maria is already betrothed to Antonio, the Portuguese Prince. As for Clara, Prince Carlo loves her too, although Carlo has already agreed to marry Princess Isabella of Portugal (the sister of Antonio). The various romantic, familial, and friendly intrigues are established in the first scene: One set of royal siblings (Carlo and Maria, the Spanish prince and princess) are respectively betrothed to another set of royal siblings (Isabella and Antonio, and Portuguese princess and prince), but both are in love with members of the Spanish nobility (Clara and Manuel). By turning away from their intendeds, Carlo and Maria are troubling the Portuguese-­Spanish alliance and the wishes of their father, the King of Spain, and Antonio and Isabella’s father, the King of Portugal. There are further complications. Roderigo, the Spanish King’s brother, tells Prince Antonio that Carlo loves Clara instead of his sister, Isabella. Roderigo also arouses Antonio’s jealousy at the supposed relationship between Manuel and Maria (Antonio’s intended), as well as Carlo’s anger at Manuel’s supposed courting of Maria (Carlo’s sister). Another complication is hinted at in the opening scene; the servant Pedro knows a “secret” that implicates Mendoza and involves the identities of Carlo and Manuel. The “court secret” is mentioned but not revealed in full, building anticipation for its eventual revelation. Prince Antonio challenges his presumed romantic rival Manuel to a duel; as a result, Manuel is sent to prison. Carlo visits Manuel in prison, where he tells his friend to ask Prince Antonio’s forgiveness. Manuel does not understand why, and Carlo reminds him (based on his false intelligence from Roderigo) that Manuel is Antonio’s rival for Maria. Manuel reassures Carlo that he does not love Maria, and indeed not to worry, because he is in love with someone else: Clara, the very woman Carlo loves. Carlo bemoans the irony of the situation, where, coming to advocate for the rival of Antonio, actually comes to his own rival’s aid: What a strange Sea-­breach has This little storm of breath made here already I was taking pains to unconcern the jealousie Of Antonio and find him my own Rivall Thou hadst been kinder to have lov’d Maria. (Shirley 1653: 32)

The displacement of the rivalry between Manuel and Antonio to Manuel and Carlo is one of many substitutions (later, as we shall see, Manuel and Carlo themselves will switch positions). When Carlo asks Manuel to give up Clara, he responds in the Fletcherian vein, with a



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series of seeming impossibilities, some of which will eventually come to pass: “With greater justice, Sir, command to uncreate myself, as call /My faith or heart again ... I may, with as much innocence, commit a rape, or murder, as attempt it” (Shirley 1653: 32). Manuel will later do some of the very things that supposedly cannot be done: he will commit murder innocently, and will “uncreate” himself through the revelation of a different identity. Carlo magnanimously releases Manuel, his friend and romantic rival, from prison. In a show of gratitude, Manuel promises to release Clara from their relationship, giving her an opportunity to declare her love for Carlo. When Clara reasserts her love for Manuel, Carlo is unhappy. Later, on the way to meet Prince Carlo, Manuel is interrupted by Carlo’s servant, who informs him that a Moor is battling his master. Intending to defend his friend Carlo, Manuel fights and kills the Moor, who turns out to be Carlo in disguise. In other words, Manuel kills Carlo while attempting to defend him. This irony is classic Fletcher, who excelled at writing scenes where an intention delivers precisely the opposite result. (Recall the cowardly clown Bessus of A King and No King, who wins the day by retreating fiercely in the wrong direction, accidentally rushing toward the enemy rather than fleeing.) In The Court Secret, Clara describes the irony of Manuel ending of Carlo’s life: “You did not murder him, nay you did not kill him, /You fought in his revenge, and while he came /Hid in the name and person of a Traytor /It was your virtue made him bleed”(Shirley 1653: 69). Manuel is now in serious trouble, having killed Carlo, ostensibly the heir to the Spanish throne. At this point, Duke Mendoza reveals part of “the court secret”: the murdered prince is not the true Prince Carlo but Julio, Mendoza’s son, with whom the royal infant Carlo was swapped when the real baby prince was kidnapped from the baby’s nurse, Mendoza’s wife. Mendoza’s wife substituted her own baby, Julio, for Prince Carlo, pretending that her own baby had died. This revelation raises the specter of incest: the fake Carlo (Julio) attempted to court Mendoza’s daughter Clara, who was actually his biological sister. Moreover, Clara’s biological brother was killed by her lover, Manuel. Meanwhile, Manuel (who at this point does not know the court secret), is speaking with Maria, Princess of Spain. He tries to discourage Maria’s love for him, noting that he killed the person they still believe to be her brother, Carlo; this does not put Maria off. Clara comes to visit them, and Manuel asks Clara to play the role of Maria, hoping that Clara-­as-­ Maria will allow the real Maria to see the error of her ways. However, Clara, who knows that the dead man is not Maria’s brother but her own, declares that she can forgive and love her brother’s murderer. In a dizzying turn, Clara, by impersonating a woman whose brother has been slain by her lover, actually embodies her own concerns. Manuel,worried that Clara’s words will encourage Maria in her love for him, declares to Clara-­as-­Maria that he will never love her (that is, Maria). But Clara, forgetting that she is only playing Maria, faints at hearing his words (yet another mix-­up). This being a tragicomedy, the fake Carlo (Julio) is not really dead, and begs for the Portuguese Princess Isabella’s forgiveness: she decides to marry him anyway, even if he is not a real prince. Princess Maria complies with her father’s desires and marries the Portuguese Prince Antonio. Thus, released from their royal romantic entanglements, Clara and Manuel are free to marry each other. The play concludes with three happy couples: Manuel and Clara, Antonio and Maria, and Carlo and Isabella. The King of Spain, however, mourns: he has lost an heir because Prince Carlo is actually Julio, Mendoza’s son. He vows revenge against Mendoza, but the pirate Piracquo reveals the second half of the “court

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secret”: he kidnapped the infant Carlo and raised him as his own son. Therefore, the true Prince Carlo and heir to the Spanish throne is alive: Manuel. The Court Secret recalls Fletcherian tragicomedy, especially A King and No King. Both are imbued with the language and imagery of contradiction. Pedro tells Manuel, “If you be, sir, my Lord Piracquo’s son,” (Shirley 1653: 4) reminiscent of the many conditionals in A King and No King, which hint at the play’s revelation of mistaken identity(Manuel, of course, is not Piracquo’s son). An upset Carlo disowns his father: “Proclaim to th’world I’m not your son . . .,” irony of course being that the King of Spain is not his father at all (Shirley 1653: 4). In prison, Manuel deploys the same oxymoronic conflation of bondage and liberty that is repeated throughout A King and No King: Our soul was the first captive, born to inherit But her own Chains, nor can it be discharged Till Nature tire with its own weight, and then We are but more undone to be at liberty. (Shirley 1653: 28)

Most importantly, A King and No King similarly involves a changeling plot and a flirtation with incest (discussed in more detail below). In the case of The Court Secret, there are two baby swaps, and two people lusting after their siblings: Carlo is revealed to be Julio, and Manuel is revealed to be Carlo, resulting in the potential romances between Carlo and Clara, and between Maria and Manuel, to be between siblings. In A King and No King one is impressed by Fletcher’s elegant, satisfying, resolution—­ one changeling plot, directly affecting one potentially incestuous romance. The Court Secret’s amplification of A King and No King—­with more changeling plots, more incestuous potential couplings—­can be interpreted as Shirley’s virtuosity, but is also evidence of the decadence of Caroline drama:­when building on your predecessors, the only thing to do is add, multiply, and potentially confuse in the process. In its first edition of 1653, The Court Secret’s speech prefixes gesture to the complexity, but also provides an aid to sort it out: character names are shortened to strikingly similar abbreviations: “Maria” is rendered as “Mar,” visually close to “Man” (the shortened speech prefix for “Manuel’), as are the speech prefixes “Car[lo]” and “Cla[ra].” While the speech prefixes signal (and compound) the ­confusion of the love triangles, once the secret is revealed, they also provide a guide to the sibling relationships: “Mar” and “Man” are brother and sister, as are “Car” and “Cla.” This solution is ingenious but also hints that audiences would need help to keep track of who’s who. In addition to magnification, The Court Secret also inverts and refracts A King and No King. In Beaumont and Fletcher’s play, the anguished King Arbaces (who has been contorting himself in an effort to legitimate sex with his presumed long-­lost sister, Princess Panthea) is revealed to be not the king but the son of the minister Gobrius, who decades prior gave the infant Arbaces to the infertile King and Queen, who thereafter promptly conceived the legitimate heir, Panthea. Thanks to this baby swap, Arbaces and Panthea are not siblings after all, and Arbaces can become Queen Panthea’s King Consort (he is therefore king and no king). The Court Secret retains the changeling and incest plot, with an important difference. In the case A King and No King, the threat of incest is forestalled by



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the revelation of the baby swap—­the two lovers are not actually brother and sister (neither related by blood, nor raised together). In the case of The Court Secret, the baby swap plots actually reveal that two seemingly straightforward longings to be incestuous: both Maria and fake Carlo/Julio have lusted after their biological siblings. Another difference between Shirley and Fletcher’s craft is evidenced by their plays’ respective titles. A King and No King points to an impossible contradiction: how can someone simultaneously be something and its negation? The surprise ending solves the riddle. (King Arbaces is a changeling, and therefore not the true king, which allows him to marry his erstwhile sister Princess Panthea, becoming King Consort.) Meanwhile, The Court Secret’s title simply points to a mystery, the contents of which few are privy, building anticipation for its eventual disclosure. Nason notes that, with this negotiation of the secret, Shirley deftly combines two dramaturgical elements that are usually opposed: surprise (characteristic of Fletcher) and suspense (skillfully deployed by Shakespeare, described by Coleridge as that dramatist’s “expectation in preference to surprise”) (Nason 1915, repr. 1967: 378). Nason explains that Shirley “succeeds in combining these seemingly opposed devices into one: that he gains the interest of suspense by making us expect at any moment the revelation of the all-­controlling secret, and yet at the same time gains the interest of surprise by keeping us utterly in the dark as to what this secret is: that Shirley succeeds in doing this, is, I feel, no small achievement. From the method of Shakespeare and from the method of Fletcher, Shirley has seized the distinguishing essentials, has reconciled their seeming conflicts, and has utilised them both in the plot-­structure of this his final play” (Nason 1915, repr. 1967: 378). Shirley’s conspicuous mystery seems to distinguish his dramaturgy from Beaumont and Fletcher’s, which tends to rely on outright surprise. However, Beaumont and Fletcher also used this strategy. In The Scornful Lady, for instance, where the Elder Loveless, exiled by the titular Lady, pretends to die at sea and returns in disguise, Jeremy Lopez explains, “the playwrights give out the secret almost immediately with an aside by the Elder Loveless (2.2.110), and continue to give him asides that emphasize the irony throughout.” As Lopez continues, “surprise is a to a certain extent besides the point: the desired effect seems to be to make you aware of what everyone else is missing, and to make you feel as a result that you are getting everything” (Lopez 2002: 57). Moreover, while Fletcher’s elegant tragicomedies have one revelatory climax, Shirley’s has two; and while A King and No King’s title perfectly encapsulates and resolves the play’s tantalizing paradox, that of The Court Secret is something of a misnomer: the play should probably be called “The Court Secrets,” which are, frankly, hard to sort out without a pen and paper. Even The Court Secret’s much vaunted surprise is compromised by the dramatis personae in its first edition. “The Names of the Persons” describes “Manuel” as “the suppos’d son of Piracquo, but the true Carlo son to the King.” Likewise, “Carlo” is said to be the “suppos’d Prince of Spain, but indeed Julio the son of Mendoza” (Shirley 1653: sig. A4v). Shirley’s text is far from the only early modern playbook whose paratexts reveal crucial plot points (in Jonson’s Epicoene, the eponymous character in the dramatis personae is described as “a young Gent, suppos’d the Silent Woman“ [Jonson 1620, sig. A4v]). By contrast, the third edition (1631) of Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King adds “The Personated Persons,” which simply lists the characters’ names and positions at the start of the play, providing a guide to the characters but without disclosing the secret on which the play’s climax hinges (Beaumont and Fletcher 1631: sig. A2v). However, while The Court Secret’s

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dramatis personae reveals the play’s secret before it has even begun, because there are two changeling plots, in which one main character switches places with another, the plot is still hard to follow. “Manuel” is “the true Carlo,” while “Carlo” is not. The Court Secret does not improve on Fletcher so much as add more elements of the same: it takes Fletcherian elements of suspense and dramatic irony, along with the much-­discussed element of surprise, but which is partially spoiled by a prefatory printed character list to help the reader follow its remarkably complex plot. Rather than enhancing Fletcher, then, Shirley’s play seems like much of muchness.

Conclusion: Second Rate, Third Rate, and The Worst: Ranking the Early Modern Dramatic Corpus in the Late-­seventeenth Century The first edition of The Court Secret (1653) includes a short book list advertising “Plays newly printed for Humphrey Moseley,” the edition’s publisher. The list includes Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Wild Goose Chase, The Widow, “a Comedy written by Ben. Johnson, John Fletcher, and Thomas Midleton, Gent.” (and now ascribed to Middleton alone), and Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling. If book list advertisements hawk books presumed to appeal to readers of the present volume, then we can see that Shirley readers were presumed to be interested in plays by Jonson and Beaumont and Fletcher, a notion bolstered by the fact that Moseley was responsible for printing both Beaumont and Fletcher’s and Shirley’s Interregnum dramatic publications. Clearly, in the mid-­seventeenth century, like his fellow dramatists of the middle-­tier Middleton and Rowley, Shirley was classified with these top dramatists, if not accorded the exact same stature. After the Restoration, Shirley continued to be grouped with the “triumvirate of wit”—­ although not always positively. Having had its 1642 premiere thwarted by the closure of the theaters that year, The Court Secret was eventually staged in 1664 by Thomas Killigrew’s King’s Company at the Bridge Street theater. In a diary entry of 18 August 1664, Samuel Pepys noted that his wife saw The Court Secret, judging it to be “the worst that ever she saw in her life” (Pepys, “The Diary of Samuel Pepys,” 18 August 1668, https://www.­pepysdiary. com/diary/1664/08/18/). The Pepys were in the habit of damning plays and were particularly harsh about plays by ostensibly the best pre-­war dramatists. On 1 March 1661/1662, Pepys saw Romeo and Juliet, calling it “a play of itself the worst that ever I heard in my life” (Pepys, “The Diary of Samuel Pepys,” 1  March 1661/1662, www.pepysdiary.com/ diary/1662/03/01/). On 2 January 1666/1667, Pepys in his diary recorded his opinion of a recent performance of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Custom of the Country, stating that “of all the plays that ever I did see, the worst -­having neither plot, language, nor anything in the earth that is acceptable; only Knipp sings a little song admirably. But fully the worst play that ever I saw or I believe shall see” (Pepys, “The Diary of Samuel Pepys,” 2 January 1666/1667, www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1667/01/02/). On 19 December 1668, Pepys went to see Jonson’s Catiline (which flopped when it premiered in the early-­seventeenth century), calling it “a play of much good sense and words to read, but that do appear the worst upon the stage, I mean, the least diverting, that ever I saw any, though most fine in clothes; and a fine scene of the Senate, and of a fight, that ever I saw in my life. But the play is only to be read, and therefore home, with no pleasure at all” (Pepys, “The Diary of



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Samuel Pepys,” Saturday, 19 December 1668, www.pepysdiary.com/diary/1668/12/19/). The “worst” plays, by the Pepys’ lights, are those by Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher, and Shirley.3 Once again, Shirley is among the triumvirate of wits, but here shares a dubious distinction. Shirley could not seem to win: he failed to measure up to his celebrated dramatic predecessors in the mid-­seventeenth century and then was grouped with them as contemporaries when their reputations started to falter in the late­seventeenth century. It must be said that Pepys’s dramatic assessments written in his private diary are personal and idiosyncratic. By contrast, the late-­ seventeenth-century dramatic critic Gerald Langbaine offered his views as authoritative. It was Langbaine, recall, who called Shirley “chief of the second-­rate poets”; he also judged dramatists to be “third rate,” and “the worst.” These judgments are refreshingly frank, and by examining the reasons that attend them we can obtain a clearer picture of the criteria for dramatic value in the late-­seventeenth century. First, dramatic collaboration with the most celebrated dramatists seems to confer value. Of William Rowley, Langbaine writes that “He was not only beloved by those Great Men, Shakespear, Fletcher, and Johnson; but likewise writ with the former, The Birth of Merlin. Besides what he joyned in writing with Poets of the second Magnitude, as Heywood, Middleton, Day and Webster” (Langbaine 1691: 428). Middleton, “a Dramatick Poet of the Second Rank,” is described by Langbaine as “Contemporary with those Famous Poets Johnson, Fletcher, Massinger and Rowley, in whose Friendship he had a large Share; and tho’ he came short of the two former in parts, yet like the Ivy by the Assistance of the Oak (being joyn’d with them in several Plays) he clim’d up to some considerable height of Reputation” (Langbaine 1691: 270–271). Collaboration with the sturdy “oaks” of English drama enhances lesser­dramatists’ reputations, and not only because their plays are improved by working with more skilled artists. It seems that mere association with the greats lends them credibility. As we saw with Kirkman’s system of organization within his catalog, the size of dramatists’ corpora also seems to play a role in valuation; Shirley, with thirty plays in print, has a corpus comparable to those of Shakespeare, Jonson or Fletcher (Lopez 2016: 17). Thomas Heywood, another “second-­rate” poet, is described by Langabine as “the most Voluminous Writer that ever handled Dramatick Poetry in our Language” (Langbaine 1691: 256). Further down the dramatic ladder, Thomas Nabbs (a Caroline dramatist), Thomas Duffet (an Irish playwright active in England in the 1670s), and Cosmo Manuche are all said by Langbaine to be “third-­rate” poets (Langbaine 1691: 177, 339; Langbaine 1699: 102). Here, Restoration perceptions of dramatic genre seem to play a key role in valuation. Duffet is “One whose Fancy leads him rather to Low-­Comedy, and Farce, than Heroick Poetry” (Langbaine 1691: 177); the heroic plays of John Dryden were at the time ascendant. As for Manuche, Langbaine hopes readers will consider his amateur status, politics, and especially his originality when judging him: “If it be consider’d that our Author’s Muse was travesté en Cavileer; that he made Writing his Diversion, and not his Business; that what he writ was not borrow’d but propriâ Minervâ, I hope the Criticks will allow his Plays to pass Muster amongst those of the third Rate” (Langbaine 1691: 339). Paulina Kewes has written about the growing appreciation of dramatic originality (and comparable anxiety about “plagiary”) in the late-­seventeenth century (Kewes 1997); for Langbaine, it seems that “propria Minerva” (that is, reliance on one’s own wisdom and artistic aptitude) is preferable to borrowed material, even if the result of originality is a rather crummy play.

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At the bottom of the hierarchy is Thomas Meriton (b. 1637), deemed to be the worst English dramatist by at least two influential dramatic commentators. In his comprehensive dramatic catalog of 1671, Kirkman states that “in my Opinion, one Thomas Meriton, who writ two Pamphlets, which he calls Playes ... was the worst” playwright (Kirkman 1671: 39). Langbaine, probably drawing from Kirkman, calls Meriton “certainly the meanest Dramatick Writer that ever England produc’d. I may with Justice apply to his Stupidity what Menedemus the Eretriack Philosopher, said of Perseus’s wickedness: He is indeed a Poet; but of all Men that are, were, or ever shall be, the dullest” (Langbaine 1691: 367). Meriton’s reputation partly recalls Shirley’s, insofar as they are deemed to be what we might call the “number one loser”: with “fourth-­best” Shirley just missing the podium of the best early modern dramatists, and Meriton the best at being bad. As I explore elsewhere, Meriton’s The Wandering Lover (written and printed in 1658) is indeed nonsensical and meandering, whose plot begins as illogically as it ends (H. Craig, work in progress). Judged next to Meriton, Shirley’s dramatic skill is evident: Shirley’s The Court Secret is overcrowded yet intricate, and one has to admire his ambition, if not always his execution. For all their differences, the careers of both Shirley and Meriton can be perceived in the long shadow of the theatrical prohibition of 1642–1660. Langbaine notes that Meriton was “A Gentleman that liv’d in the Reign of King Charles the Second.” Born in 1637, Meriton would have been a young child when the theaters closed in 1642: his sorry attempts at dramatic composition could be related to his lack of theatrical experience as a spectator. As we have seen, Shirley’s The Court Secret was the first known casualty of the theater closures in 1642. Meriton could exemplify dramatic ambition gone awry because he was unable to stage professional plays. As an early modern professional play whose theatrical premiere followed its first printed edition, The Court Secret is an historical anomaly and cemented Shirley’s reputation as the “last dramatist.” Although Shirley was widely respected and Meriton was derided, what they share is a sense of dramatic belatedness, working at the tail end or in the aftermath of the flourishing English professional theater industry shuttered in 1642. The crisis that ruined the theatrical fate of The Court Secret was also the period in which we find English drama’s “worst” dramatist. Both Shirley and Meriton would inevitably fail to measure up to their predecessors cum contemporaries working in a thriving theater scene. The closures of 1642 and eventual reopening of the theaters in 1660 profoundly shaped dramatic history and notions of dramatic value. Francis Kirkman’s 1671 comprehensive dramatic catalog, as we have seen, privileged Shakespeare, [Beaumont and] Fletcher, and Jonson’s plays, followed by Shirley’s. Kirkman’s catalog also included a potted history of drama: in the same section where he deems Meriton “the worst,” he also identifies John Heywood as English drama’s “first Play-­writer” (Kirkman 1671: 39). In 1653, when John Hall called Shirley “the last supporter of the dying scene,” Shirley was seen to bookend English drama. By contrast, Kirkman does not identify Heywood’s counterpart, namely, the “last Play-­writer,” let  alone name Shirley in this position. Kirkman does, however, identify “new” plays. By 1671, the restored English theater had been active for over a decade, and Kirkman “place[s] all the new ones [i.e. Restoration plays] last,” in his catalog. Furthermore, in his history of drama, Kirkman names Restoration dramatist John Dryden as “the most accomplished” English dramatist, offering a perception of English drama that



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did not conclude or even decline after 1642 but which continued to thrive in the present day of the 1670s (Kirkman 1671: 39). The closure of the theaters gave Shirley new significance as the “last” professional dramatist, but this status proved to be temporary, undone once the theaters reopened in the Restoration. As modern criticism evinces, however, Shirley would perpetually maintain his position as the last professional dramatist working before 1642, a status that depends on a notion of periodization that was starting to be visible in the mid-­seventeenth century, thanks to the theater closures themselves. That John Hall, Kirkman, and Langbaine grouped Shirley into the same category of dramatists who lived and worked decades prior suggests that the theater closures created a fissure that created what we now call “early modern drama” as a distinct field and genre; that Shirley was both the “last” and “fourth best” of this genre demonstrates the reciprocal relationship of periodization and dramatic value. Shirley, previously a middling contributor to the English dramatic corpus, was now the last gasp of pre-­1642 English theater. Ironically, while this latter status is actually more significant than the first, it actually pre-­empted the study of Shirley’s plays. One no longer needed to actually read Shirley to know what he meant: his meaning comes readymade, as “the last dramatist.” However, as discussed in this chapter, assessing Shirley’s other reputation, as “fourth best,” helps us recover Shirley’s debt to his predecessors, his place in the early modern English dramatic hierarchy, and the criteria of dramatic value in the late­seventeenth century.

Notes 1 On bio-­ bibliography, see Adam G. Hooks, Selling Shakespeare: Biography, Bibliography and the Book Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 2 This critical trend is starting to shift, thanks to a recent edited collection on James Shirley edited by Barbara Ravelhofer (2016), and a recent anthology of early modern drama edited by Jeremy Lopez (2020) which includes one of Shirley’s plays.

3 Other plays are deemed to be “the worst,” too: Pepys called Roger Boyle, the First Lord of Orrery’s The Black Prince his “worst play” (Diary entry 23 October 1667); He also put down Boyle’s The General as “so dull and so ill-­ acted, that I think it is the worst I ever saw or heard in all my days” (4 October 1664).

References Bailey, Rebecca A. 2016. “A Conflict More Fierce Than Many Thousand Battles: Staging the Politics of Treason and Allegiance in James Shirley’s Maritime Plays, The Young Admiral and The Court Secret.” In James Shirley and Early Modern Theatre: New Critical Perspective, ed. B. Ravelhofer, 72–85. London: Routledge.

Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher 1631. A King and No King. London: William Leake. Forsythe, Robert Stanley 1914. The Relations of Shirley’s Plays to the Elizabethan Drama. New York: Columbia University Press. Hall, John 1652. “To the Surviving Honour and Ornament of the English Scene, James Shirley.” In The Cardinal. London: Humphrey Moseley.

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Jonson, Benjamin 1620. Epicoene, or The Silent Woman. London: William Stansby. Kewes, Paulina 1997. Authorship and Appropriation: Writing for the Stage in England, 1660–1710. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kirkman, Francis 1671. “An Advertisement to the Reader.” In Nicomede. London: Francis Kirkman. Langbaine, Gerard 1691. An Account of the English Dramatick Poets. London: George West and Henry Clements. Langbaine, Gerard 1699. The Lives and Characters of the English Dramatic Poets. London: Tho. Leigh and William Turner. Lopez, Jeremy 2016. “Time for James Shirley.” In James Shirley and Early Modern Theatre: New Critical Perspective, ed. B. Ravelhofer, 17–31. London: Routledge. Lopez, Jeremy 2002. Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lopez, Jeremy (ed.) 2020. The Routledge Anthology of Early Modern Drama. London: Routledge.

Massinger, Philip 1630. Commendatory Poem on The Gratefull Servant. London: John Grove. Nason, Arthur Huntington 1915, reprinted 1967. James Shirley, Dramatist: A Biographical and Critical Study. New York: Nason. Pepys, Samuel 2002–2012; 2013–2022. The Diary of Samuel Pepys Online, ed. Phil Gyford. www. pepysdiary.com/ Ravelhofer, Barbara 2016. “Introduction.” In James Shirley and Early Modern Theatre: New Critical Perspective, ed. B. Ravelhofer, 1–16. London: Routledge. Russell, Fraser and Rabkin Norman 1976. “Introduction to Hyde Park.” In Drama of the English Renaissance, Vol. II: The Stuart Period, eds. R. Fraser and N. Rabkin. New  York: Macmillan. Shirley, James 1653. The Court Secret. London: Humphrey Moseley. Wood, Anthony 1692. Athenae Oxonienses. London: Thomas Bennet.

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“The Glories of our Blood and State” and The Lady of Pleasure: The Genius of [Counterfactual] Britain’s National Writer—­—­James Shirley Kevin De Ornellas

Introduction: Charles I and James Shirley The greatest monarch in British and Irish history is, of course, King Charles I. He reigned for sixty glorious years, dying in that tragic fire that razed London to the ground in 1666. Literally a hands-­on monarch, he died, heroically, personally fighting the flames. How the united nations of these two islands mourned when he passed away; but how universally grateful was everyone to have been blessed by his selfless, benevolent rule for six decades. Charles had not even turned five when his father, King James I, and his older brother, Henry, Prince of Wales, were killed in the November 5, 1605 attack on Westminster—­ the last terrorist attack or indeed bomb explosion of any kind that ever occurred on British or Irish soil. A more cynical nation might have dubbed the infant King Charles the Unready—­but guided by a diverse Privy Council and a popular Lord Protector, Sir Walter Raleigh, Charles united the nations by leading through example—­through endless toleration of difference, forgiveness of enemies, and love of both elite and popular arts. He made the Kingdom of Britain and Ireland what it is today: a bastion of open-­ minded reasonableness where bigotry is unheard of, immorality is scarce, and the powerful King rules through consent and through taking constant advice from a Parliament that is delighted to serve him. Despite his tender years, Charles showed precocious leadership and humbled every enemy through reason and rapprochement. He insisted that the perpetrators of the 1605 bombing were given lengthy jail terms but were to be treated humanely—­a believer in rehabilitation, Charles shamed the world into reassessing bad attitudes when he personally, repeatedly visited the conspirators Robert Catesby and Guido Fawkes in prison and graciously allowed their early parole. In the face of such

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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leadership, every faction in the two islands ceased hostile rhetoric. Following Charles’ example, reconciliation was the order of the day. This spirit of reconciliation is captured in the most holy text of Charles’ great reign, a text that all shades of Christianity use and revere: The Authorised Bible of 1611—­The King Charles Bible. Some European countries descended into unholy civil wars during the 1600s—­but not Britain or its sister kingdom, Ireland. This Kingdom has enjoyed four centuries of absolute peace. Of course, life is not always perfect—­but it is as good as it possibly can be, thanks to the endlessly bountiful leadership of the universally accepted Stuart monarchs. Hand in hand with the glorious memory of Charles I is the glorious, life-­affirming legacy of his favorite dramatist, James Shirley (1596–1666). Shirley needs no introduction here: he is the Kingdom of Britain and Ireland’s national literary figure: theaters are named after him; playing companies are dedicated to him and his work; statues of him are to be found in every city; inns, hotels, and estates are named after him; writers in every genre aspire to write like him; and his work is enthusiastically studied by schoolchildren of every age and ability. He excelled in every genre: tragedy, comedy, masque, sonnet, and ode. A great pedagogue and a man of great morality, he also authored books about grammar, and he took holy orders. There were other great dramatists of the Renaissance, but they were all pale in comparison. Some are mere footnotes in theatrical history: forgotten dramatists of the era include Francis Beaumont, Richard Brome, Elizabeth Cary, George Chapman, Henry Chettle, Samuel Daniel, Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher, Nathan Field, John Ford, Robert Greene, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Kyd, John Lyly, John Marston, Antony Munday, Philip Massinger, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Nashe, George Peele, William Rowley, Cyril Tourneur, John Webster, and George Wilkins. Three playwrights of the era do stand out: Jonson, Marlowe, and Shakespeare. Ben Jonson (1572–1637) admired Charles I, but he was too hard on opponents: Shirley always encouraged generous forgiveness but not caustic mockery. Christopher Marlowe (1564– 1620) had a terrific start to his career, writing bombastic tragedies and outrageously outlandish revenge plots—­but his later efforts at comedies were less successful, and his post-­1603, nostalgic Elizabethan-­style history plays were anachronistic after the changes brought in by the November 1605 bomb. William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was a dramatist of substance, a sophisticated entertainment entrepreneur and a playwright capable of comic and tragic theatrical impact. His surviving eighteen plays show wit, stagecraft, and occasional flashes of precocious Stuart compassion. However, many of his supposedly greatest plays have not survived: there is no textual evidence that rumored plays such as Mark Antony and Cleopatra, Macbeth, The History of Cardenio, Simon of Athens, Julius Caesar, and Twelfth Day were as theatrically and morally significant as has been claimed. Nobody ever thought of compiling Shakespeare’s plays into a serviceable collection, so many of his plays are lost forever. Perhaps that is not a great loss. We will never know. Thankfully, all of James Shirley’s plays survive. Already revered during his lifetime, he was adopted by the Stuart leaders and by generations of appreciative citizens of these islands. He is the dramatist who Shakespeare could have been. Like Charles himself, Shirley died during that 1666 fire—­like Charles, he died helping others. The spirit of love and tolerance is apparent in every Shirley work. He entertains, educates, and corrects our follies. No praise is high enough for Shirley’s moral capacities and his not unconnected mastery of playwrighting. The purpose of this chapter is simple: through an



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analysis of one of Shirley’s great comedies, The Lady of Pleasure (1635), Shirley’s combined capacity for aesthetic brilliance and purposeful moral teaching is explained in detail. After reading this chapter, there should be a clear understanding of why Shirley was, is, and always will be the national dramatist of these wonderful, Stuart-­led islands.

The Lady of Pleasure: Act One The first, quite lengthy, scene of The Lady of Pleasure brings us into the London home of Sir Thomas Bornwell and his haughty wife, Aretina. Aretina is immoderate, vainglorious, and lavish—­determined to be seen as someone who spends and spends, and she is utterly impatient with any possible check on her extravagance. The first character to question her conspicuous consumption is a social inferior: her Steward. Bravely, the Steward calls his employer “a woman of ungoverned passion” in response to her reckless disregard for thrift and for what she sees as the backwardness and slowness of the countryside.1 She must live in London, and live on the fashionable Strand, with ostentatious splendor. She is wrong, of course; and the Steward is right. When her husband enters, he, inevitably, takes up the Steward’s concerns about profligacy and berates his wife for wastefulness. Bornwell’s sage  advice is seemly, but the haughtiness of his sibilant, snake-­like contempt for his wife  will register alarmingly with any audience: he complains about her voracious consumption of goods, and, within ten lines, stresses words such as “master ... looking-­ glasses ... engines ... superfluous ... vanities of tires ... suppers ... banquets ... cousins ... perfumes ... servants ... stifle ... show ... postillion ... pester” (I.i.75–85). The hissing sounds suggest almost a hellish milieu. The implication is clear: Aretina may look splendid in this life, but in the next life, she may be consigned to hell—­the glories of her blood and state will be very temporary. However, Shirley does not make us despise the money-­wasting Aretina—­he makes us sympathetic to her by simply affording her unbridled wit. She sarcastically denigrates Bornwell’s “homily of thrift” and, later, bored, she asks petulantly if he has “concluded” his “lecture” (I.i.99, I.i.128–129). Therefore, Aretina compares Bornwell to a patrician priest and then an academic—­both male roles that Aretina has no respect for. Importantly, though, Bornwell uses one word that will alarm all Stuart lovers of moderate government: “tyranny” (I.i.110). One of Bornwell’s many problems with Aretina is that she gambles—­not because she is addicted to gambling in itself, but because she sees it as a necessary way to attract approval in high society and because one must be thought of as rich if one can afford to lose money frivolously. However, Bornwell cannot be frivolous—­he is after all a man of measure, a man of discipline and control, and a devoted follower of the man of moderation, Charles I. He says that his wife’s excessive involvement in gambling means that “You make play/Not a pastime but a tyranny” (I.i.109–110). Tyranny, of course, is the opposite to what all Stuart devotees admire. After the death of his father and his brother in that terrible 1605 atrocity, Charles always embraced collaborative government, listening to Parliament and eschewing any form of monarchical prerogative or personal rule. Aretina may well be witty, but through her husband’s use of this one highly charged word she is associated with non-­Stuart tendencies—­with immodesty, ­egotism, and self-­gratification. All pointedly un-­Stuart defects. Bornwell’s fug is exacerbated when two gallants call to the house: the egregious Alexander Kickshaw and the

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foppish John Littleworth. Kickshaw tells Aretina that he is in love—­with a very young widow called Celestina. Indeed, he rambles at length about her supposed abilities at lute playing, satirical banter, and fine singing and dancing. What is significant is that Bornwell thinks on his feet—­he is shown to change his mind quickly—­because Shirley, the universal dramatist, creates characters that seem to mimic real humans. First, Bornwell thinks that the presence of an attention-­grabbing Celestina will simply cost him more money as Aretina increases her spending to compete with the newcomer in popularity stakes—­she will, inevitably, be “feared to be eclipsed” (I.i.279). However, quickly and decisively—­so quickly that he does not, yet, explain the plan to the audience—­he forms a plan: he will cease to recommend spending restraint and will encourage his wife to buy anything and everything. He even manages to out-­Aretina Aretina by almost blasphemously parodying the Christian concept of absolution through repentance by promising to “Repent in sack and prodigality” (I.i.290). He has totally changed his tune: it is surprising that the usually sharp Aretina is not spooked by this extraordinary change in attitude at all. However, she is solipsistic and perhaps does not even notice his supposed transformation: she is just pleased that he is, now, “in so good tune” (I.i.316). Despite these farcical events, the scene ends on a melancholy note because Shirley uses his mastery of verse to remind us of the utter sadness beneath Aretina’s possession-­fixated, idle, empty existence. The vast majority of the lines of The Lady of Pleasure are rendered in blank verse. However, toward the end of this long, three-­hundred-­line scene, Aretina is afforded a rhyme as she imagines her “busy” day posing for a painting: A lady’s morning work: we rise, make fine, Sit for our picture, and ’tis time to dine. (I.i.322–323)

It is an aphorism of emptiness, an axiom of hollowness. Everything is geared for the superficial—­how she looks is what matters to her. “Dine” is stressed as a cognate of “fine.” Looking good through the use of inch-­thick makeup and eating rich foods are all performative acts, all acts of use and consumption. Nothing constructive is achieved. Immediately following that couplet, the two gallants, Littleworth and Kickshaw, share an awkward, nine-­syllable line of verse. Apropos very little they say: Littleworth. Praying’s forgot. Kickshaw. ’Tis out of fashion. (I.i.324)

They seem to be commenting on the lack of religion in Aretina’s life. Coming from gallants such as these, there is a hint of the tragic because even they can see how Godless their socially superior hostess’ life is. Structurally, the second of the two scenes in Act One is similar to the first because, here, we have another conversation between a reckless lady and her cautious but ignored Steward. Celestina is what we would now call a teenager. Once married, but briefly, she has ­developed a misandrist hatred for all inadequate males. She sees men as beasts to be used: indeed, in one of Shirley’s unforgettable word juxtapositions, she refers contemptuously to ­“men-­mules” (I.ii.52). For her, men and animals are as one—­beasts of burden to facilitate her spectacular, rich displays of possession and splendor. No finery is too elaborate for



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Celestina. Gold can never be too thickly plated. Shirley grants Celestina a sharp tongue. However, she lacks the satirical energy of Aretina—­in contradistinction to the praise lavished on her by Kickshaw in the previous scene, she is even more solipsistic than Aretina. Again, it is in the details that we see Shirley using dialog to influence playgoers’ opinions with almost subliminal subtlety. Between lines 69 and 93, Celestina refers to herself repeatedly, using the words “I ... my ... I ... I ... my ... I ... I ... me ... I ... I ... my ... my ... I ’ll ... My ... my ... my ... my” (I.ii.69–93). She sees the world as being hers. Hers to be waited on, hers to be seen in. She is more brutal toward her truth-­telling servant than Aretina. Annoyed by his supposed “ill manners,” she simply strikes him (I.ii.97). Stuart culture does not like violence—­it will be remembered that the perpetrators of the 1605 regicide were treated with restraint, receiving only lengthy stays in the Tower and after confessions that were cajoled through reason not torture. Stuarts do not countenance coercive violence, and they do not countenance domestic violence. Celestina, in other words, behaves in a very un-­Stuart way when she strikes her Steward. The Steward, ­incidentally, responds to his humiliation and pain with passive, meek acceptance. Celestina is not repentant though: her belief system is simple: a hedonist, she believes that no underling should ever “Check at their mistress’ pleasure” (I.ii.102). The scene ends with a curious courtship scene. A visitor called Haircut tells Celestina that he would like to marry her. She professes to admire his boldness but it is typical of Celestina that she imagines his love in a purely physical, sexual way. She asks Haircut if he “can love .../ quotidian, or will it hold/But every other day?” (151–153). In other words, is Haircut virile enough to satisfy her every day rather than every second day? There is no sense of the spiritual satisfactions of love for this emotionally empty young widow. She is not just a lady of pleasure but a lady of sordid pleasure. Everything is simple, physical, and somehow related to consumerism. Toward the end of the scene, she tells Haircut that he may “present” himself again to her—­but, in an aside, she tells the audience that she hopes that he will not “give fire” (I.ii.73, I.ii.74). She hopes that Haircut will present his manhood, as it were, but not ­discharge it: to “present” can mean to aim a firearm as well as to offer something else—­ such as a penis indeed. It is typical of Shirley’s potent, suggestive, sometimes ambiguous verse that such simple words and allusions can plant in audiences’ minds a great sense of peril. Metaphorically a phallic and a violent threat, Haircut is now a threatening outsider. It seems, at this stage, that Aretina wants to flirt with Haircut, to string him along, and to tease him. However, if he is metaphorically a firearm, then she is almost literally playing with fire.

Act Two We learn of Bornwell’s specific plan in Act Two, scene one. Within just three iambic feet, Bornwell tells us that his plan is to affect a wasteful disposition and out-­Aretina Aretina by making her see the folly of her ways. He will play the gallant wastrel “And fright her into thrift” (II.i.4). Using alliteration and consonance, Shirley ensures that his character’s plan is told to the audience with fervent, strident, declamatory decisiveness. Bornwell, a  trifle more enigmatically, says that he will “make her jealous too” (II.i.5). Bornwell’s explanation of his motives is interrupted by the entrance of his nephew—­ who is,

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i­ mmediately, seen to be a young man suffused with learning, seriousness, and perhaps even pretentiousness. The nephew, Frederick, is sufficiently proud of his reputation for ­studiousness by carrying around a reference from a tutor. However, Frederick soon changes immediately: because of straightforward goading from his aunt, Aretina. Not surprisingly, Aretina has no respect for the young man’s immersion in learning. This distaste is profound—­it does not seem hyperbolic for her to say that Frederick’s serious, academic character “turns my stomach” (II.i.97). For her, young men should seek to learn the fashions and tongue of France—­not the irrelevant old tongues of ancient Greece and imperial Rome. She even seems to imply that her servants will be sexually available to him: acting as a sort of bawd, she tells him, through her Steward, that she will not deny “Any of her chambermaids to practise on” (II.i.162). Frederick’s response to this is diffident: he says that he is not sure how fit he is for “that exercise”—­after all, he has been adept at scholarly exercises but he knows nothing of courtship (II.i.164). The Steward hints at the moral degeneracy of his mistress’ offer: he suggests that it is because—­in a metric line that is completed by Ferdinand because he perhaps does not want the thought to be developed—­ “She loves you but too well” (II.i.163). There may be a type of incestuous insinuation here—­the audience may wonder if the Steward is suggesting that Aretina would enjoy a vicarious thrill from being involved on some facilitating level with her nephew’s potential sexual dalliances. She certainly cares neither for his morals nor for those of her servants. Instantly, Frederick is converted to decadence: given a large sum of money, he determines to acquire extravagant clothes, fine horses, and fine drinks. Indeed, the last few words of the scene, articulated by Frederick as a quasi-­warlike command, sum up his new hedonistic mentality: “Come, to the wine-­cellar!” he asserts (II.i.169). The longer scene in the Act, scene two, begins with Celestina delivering something of a masterclass on the art of flirtation to two of her followers, Mariana and Isabella. Celestina, sounding a little more controlled than in the previous scene, says that she loves to flirt with men but that none can “Accuse me of being prodigal of my favours” (II.i. 56). She further stresses that “a thrift in our rewards” will mean that men will retain a flattering interest because they will continue to strive for the unattainable goal of copulation (II.i.70). Celestina soon demonstrates this juxtaposition of permissiveness and standoffishness when two suitors visit: Haircut, seen in the previous Act, and another callow young male called Sentlove. Both are pursuing Celestina openly. However, both claim to be friendly with one another. The atmosphere changes dramatically, though, when Bornwell enters. We now learn what he meant when he told us that he planned to make Aretina jealous: he brazenly asks Celestina to sleep with him. “I can love you in my wedlock,” he proclaims—­instantly disregarding his wedding vows and, implicitly, all Christian teaching (II.ii.229). Gentle but intellectually elaborate mocking by Celestina does not deter him. Playing with norms of sexuality and gender, Celestina lampoons all men who would rather “Believe they had a maidenhead” rather than remember their myriad unchaste acts (II.ii.219). Not only are men unchaste, Celestina suggests, but they are self-­deluding and hypocritically pious about their notional maidenheads: they cannot face up to their own responsibilities regarding their own moral behavior. Despite Celestina’s careful response to Bornwell’s outrageous proposition, they do dance together. Even before the dance, Bornwell and Celestina succeeded in scandalizing Haircut: “I like not/their secret parley,” he laments (II. ii.258–259). The scene ends with the enigmatic Haircut leaving because of some alleged



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court business—­and with Bornwell telling Celestina that his own wife will act as “servant” to her (II.ii.275). Celestina will cooperate with Bornwell’s infamous, adulterous fantasy. Shirley certainly knows how to make an audience gasp.

Act Three The dominant male figure in Act Three, scene one is Lord Unready. He is presented as a man lost to grief. He once loved, constantly, a woman called Bella Maria. Since she died, he has had no desire for any other woman. Indeed, he even hints that without her he is impotent: Bella Maria died; my blood is cold, Nor is there beauty enough surviving To heighten me to wantonness. (III.i.70–72)

By “me” Unready means, of course, his penis. Limited men in the immoral milieu of Shirley’s seedier environments define themselves by the power of their genitals. As this is a play of intrigue, though, it is inevitable that there will be social changes that somehow bring Unready back to sexual potency. Indeed, during this scene, two new developments manifest. The first involves a scandalous offer delivered by a sort of high-­class bawd called Madam Decoy. An offer of favors to the Lord has been made—­by Lady Aretina. Therefore, Aretina and her husband, Bornwell, have, independently, sought to carry out extramarital affairs. Decoy is quite explicit about the sexual availability of her mistress. She says that Aretina “has a very applicable nature”—­referring, clearly to Aretina’s sexually adept vagina as well as to her agreeable personality (III.i.49). Lord Unready responds with initial self-­ righteous incredulity about the offer, suggesting that Decoy should be “whipped” or “carted” or “sent off with .../halberdiers” for conveying the offer (III.i.50, III.i.59, III.i.63– 64). However, he soon relents and decides with a typical Shirleian character’s curiosity to test the waters with Aretina because “the favour is not common” (III.i.83). The favor in this world of sexual shenanigans is more common than Unready thinks. This epistolary intrigue is witnessed by two of the gallants from before: Kickshaw and Sentlove. They have a different temptation for Lord Unready: they know a woman who will arouse the erotic interest of even the grieving Unready. First, though, he dismisses their suggestion, going so far as to show them a miniature of Bella Maria (III.i.153). Although impressed by the picture, the pair are callously dismissive of Lord Unready’s devotion to his dead icon. Kickshaw accuses Unready of spending his love in “waste upon a ghost” (III.i.179). He even seems to accuse Unready of masturbatory, necrophiliac behavior concerning Bella Maria—­to “waste” is to “waste” semen through masturbation. He says that Unready should feast on the living, not the dead: “they are living/can give you a more honourable consumption,” he insists (III.i.179–180). The implication is clear: sexual desire for a corpse is not “honourable.” It should be stressed, though, that the three men here—­Unready, Kickshaw, and Sentlove—­ are all guilty of perpetuating the male gaze. Shirley is certainly unafraid to illuminate the sexist staring of men. The three men speak in terms of owning women through gazing. Kickshaw and Sentlove say that there is another woman who Unready will enjoy looking

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at: Celestina. Kickshaw summarizes the whole culture of the male gaze when he says that Unready should be able to appreciate the beauty of Celestina because he “Has a clear eyesight, and can judge and penetrate” (III.i.196). Just looking is a form of coitus, and a “penetration” of a woman who is by no means necessarily wanting to be “judged.” In the heightened poetic language of Shirley, the eyes are not just eyes but “corrupted optics”—­ optics that are used and misused by men to “penetrate” women (III.i.199). Initially, casting himself as being above the culture of bawdry represented by Madam Decoy, Lord Unready has shown himself to be no less sexually curious than the other males. He will certainly go to stare at Celestina, to “judge” her, to “penetrate” her. Act Three, scene two sees the Strand home degenerating into a den of decadence and plotting. Aretina enjoys the music, the drinking, the dancing, and the fashionable French speaking—­indeed, many of the scene’s lines are spoken in French. Shirley, a master grammatician and polylinguistic intellectual, had no problem writing verse in French. However, much as she is enjoying the hedonistic scenes, Aretina has three main problems. First, she wants to commit adultery; second, she is bugged by her husband’s shameless dalliance with Celestina; and third, she is embarrassed by her nephew, who has not shaken off his university-­style seriousness. Aretina uses Madam Decoy. She wants to get access to an unnamed man. She says quite boldly to Decoy that she is determined to “Love a gentleman” who could quite easily be met—­with not “much conjuration” (III.ii.12, III. ii.13). Shirley frustrates the audience here: Aretina tells Decoy who the man is—­but only in a whisper. We do not know who it is—­Shirley will not give his audience instant gratification. Aretina’s second problem is her husband’s behavior. She tells us in an aside that she does not care about the emotional scars or the humiliation (“disgrace”) caused to her by the breaking of his oath to her (III.ii.60). In fact, Aretina says brazenly that his public dalliances with Celestina “gives but a licence to my wand’rings” (III.ii.47). Her problem is jealousy not of her husband’s betrayal but of the beauty of the woman who is distracting him: Celestina. With simple iambic monosyllables, Aretina tells us that she resents Celestina not because she is seemingly worshipped by Bornwell, but because she is beautiful: “but that it shines above my own” (III.ii.51). The beat brings stress on the word “shines”—­Celestina shines like a star. Aretina recruits two individuals to help her in a plot to defame Celestina: the familiar Kickshaw and a newcomer, one Littleworth who, for unclear reasons, wants to worm his way into the affections of Aretina—­to “Make her affect me in revenge” (III.ii.33). They do proceed to insult Celestina with comments about her being bereft of virtue and being even uglier than the proverbial Sibyl (III.ii.246, III. ii.251). Celestina is furious to be insulted by these two—­but, as proud as she is self-­ controlled, she will not them know that they are hurting her: in an aside she expresses annoyance at their “petty impudence” but determines that she will not show anger (III. ii.257–258). Bornwell stands up for the honor of his mistress—­but she does not need him. She simply refuses to express vulnerability and lambasts what she says are the unpenetrating jibes of Kickshaw and Littleworth—­men she derides as “vermin,” “pilchards” and “tadpoles” (III.ii.281, III.ii.292, III.ii.315). They are not men, but lower-­order invertebrates, she implies. Kickshaw is eventually distracted from the slanging match when he receives word that a mysterious woman wants to meet him—­but not before yet another slanging match has ensued. This involves Aretina’s third problem: her embarrassing nephew, Frederick. The nephew makes a mistake by speaking to Celestina in Latin: in this fashionable but



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decadent Strand house, one must speak either English or, preferably, French. Abuse comes at Frederick from many angles. Much of the abuse comes from Celestina herself: it is perhaps a sort of proxy bullying—­she is mocking Frederick to exacerbate the embarrassment felt at his greenness by his aunt, Aretina. Frederick really does not like being laughed at: he indignantly repeats several times a jibe thrown at him by Celestina: “little gentleman” (III.ii.176). As repetitive and pathetically vituperative as anyone who is not used to drinking sack, he continues to stress that he is not a “little gentleman” but a man of substance and seriousness. He is neither, and it is a relief to the audience when his uncle, Bornwell, gently takes him out of the room and away from our eyes and ears: “Come, nephew,” he directs, gently but commandingly (III.ii.198). An embarrassment indeed, Frederick is the third problem for Aretina—­but, certainly, the least vexing of the three. She needs to get the man she wants into bed, and she needs to spite the beauty of the woman who is dallying with her husband. This is the end of Act Three. It is a good time for an interval: Shirley’s audiences are likely to spend the interval in excited expectation: the hostilities between Aretina and Celestina are likely to climax in Acts Four and Five.

Act Four Act Four begins with a scene of apparent thuggery and peril. Kickshaw has been kidnapped by two men: they dump him in a dark place. The tone of most of the play has been, despite threats of adultery and some domestic violence, quite light, almost facetious. However, for a brief period, the audience feels anxiety because they, like Kickshaw, do not know who the assailants are or why he has been abducted. It has obviously been some sort of honey trap—­ Act Three ended with him responding to a mysterious letter from an unknown woman. Within Kickshaw’s plaintive soliloquy, we hear hints about poor prison conditions and about the exploitation of the animal world for decadent human purposes: Kickshaw fears that he is in prison but “This is too calm and quiet for a prison” and he worries if he may be killed—­and his bones used for dice in the way hapless animals are killed for dice-­ making ivory (IV.i.15). The farcical tone is restored quickly though. Shirley, with pointed dramatic irony, brings in Madam Decoy—­but she is dressed up as and assumes the demeanor of an extremely old woman. We know what Kickshaw does not know. Decoy, using the dark conditions, attempts to seduce Kickshaw, to entice him away to a loving world where “kisses seal the welcome of our lips” (IV.i.74). Kickshaw, like Adonis being chased by a rapacious Venus, is terrified. He thinks of her as a witch, a hideous old crone—­he imagines being the foolish young man in the “ill-­matched couple” genre of Renaissance painting. Such is his terror, and he even seems to conjure up bad memories of the murder of James I in 1605 when he imagines that the frail old woman would blow “up like gunpowder” if she was kicked—­that will remind any Stuart audience of the frailties of the Parliament buildings that were so easily razed to the ground by Robert Catesby and Guido Fawkes back in 1605 (IV.i.50). The toothless old woman’s breath, though, “Would damp a musket bullet” (IV.i.53). Her breath is as powerfully repellent as her body is frailly weak. Shirley even seems to anticipate the Industrial Revolution when his character worries that phlegm from the cold old “grannam” would “quench a furnace” (IV.i.58, IV.i.52). Kickshaw is thinking in vivid terms about metals and industrial-­scale fires and hellish

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environments. Ultimately, the increasingly hyperbolic and paranoid Kickshaw believes that she is actually some sort of “devil” or “succubi” (IV.i.80, IV.i.83). He fears being “torn a-­pieces” if he does not grant the old woman sexual favors (IV.i.82). The old woman will indeed visit him subsequently and consummate their hideous association. It is a ghastly prospect—­for Kickshaw and for the audience who may have forgotten over the course of the scene that the old woman is Madam Decoy in disguise. The next scene in the Act begins with the increasingly ridiculous Frederick being tutored in man-­about-­town gallantry by the Steward and Littleworth. They continue to instruct him in what to wear and how to proffer properly supercilious body language. Aretina is pleased with the progress of her nephew and with the work of the Steward and Littleworth—­but she is not pleased enough to accept the advances of the ingratiating Littleworth. Littleworth seems even to offer her oral sex: he promises that he “would creep/ Upon my knees to honour you” (IV.ii.125–126). The link made, through assonance, ­between the words “creep” and “knees” suggests that Littleworth will promise discreet, clandestine sex. Notably, Littleworth refers again, in an aside, to the thought of “creeping/ Upon one’s knees” (IV.ii.130–131). The idea of being on his knees is on his mind—­his sniveling devotion to Aretina is both erotically insouciant and oleaginously servile. Kickshaw then arrives: he pleases Aretina by discoursing about the abundance of indulgence that Frederick is now pursuing. (Kickshaw does not mention or seem traumatized by his abduction and seduction by an apparent succubus in the previous scene—­though he will admit to the trauma later in the play.) At a tavern, the men, including Frederick, will, according to Kickshaw, “have a dozen/partridge in a dish; as many pheasants, quails, cocks,/and godwits” (IV.ii.149–150). These lines are written in prose—­the sheer scale of birds to be bought and consumed by these wasteful men cannot be fitted into ten-­syllable verse lines. It is also notable here that Frederick’s rhetoric is becoming markedly mock-­ heroic. When going out to feast and drink he will “outroar the Thames and shake the bridge” (IV.ii.158–159). His impersonation of a Renaissance “roaring boy” may be gaining momentum, but no rich hooligan can shake the only bridge in London—­his hyperbole, in other words, is ludicrous and laughable because he speaks without irony or self-­deprecation. He believes that he may be a notable roarer—­he will not be. The scene continues with an extraordinary confrontation between Aretina and her philandering husband, Bornwell. When he is accused by Aretina of kissing Celestina, he admits it readily: “I/feel her warm upon my lip,” he boasts (IV.ii.182–183). Of course, he does not say which part of her is “warm” on his lips—­it is typical of Shirley to again cheekily make the audience think of oral sex when it has not been explicitly described. Attempts to agitate Aretina by saying that he has regained his manhood. Following some misogynist remarks about thinking that all women would age and wither like Aretina, he says that sleeping with Celestina has turned him “From a dull husband to an active lover” (IV.ii.187). Note that, unusually, that line of verse has eleven syllables. There is a balance. The first five syllables convey melancholy about Bornwell’s retrospective impotence; the sixth syllable is a neutral transitional word; and the last five syllables assert his newfound potence. The five syllables of an impotent past are balanced precisely with the five syllables of a virulent present. Typically, though, Aretina refuses to show any sign of humiliation. Rather than denigrating Celestina, she praises her in a sort of parody of amorous hyperbole: “I must be just and give her all/The excellency of women,” she says (IV.ii.208). In other words, every possible



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positive quality that any woman can have is to be found in Celestina. However, Aretina goes even further—­she affects a Sapphic desire for Celestina. She says that if she would “dote upon her form” (IV.ii.213). It adds weight to the previous notion of giving Celestina “her all”—­the implication is now that Aretina might give Celestina “all” her sexual love. Given the heteronormative culture of the time (and the possible censorious attention of the Master of the Revels), it is natural that Aretina has to say that she would only be erotically ­intoxicated by Celestina if “were I/A man” (IV.ii.208–209). However, Aretina is only allowed to express two syllables of the line starting with “A man.” As soon as she says “A man,” the flustered Bornwell interrupts her with the monosyllabic, flabbergasted question “What then?” (IV.ii.209) Bornwell is not in control of the interview. He has tried to shock Aretina, but she has shocked him. When she trots off triumphantly, Bornwell is left to reflect pathetically on masculine fecklessness: “What a frail thing is man,” he laments (IV. ii.219). Sexist social and religious patriarchal societies have always perpetuated the myth that women are proverbially frail—­but Aretina turns the tables here not just on Bornwell but on masculinist assumptions as a whole. Seeing Bornwell outwitted by a woman who imagines lesbian possibilities as well as poking fun at frail men may undermine superior masculinist assumptions in Shirley’s audience. This is the impact of Shirley’s drama. He questions the entire concept of universal heteronormativity, and he overturns centuries of sexist assumptions about which sex is “frail” or not. Act Four, scene three is unusual in the play because the main component of it is a conversation between two parties who are sincere with one another. Lord Unready has fulfilled his promise to visit Celestina. He is indeed impressed by her comeliness: with some understatement, he observes that “She’s fair, I must confess” (IV.iii.18). The immediate fondness is reciprocated. Characters have short memories—­Celestina seems to have forgotten her dalliance with Bornwell. She immediately promises devotion, asserting than she would behave as an “anchorite” in devoted chastity rather than seek pleasure with another man (IV. iii.25). Celestina senses, though, that she cannot break through the wall that bars the Lord from all contact with women—­his continued love for the long-­dead Bella Maria. This, for Celestina, is a great pity. For her, sexuality and overall generosity of spirit is as normal as verdant nature: “You are as bountiful as the showers that fall/Into the spring’s green bosom,” she says to him, linking women’s bodies to the landscape and praising his fiscal generosity as well as his presumed capacity to sexually climax on a woman’s breasts (IV.iii.79–80). Celestina continues to allude to women’s bodies as sites of appeal and satisfaction: forty lines later, she imagines the Lord having his eye tempted by a “glorious harvest” of “laden trees [that] bow down/Their willing fruit” (IV.iii.117, IV.iii.119–120). Despite her affected modesty, Celestina draws attention to her own sexual appeal and her capacity for fecundity. However, her language becomes more caustic when she begins to perceive that despite his stated appreciation of her, the Lord will not succumb to desire for her. She mocks him for being his own surgeon: the Lord does not let her finish the joke—­he himself uses the word “eunuch” to describe his asexual being (IV.iii.138). He does indeed reject any amorous activity with her: he will agree to attend a banquet with her—­but only in the honor of the memory of Bella Maria. Celestina humors this grief for his dead love—­but the audience will know that the determined Celestina will not give up on her prey so easily. It is also necessary to note Celestina’s vivacious appetite for life in this scene. When asserting her right to love and satisfaction, she points out that “my father/Thought of no winding sheet when he

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begot me” (IV.iii.50–51). In other words, life is the opposite of death—­to not live life to the full is to mimic death. It is a charter for a fulsome, enjoyable life. Celestina’s effervescent belief in celebrating life is the quintessence of Cavalier, Stuart joy in the good (but moral, modest) life. As the scene ends, we may reflect on the fact that the play has provided us with many plots and diversions concerning minor characters. However, most of these minor characters—­Sentlove, Frederick, and Kickshaw—­hardly seem to matter now. Shirley has waylaid us with various insignificant entities and events. However, now, it seems that we are to focus on only two couples—­the seemingly delayed but inevitable pairing of Celestina and Lord Unready and the troubled married couple, Aretina and Bornwell. It is a singular feature of Shirley’s genius that in the midst of decadence, foppery, and general outlandish nonsense, we care deeply and genuinely about the future of these four people—­people made to feel almost real in the lively, engaging drama of James Shirley.

Act Five The first scene of the fifth and last Act consists of a sort of verbal tennis match between the estranged married couple, Aretina and Bornwell. Aretina has heard that Bornwell is losing vast amounts of money gambling. A servant of Aretina speaks about the sheer scale of the losses being taken by Bornwell and, in general, about the temptations of gambling with apocalyptic anxiety—­he even anthropomorphizes dice as “notable devourers” (V.i.3). The servant imagines a gambler being a willing martyr—­a willing victim of “his money’s executioner, the dice” (V.i.11). Aretina, at last, has come to her senses and worries about the wastefulness of her husband—­but she does not express that worry to her husband. Bornwell arrives and boasts about his losses. He connects his love for losing money to his love for Celestina, devising a clear analogy between wasteful gambling and immoral sex: “we lose with the alacrity/We drink a cup of sack or kiss a mistress,” he blusters (V.i.41– 42). He dismisses money as “trash” and “dirt” (V.i.39, V.i.48). In the face of this provocative recklessness, Aretina, though, will not admit to being concerned. She tries to assert her own ambitions to waste and waste—­she insists that she will buy a needless new coach, an unnecessary new gold-­embroidered gown, and to feed half the court—­and, even, in one of many of Shirley’s trademark moments of self-­reflexiveness, to stage a play in the Strand house. Bornwell will be ever more lavish though—­deliberately goading his wife, he announces plans to continue to gamble extravagantly and to buy a chain of diamonds for his mistress, Celestina. Shirley adds on layers of irony when Bornwell himself imagines himself as a martyr—­he was not on stage when the servant compared gamesters to self-­ destroying martyrs. He says that he will not deviate from his course of reckless misuse of money even “Though my estate flame like the world about me” (V.i.115). It is an image of cataclysm that discombobulates the usually unshakeable Aretina. Although she will not admit it, there is a clear sense that Aretina is scared when Bornwell says that there is enough money left for perhaps a month of wild decadence—­we sense this because when Bornwell leaves her alone on stage, Aretina can only say three bland words: “’Tis very pretty” (V.i.116). Aretina has, at last, been rendered shocked and inarticulate. Bornwell’s plan to shock her by making her feel fear about impending poverty is working: the hitherto flippant and complacent Aretina is changing.



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Aretina’s heightened anxiety increases in Act Five, scene two. Here, she receives unwelcome sexual attention from, hideously, her nephew, Frederick. Frederick has hitherto seemed like a mere fool, but now he seems like an incest-­threatening menace. He has been drinking with Kickshaw and Littleworth—­who has incidentally fallen into the Thames and is humiliatingly disrobed and dried on stage. Frederick “must court somebody” (V. ii.20). He shocks Aretina as well as the audience when he says that his sexual partner may be “As good my aunt as any other body” (V.ii.21). The stress is on the female physical “body”—­nothing other than fleshy lust is imagined by the foolish Frederick. A Sophoclean nightmare is threatened as Frederick wonders aloud if his aunt is “all over” soft and, reading the lines in her hand but really imagining her genitals, he speculates about her “Venus’ girdle,” her fair “semicircle” and, explicitly referring to her vagina, her “very line” (V.ii.36, V.ii.44, V.ii.44, V.ii.47). Aretina, again reduced to incredulous short outbursts, can only respond with staccato, strongly end-­stopped speeches saying things like “How,” “Would you practise upon me?” “Nephew!” and “No more” (V.ii.29, V.ii.34, V.ii.37, V.ii.53). Kickshaw rather saves the day when he distracts Frederick by pointing him toward Madam Decoy—­whom Kickshaw had previously mistaken for the Devil or at least for a witch. Kickshaw, it seems, is improving a little. A scene of painful dramatic irony ensues. Aretina and Kickshaw have a private conversation. Kickshaw reveals that he has become rich because he has been receiving money from the devil—­or some sort of malevolent spirit in the form of the old woman he has copulated with. Although we have not seen the act done on stage—­again, the Master of the Revels can only allow so much licentious action to be seen by audiences—­it is clear to us that it is Aretina who has engaged in coitus with Kickshaw. Aretina has indeed committed adultery. However, she is shocked by the way that Kickshaw refers to his mysterious lover—­he does not know that it was Aretina in a totally darkened room. It is a sort of blackly ironic version of the old bed trick trope. Aretina, although knowing that she has erred badly cannot see herself quite as the succubus described by Kickshaw—­ the description he paints of her is “deformed,” she insists (V.ii.178). She goes on to rhetorically ask herself and the audience (in prose) “What have/I done?” (V.ii.178–179). What she has done is commit adultery with an oafish gallant who believes that she is evil. It may blacken her forever: speaking alone, with no mere self-­pity but with portentous remorse, she opines that “My soul is miserable” (V.ii.179). Her very eternal essence is ruined. It is, of course, the stuff of tragedy—­but there will be another scene and, in this play, written in the genre of comedy, we can be sure, even at this bleak moment, that Shirley will ultimately gratify us with happy endings for the only four characters who really matter to us: Aretina and Bornwell, and Celestina and Lord Unready. Effectively, three plots have been played out: the troubled marriage of Aretina and Bornwell; the vexed courtship of Lord Unready and Celestina; and the descent into depravity of young Frederick. The third strand came to a climax in the last scene when Frederick’s excesses are illuminated by his bizarre sexual attention to his aunt, Aretina. Aretina has finally realized that seeking to make Frederick a city gallant is a bad idea—­he gets sent off back to where he belongs—­university: “my nephew/Send back again to th’ college,” she orders (V.iii.177–178). Frederick’s Orpheus-­like descent into city sin has been temporary. He has gone—­his lost weekend will be a blip but the important thing is that he has gone and he will not be missed by the audience. The major resolution of the

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play’s last scene involves the four characters we will care about. Lord Unready, who has now forgotten Bella Maria and has become concupiscent, has indeed fallen for the sexual appeal of Celestina. However, he wants her only to be his mistress. She is appalled—­all the more so when he delivers a ludicrous sub-­pastoral, pathetic fallacy-­laden speech about winds, bowers, violets, and red roses deliberately modifying their behavior to enhance a loving milieu for the two lovers. In his fantasy, “A thousand birds” will sing for Lord Unready and Celestina (V.iii.79). She is unimpressed. Lord Unready even physically lunges at her: “Good my lord, forbear,” is her calm but rebutting response (V.iii.105). Celestina proves herself to be not only chaste but intellectually reasonable and logical. She explains why she will not be Unready’s mere lover. For her to lose her honor would be equivalent to the Lord losing his family lineage and nobility. He admits that to lose such privileges and titles would be worse than death—­so he realizes what honor is, including the honor of chastity. So impressed is he with Celestina’s reason that it would be “Enough to rectify a satyr’s blood” (V.iii.147), Lord Unready is indeed himself “rectified.” Celestina herself is “rectified” too—­the shenanigans with Bornwell is forgotten. Lord Unready and Celestina will pursue an open, honest, socially sanctioned courtship. The other happy ending involves the wholesome reconciliation of Aretina and Bornwell. Bornwell admits to his wife that his extravagant behavior and dalliance with Celestina was a plot “to fright thee with a noise of my expenses” (V.iii.182). Aretina’s regret is as sincere as it is deep. Shirley uses the stage device of the aside to underline this: when Aretina, forgiven sincerely by her husband for her wasteful follies, says that she feels “a cure upon my soul” and promises “my after life to virtue” she does so in an aside (V  iii.193, V.iii.194). Characters speak sincerely in asides—­we are absolutely sure that Aretina does indeed feel washed with moral virtue—­Shirley’s great characters think about eternal life as well as worldly reputations. We can be sure that Aretina and Bornwell are now completely reformed for this life and for the next life as well. We have, basically, watched the couple court again and effectively remarry. Therefore, we have the fruition of two joyous heterosexual couplings. The anticipated confrontation between Aretina and Celestina has not materialized: everything is forgiveness, reconciliation: everyone matures and moves on. That, after the decadent fug of the previous Acts, is a great and wholesome relief. There is just one last thing that will please the audience. Most of the minor characters—­ Haircut, Sentlove, the Steward—­are gone and not missed, but one minor character does make a significant appearance right at the end. Kickshaw has believed that he has had congress with an evil spirit, perhaps a witch or the Devil himself. It was Aretina. However, Aretina shows her immense capacity for newfound moral leadership as well as spiritual generosity by confronting Kickshaw and berating him for his “horrid sin” (V.iii.202). However, she will stand by him, she will encourage him to embrace virtue and will even maneuver to get him well placed at court. It is a very happy ending for a seriously lost soul. Kickshaw (thinks) he has slept with an evil force. He has given into darkness, but he has been rescued. His devilish pact was not a real demonic pact, but he does not know that—­so, in essence, the trajectory of his moral recovery is a sort of happy version of the Doctor Faustus tragedy. In the wonderful world of James Shirley’s moral universe, there is hope of salvation for absolutely anyone, even a low-­rent Faustus type. It is a forgiving, optimistic mentality that feeds directly into the ongoing Stuart culture of love, of belief in reform and of total generosity of spirit.



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Conclusion: Charles III and James Shirley The present-­day monarch heading the Kingdom of Britain and Ireland, Charles III, has always expressed admiration for his seventeenth-­century predecessor, Charles I. This is not least because they both became rulers at a shockingly young age. Charles III became King in 1966—­being crowned at the age of 18, just a few months after his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, was killed when her car was hit by a boulder in Belfast on July 6 of that year. Charles I did not persecute the men who had conspired to kill his father and brother, and Charles III did not persecute the young man who murdered his mother. Indeed, typical of Stuart generosity, he visited the man in prison, befriended him, and, of course, encouraged him and mentored him as he went on to become an important politician in Ulster. The only criticism of Charles III that has ever been uttered is that he is simply too hands-­on, too interested, not aloof enough. However, Charles scorns such concerns, pointing out that if Charles I could personally nurse plague victims, clothe the homeless, feed the hungry, and even grapple with massive urban fires, then he could comment on the literature, the environment, and the architecture of his countries. Charles is always there in good or bad times. One of the Kingdom’s greatest moments came in 1982  when the George B ­ est-­ inspired Kingdom of Britain and Ireland won the FIFA soccer World Cup in Spain. Charles III had always admired Best, the team’s 37-­year-­old captain, so it was natural that he would meet Best and his fellow Kingdom of Britain and Ireland players (Glenn Hoddle, Pat Jennings, Kevin Keegan, Bryan Robson, Frank Stapleton, Mickey Thomas, John Wark etc.) when they got off the plane at the James Shirley Airport in London. Unusually for a Stuart subject, George Best, now modest and facing a revered retirement with good grace, had once been something of a drinker—­that sort of thing is anathema to the Stuarts who have been abstemious ever since Charles I, always a great listener, took both Puritan and Papist advice and almost eliminated alcohol from British and Irish society. Therefore, Best knew modesty and he knew how to correct errant behavior through repentance and through listening to sage advice: he knew that however stellar one’s achievements are, earthly pride is inappropriate because mortality will afflict us all. Best, then, was chosen by Charles III to recite his favorite poem—­the poem that, set to music by the anti-­drug campaigners John Lennon and Syd Barrett, has become the official anthem of the Kingdom of Britain and Ireland: “The Glories of our Blood and State”—­by James Shirley. Together, Best and King Charles concluded their rendition of Shirley’s poem: Your heads must come To the cold tomb: Only the actions of the just Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

Worldly fame will come and go. Through the jarring half-­rhyme of “come” and “tomb,” Shirley links procreation to death, joy to sorrow, and ecstasy to grief. However, those who are generous and merciful will be remembered with fragrant delight, Shirley stresses. That is certainly true of all the early Stuarts and their great cheerleader, James Shirley. Shirley uses his great drama and poetry to teach us about forgiveness, to respect our responsibilities and vows. Always an open and honest man, Charles III has talked frankly about the ups

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and down of his marriage to Queen Diana. However, as tough as things have got between Charles and Diana, there has never been any adultery or media manipulation or any sort of public disrespect. Charles and Diana are devotees of James Shirley. They see in Shirley forgiveness and honor. If Bornwell can forgive Aretina, then Charles can forgive Diana; and if Lord Unready can be shamed into chaste love by Celestina, then even a great leader like Charles III can improve under the stern but moral teaching of a Stuart Queen such as Diana. Shirley will always be special to all the peoples of the Kingdom of Britain and Ireland—­but he is cherished globally. Shirley has gone wherever the English language has gone. He is culturally ubiquitous on a world scale. His plays have never left the repertoire; his poems are learned by rote by children in all societies; and his books on grammar remain essential pedagogical resources. He transcends time and place with universally appealing and applicable, generous stories about love, honor, and the correction of vice. He is truly not for an age but for all time.

Note 1 The Lady of Pleasure, I.i.40. All quotations from the play are taken from the Revels edition: James Shirley, The Lady of Pleasure, edited by Ronald Huebert, Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 1986. All further Act, scene, and line numbers are provided in parenthesis in the body of this chapter.

References Shirley, James 1986. The Lady of Pleasure, ed. R. Huebert. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Shirley, James “The Glories of Our Blood and State.” Poetry Foundation. https://www.­poetry

foundation.org/poems/56372/the-­g lories-­o f-­ our-­ blood-­ and-­ state (accessed on October 16, 2023).

19

Evaluating Literary Evaluation Peter Barry

From the present age of marvelous mechanical contrivances we can, I suppose, look forward with confidence to the time when our own memories will be visibly reproducible by some electronic process. Authors like myself will sit in their publisher’s Telememoir Studio with all the most recent apparatus around them; hundreds of miles of reels of autobiography will be communicated to some highly sensitive medium—­the actual ingredients of which I am unable to predict—­and the results will be selectionized much in the same way as done by our modern film industry. The radiation waves of authors will vary in length and intensity, and there will be a few highly paid writers who will remember voices so sympathetically that they will be able to create talking Telememoirs. New books will be shown on the screen and will also be accessible—­silently of course—­in enormous albums. It will be a literature of scenic sensations that will compete with—­and possibly supersede—­the literature of printed language. Some of us—­or rather some of them—­in that age may regret the abandonment of the old unmechanized method of reminiscence writing, but on the whole it will be regarded as an improved and much more flexible art form. The innovation will, at any rate, create an unlimited supply of authors, and no facet of human experience will be left unrecorded. In the meantime, I must continue to transcribe my recollections in the usual way, amplifying as best I can my mental picture of that group on the lawn in front of Henley House. (Sassoon 1968, pp.255–­256)

Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) wrote the above anticipation of the Internet in 1938 during the aftermath of the Munich Crisis. The passage occurs near the end of his reminiscence The Old Century & seven more years of 1938). Writing as the inevitability of another war became obvious, he escaped into a creative re-­living of his happy and privileged childhood in the ‘golden afternoon’ of late Victorian England. The book was posthumously

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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re-­issued thirty years later, edited by Michael Thorpe, and hedged with many apologies and caveats, as if the very idea of escapism was, or had become, morally repugnant. Inevitably, the 1968 introduction now seems more dated than the 1938 text. I found the book some years ago ‘by hand’ (that is, not online) in a local second-­hand bookshop, and I vividly remember now how much I enjoyed it, though until I re-­read it to write the present piece I could recall hardly anything specific about its content. Pre-­ retirement, almost every literary book I read is full of underlinings and turned-­down page corners. However, the pages of this one are clean, and the passage quoted above is the only one with a turned-­down corner, so I know I must already have been a retiree when I first read it. These days, I hardly read even authorial prefaces, let  alone anything critical or metatextual—­no blurbs, no reviews, no acknowledgments, no critical histories—­I go straight to page one, often fifty or so pages in the case of the Oxford or Penguin paperbacks I use, which are comfortably portable up to six hundred or so pages, and have succinct and reliable annotation. Then I just start reading. But this book begins with a fascinating authorial ‘Prelude’ of a couple of hundred words: here are its two opening paragraphs in full: Far off in the earliest remembered childhood I can overhear myself repeating the words Watercress Well. I am kneeling by an old stone well-­head; my mother is standing beside me and we are looking into the water. My mother tells me that it is ‘a very deep-­rising spring’; but I do not want to be told anything about it, even by her. I want nothing at all except to be gazing at the water which bubbles so wonderfully up out of the earth and to dip my fingers in it and scatter the glittering drops. From its well-­head the spring overflows into cressy shallows; thence it wanders away as a gurgling and purposeful runnel which may, some day, for all I can tell, arrive at being a real Kentish river. The well reflects the empty sky; I can see myself in it, rather obscurely, when I am not watching the bubbles climbing up in the middle of the crystal-­ clear water. (Sassoon 1968, p.23)

The opening paragraph here suggests someone turning the dial of a radio set, which seems rather like a Wellsian time machine, as it picks up a crackly voice from a distant station where ‘I can overhear myself repeating the words Watercress Well.’ By the end of the second paragraph, the time machine has become more like an early television set sending out blurry interference and a flickering image, as if from Alexandra Palace in the late 1930s, so that ‘the well reflects the empty sky; I can see myself in it, rather obscurely.’ Oddly, given the chronology of the 1968 re-­issue of the book, the writing shares some of the power, preoccupations, and methods of the earliest collections of Seamus Heaney which appeared in the mid-­to-­late 1960s, notably poems like ‘Personal Helicon’ in Death of a Naturalist (Heaney 1966), with its opening stanza: As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.



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And also ‘The Forge’ from Door into the Dark (Heaney,1969), which begins: All I know is a door into the dark. Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting; Inside the hammered anvil's short-­pitched ring, The unpredictable fantail of sparks Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.

So Sassoon begins his book with a Wordsworthian ‘Prelude’ and then a prescient dip into the matter and method of the emergent poetics of the 1960s. But what exactly does Sassoon envisage when he extrapolates ideas from his ‘present [1938] age of marvelous mechanical contrivances’? Taking his cue from the then ultra-­ modern medium of cinema, he sees that in the future ‘our own memories will be visibly reproducible by some electronic process’ [my italics], which seems to denote not just the written form of what is remembered but the nature and content of memory itself. Perhaps the ‘hundreds of miles of reels of autobiography [which] will be communicated to some highly sensitive medium’ may be that brief half-­way-­house between his own mechanical era and our electronic era of the Internet which took the form of micro-­film -­it quickly fizzled out because of the always inadequate provision of micro-­film readers in libraries. At a more advanced stage, he says, will come ‘some highly sensitive medium—­the actual ingredients of which I am unable to predict,’ but it will be ‘a literature of scenic sensations’ and will ‘compete with—­and possibly supersede—­the literature of printed language.’ Here the word ‘scenic’ emphasizes the drift away from the primacy of ‘printed language’ that the Internet embodies, and the endpoint will be that ‘no facet of human experience will be left unrecorded,’ as the very concept of authorship will be eliminated when everybody becomes both an author and a (self) publisher. The emphasis on visuality rather than (say) readability opens the way for the view that every authorial change made to a poem makes it, not just a new variation of a single-­entity text, but another new text. This is the era we ourselves are now in, for which the dogmatic formulation might be ‘Every textual variation constitutes a new iteration of the text as a whole’. So the text is held forever in a web of synoptic suspension, and all of them have equal authority with the poem or text that the author actually ‘finished’ and published, and which may already have a readership across generations with and for whom it has been explicated and mediated. Only the Internet can display all these ‘versions’ (never just variants) comprehensibly as different poems. Sassoon’s ‘Internet’ passage, though, is merely the transition to his account of ‘Henley House’, as he names it in the book, which he presents as the great academic ‘good place’ of his early life. Perhaps most of us encounter some such place, probably in early career, and feel that it is the one academy we will always remain part of, so that, later on, we think of ourselves as being diasporic members of it. The worth of the ‘good place’ may be realized only in retrospect, and there are academies that posthumously become more themselves, and more fully accomplish their mission and identity. Perhaps the best-­known academic examples of this are Black Mountain College, North Carolina, which was a continuous going concern only from 1933 to 1957, and the Bauhaus School of Art and Design, which likewise functioned only from 1919 to 1933, first in Weimar, then Dessau, and finally

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Berlin. But Sassoon’s Henley House is really nothing like these, being quite obscure, as, indeed, these academic ‘good places’ more usually are. More typical of them is the place depicted in W.H. Auden’s early poem “Out on the lawn, I lie in bed,” (Auden  1930), where the poet feels ‘Lucky, this point in time and space/is chosen as my working place’ and where ‘The creepered wall stands up to hide/The gathering multitudes outside ... Concealing from their wretchedness/Our metaphysical distress, Our kindness to ten persons.’ It is partly their human scale that makes them ‘good’ and the escapist element, far from persuading us that the ‘golden afternoon’ can last forever, begets a keen awareness that it cannot. What ‘the good place’ provides is a safe environment in which to learn what we need to know professionally. All along we realize within ourselves that, as the poem says, ‘Soon through the dykes of our content/The crumpling flood will force a rent,’ but enjoy the conviction that that will not happen just yet. Nearly forty years later, in the title poem ‘Thank you, Fog’ of his last (and posthumously published) book (Auden 1974), Auden wrote again about the great good place—­another form of it—­when he was fog-­bound during his first Christmas in England since 1937 at a country house in Wiltshire—­it was to be the last Christmas of his life: my cosmos is contracted to an ancient manor-­house and four Selves, joined in friendship, Jimmy, Tania, Sonia, Me. ... Indoors specific spaces, cosy accommodate to reminiscence and reading, crosswords. Affinities, fun; refected by a sapid supper and regaled by wine, we sit in a glad circle, each unaware of our own nose but alert to the others, making the most of it, for how soon we must re-­enter, when lenient days are done, the world of work and money and minding our p's and q's.

As in 1930, the escapism the house provides is not rooted in illusion or wishful thinking—­ the speaker knows that the potential of this place for providing respite is limited to a very small community of like-­minded people, and that the everyday world with all its problems will very soon re-­assert its influence and its unavoidable wear and tear. But the experience is real all the same, and it became so for me when I heard Auden read this poem at Poetry International in the Royal Festival Hall, London, in 1973. The reading was unforgettable, and (at least as I recall it) quite unlike recordings made when he was much younger – for



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instance, he knows now that it is almost impossible to read such a poem too slowly. His voice had the husky gravitas attributable to a lifetime of old-­fashioned drinking and smoking, and that contributed to the overall effect. It ends: Our earth’s a sorry spot, but for this special interim, so restful, yet so festive, Thank You, Thank you, Thank You, Fog.

Sassoon’s biographical academic ‘good place’ is called Henley House in the book, and it was itself a half-­way house, that is, a so-­called ‘Crammer’, that he encountered when he had completed his time at Marlborough public school and was due to start at Cambridge University in the following academic year. Re-­reading the three or four pages on the place’s atmosphere, it is not at first easy to define the element that made it so special, but it seems to lie in two things; the first is the pervading influence of the placid and familiar character of the surrounding countryside. It was only about ten miles away from his home, and: In the narrow lanes we sometimes heard the bells of a timber-­wagon and pulled up at the edge of the road to watch a grandly straining team go past with pride of country music chiming above their manes and harness.... Free-­wheeling along my favourite lanes on that early autumn afternoon seemed to suggest escape from school life and nothing much to worry about during the next twelve months.... I felt a happy-­go-­lucky sort of person, head in air and pleasantly occupied by loosely connected ruminations, and eyes less on the familiar and rather flinty road than on the woods and fields and hop-­kilns which looked so contented with the indolent September sunshine.... As a result I was consistently cheerful, whereas at Marlborough I had often felt moody and unappreciated. (Sassoon  1968, pp.248–251)

The second contributing factor is the relaxed character of the four adults in charge of the twenty or so nineteen-­year-­olds whose destinies they molded, especially that of the director: The owner and director of the Henley house establishment (affectionately known to his past and present pupils as ‘The Boss’) allowed our high spirits full freedom. His controlling influence was exercised by quiet methods ... His steadying effect on us was, I think, mainly caused by his imperturbable voice and manner. There were occasions when our animal spirits found an uproarious outlet. This usually took the form of ‘ragging’ someone who had made himself unpopular. One evening, for instance, we had put our victim into a narrow courtyard at the back of the house, and were sousing him with water. No firehose being available, I had collected all the bedroom jugs I could find and the contents were being heaved at the unfortunate youth from several windows ... All that The Boss said was: ‘Oh Sassoon, do you mind using the metal jugs? The earthenware ones are apt to come away from their handles.’ He then went quietly out of the bathroom, and somehow I felt that we might as well stop now. As usual, The Boss had made me realise that he understood the situation but considered the things had gone far enough. (Sassoon 1968, pp.251–­253)

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The other adults are similarly described, but at the same time distinctly characterized, such as ‘Uncle’, The Boss’s cousin, and business partner: [He] spoke more musefully ... and appeared to be in no hurry to reach those definite conclusions at which his cousin arrived.... To watch Uncle dawdling along the stretch of lawn after breakfast one might have thought that he was going nowhere in particular instead of making his way to conduct Army candidates though Wellington’s campaigns or tread with me the well-­worn path of Paley’s Evidences ... Uncle usually seemed to be thinking about something else.... [At golf he] appeared to conjure rather than hit his ball up to and into the hole ... Far away in 1905 a shout goes up from the onlookers, while Uncle with the nonchalant air of a man who could do it again if he wanted to, saunters across to them and lights a cigarette. (Sassoon 1968, pp.253–255)

Much of the appeal of the book stems from Sassoon’s ability to reproduce the tone of a voice speaking without self-­consciousness, a realization reinforced for me partly by the accident of my reading (in the period when I was writing this piece) Seamus Perry’s TLS review of three books about Byron, under the headline ‘I rattle on exactly as I talk’ (26 May 2023), which is a quotation from Byron in Canto XV of Don Juan. One of the books he was reviewing was by Jerome McGann, and I will come back to McGann in a later part of this chapter. Sassoon’s fifth and final chapter explains how, in the end, he never took his Cambridge degree and opted instead to commit himself to poetry, the only thing that had ever fully interested him. He had ‘blindly opted’ for Law till brought to his senses when his Henley House tutor publicly told him ‘If I were to go out into the street and interrogate the first errand-­boy I met he couldn’t know less than you do about Maine’s International Law!’ (Sassoon 1968, p.268). Sassoon transferred to the History Tripos, and the same thing happened: that is, he found that he could indeed make his eyes move from line to line of a book about the historical struggle between the Empire and the Papacy. However, he could only do so while he simultaneously ‘overheard rather than “took in” the beautifully monotonous word music of William Morris, which loitered through my mind as though it were one with the riverside sounds of that golden day in early summer” (Sassoon 1968, p.271). His Uncle Hamo, a sculptor, was then visiting Cambridge while working on a bust of Tennyson (a distant relation) and using Tennyson’s hat as a prop. He placed the hat on Sassoon’s head, causing him to speculate: Could I carry on that tradition [of craftsmanship] with my pen? I wondered, and should I ever write as good a poem as my mother’s picture of The Hours, where sunset flamed and faded into night-­blue sleep that drifted into the flush of daybreak, and the foreground figures swung into the white radiance of noon? For in that noble design I have always felt something of the poetry which I could never put into words; and in it I could recognise my kinship with the strength and simplicity of my mother’s imaginations. (Sassoon 1968, p.298)

The Uncle’s visit proves to be decisive, so that: I felt secretly elated afterwards as I walked along the Melbury Road with my new straw hat in my hand. For Uncle Hamo had spoken of my [privately printed] poems as though he believed in me. ‘Let your thoughts ring true; and always keep your eye on the object while



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you write’, he had said. Which, although I wasn’t altogether aware of it, was what I hadn’t hitherto done. (Sassoon 1968, p.300)

In the final pages, Sassoon re-­lives his twenty-­first birthday in 1907, with his mother and the family’s friends and relatives overheard, but never quite clearly seen, in the garden, or upstairs, wishing him well and making the jokes or remarks they always do on such occasions: The Major stopped to inspect a bird-­cherry tree which he had planted for my mother in the eighties. It was doing nicely, he observed; and the hum of the insects from its foliage concurred with his opinion.... When they had gone out by the garden gate, I stood in the shadow of the old leaning may-­tree and watched them till they disappeared round the corner of the road by the stables. They were rather like the old century, I thought, going down the hill with so much of it in their heads and so little of the new one left to them.... As I turned to go up to the house, I couldn’t imagine what it would feel like to be more than twenty-­one.... Lucky to be in love with life, I did not know how lucky I was. (Sassoon 1968, pp.304–305)

The book ends with that, and I think its essential point as it conveyed itself to me is that real time is made up of layers of interwoven recollection, enriching and dissolving the notion of ‘now’ into something bigger. Only when suffused with recall can the human reality be said to be ‘present’. The hero or heroine of any Kunstlerroman such as Sassoon’s is not the aspirant artist or writer whose developmental portrait it paints, but those who are able to make room for artists to find their moments of becoming and reach their full potential. Even if you have been born with all the luck in the world, you still must make your own way onto the life track they have opened up for you. I said I would come back to McGann. For McGann, says Seamus Perry in the TLS, ‘Authorship is always a social business emerging from historical circumstances that remain an important part of the meaning of the works it produces  ...  not as merely useful “background” but as central to the critical response.’ I agree with what McGann is quoted as saying here, but not quite with what he himself seems to mean by it. This takes me back to my own struggles early in the present century with McGannian doctrine and to my own double time scheme—­for me the key years were the 1980s rather than the 1880s, and after that 2007 rather than 1907. Back in the 1980s, the full impact of literary theory was still being absorbed, and each major literary period was feeling the need to demonstrate exactly how it had accommodated the shock and modified its methods and syllabus. I was primarily a modernist (in the non-­Oxbridge sense of having the twentieth century as my main sphere of teaching and research), but I maintained a strong secondary interest in Romanticism. Post-­theory, there had been much debate about whether the work of hitherto non-­canonical poets such as Felicia Hemans merited a significant place on the syllabus of the ‘New Romanticism’. Major American scholars then active in the field of Romanticism took it for granted that it was their role to direct those of us laboring elsewhere in the world into our appropriate place on this expanded-­syllabus track, even if, unlike Sassoon’s uncle, they were unable to supply us with appropriate headgear. Encountering a significant number of these American Romanticists, at the British Association for Romantic Studies Conference at the Liverpool University in 1991, was a significant culture shock for me. Like McGann, I was ambivalent about Hemans, having found it difficult to get students to read her

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without apparent boredom. I later expressed this ambivalence fully in a chapter called ‘Contextualising Hemans’s shipwrecks’ in my 2007 book Literature in Contexts. McGann was ambivalent about her too, but he staged his views rather more flamboyantly than I did. As I said about him in that chapter: [His ambivalence about Hemans] is nicely dramatized by Jerome McGann in the last chapter of his book The Poetics of Sensibility (1986), which stages an internal debate over Hemans between three aspects of himself under the title ‘Literary History, Romanticism and Felicia Hemans: A conversation between A. Mack, J.J. Rome and G. Mannejc’. The debate is conducted in the high-­baroque style of American rhetorical criticism (of which McGann and Stanley Fish were then the major figures) so that pronouncements abound like ‘Her poetry is not clichéd and sentimental, as many have charged, it is a prolepsis of the ideas of cliché and sentimentality’. (Barry 2007, p.90)

The McGannian method took it for granted that all the Romantics except Byron refused to face the social injustices of their day and were always evasively shying away from them in their poetry, so that they could not properly acknowledge the poverty and social injustice in the countryside they loved, and needed the morally-­superior honesty of their twentieth-­ century critics to point out to them that they were actually writing about the Peterloo Massacre or the virtual serfdom of British agricultural laborers. By contrast, their contemporaries who were writing Gothic novels, the New Romanticists thought, saw through the cataract-­like veil that obscured the thinking of the Romantic poets and wished to help their readers to see through it with them. I found it difficult to understand why the Gothicists were always to be waived through the moral customs, whereas the poets had every literary item they had produced closely examined. ‘Historicist close reading’ of the McGannian kind (though I am not blaming him for everything) meant that the literary text was allowed no developmental autonomy—­each one must be studied on the page (that is, in the context) where it first appeared. Hence, for instance, as Coleridge first published his Ode ‘Dejection’ in the Morning Post, it must forever be studied in that context, for poems should always be studied ‘in the exact specificity of their occurrence’, a phrase from Foucault which was frequently quoted and used in this context. It is a sign of our times that these days variations on the phrase about ‘the exact specificity of occurrence or circumstances’ are found, not in literary studies but in medical literature, especially in online forums used by those working on vaccines to combat and contain new forms of the COVID virus. For them, “exact” must mean what it literally says. By contrast, in the early years of the present century, the word ‘exact’ in literary studies functioned rather like the word ‘firm’ in the Catholic catechism: in relation to going to confession; a ‘firm purpose of amendment’ was enjoined on the penitent, but how could you ever be sure that your purpose was firm enough? If you had to confess the same sins again a few weeks later, it presumably was not. Likewise, how could you ever be sure that you had established the ‘exact specificity’ of the socio-­political context of your chosen literary work? As I put it when wrestling with these issues: The method establishes a contextual domain which is virtually limitless. Thus, if the essential context of ‘Dejection’ is the Morning Post then what is the essential context of the Morning Post? If the poem’s context is taken to be the adjacent items in that newspaper then what is the



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essential context of those items? Where are the limits of the pond across which these contextual ripples spread? How can the archival continuum be prevented from reaching to Infinity? Hence these attitudes too pressure us into studying a realm of virtuality, insisting that vastly impractical ideals of contextualization are carried out to the letter. The effect is, among other things, to widen the gulf between undergraduate and graduate study, and between elite universities and the rest by making it nearly impossible for a less privileged academic to write even a journal article without generous travel grants to consult manuscript collections and, therefore, generous sabbatical time. Historicism indeed sometimes seems like a plot to North-­Americanise literary study forever by making mandatory an approach that only the world’s richest nation could support and sustain. (Barry 2007, pp.15–­16)

It is painful to re-­read and re-­use these accounts of my struggle to work against what followed the ‘fall of theory’ when everyone was determined to make English Studies history. Academics in grant applications and interviews always called what they were doing ‘interdisciplinary’ and seemed to congratulate themselves constantly for a stance they regarded as progressive and as requiring no further justification or definition. On bad days, on professorial panels or adjudicating for grant applications, I felt that we were too passive and accepting of this historicist bombast. My 2007 book pluralized the word ‘Context’ in its title and content, to emphasize that every literary context we identify is simply a choice that we have made—­each one is like a jacket, something that we choose to put on. I think that F.W. Bateson was right when he said in 1953 (in Essays in Criticism, the journal he had founded in 1951) that ‘a degree of anti-­historicism is the price that has to be paid for the continuing vitality of an English literary tradition’. (Leavis 1968, from p. 301). However, Bateson was also a less than nuanced advocate of contextualism: F. R. Leavis observes that ‘he arrives at the assumption that the way to achieve the correct reading of a poem say of Marvell’s or Pope’s is to put it back into its “total context” in that world’. In this formulation, the word ‘total’ has the same minatory effect as ‘exact’ and ‘firm’. Leavis goes on, in some exasperation: What is this ‘complex of religious, political and economic factors that can be called the social context ... How does one set to work to arrive at this ‘final inclusive context, the establishment of which puts the poem back in ‘its original historical setting’, so that ‘the human experience in it begins to be realised and re-­enacted by the reader?’ (Leavis 1968, vol.2, from p.301).

This ‘final inclusive context’, in Leavis’s view, is an illusion that will never amount to more than ‘random notes from his [the critic’s] historical reading’, as he writes in his 1953 essay in Scrutiny ‘The Responsible Critic or the Function of Criticism at any Time’ (Leavis 1968, vol.2 from p. 301). The date 1933 has occurred several times in this piece. In that year, Ernest Hemingway, a war veteran who, like Sassoon and Owen, was traumatized by his war experiences, wrote one of his most reticent and minimalist stories. It is just three pages long, with the title ‘A Clean, Well-­lighted Place’. It never mentions war, trauma, therapy, or writing – it merely describes an unnamed man’s nightly routine of drinking for hours, on his own, in a café, chosen because it is a clean, well-­lighted place, until nearly three in the morning. It ends “Then he would go home to his room. He would lie in bed, and finally, with daylight, he would go to sleep. After all, he said to himself, probably only insomnia. Many must have it.’

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This paragraph draws throughout on Dottyville, (2006). Edinburgh’s Craiglockhart Military Hospital for Shell-­Shocked Officers, where Sassoon was fortunate enough to be sent in 1917, was better than the terrible abandonment depicted in that Hemingway story, for it provided the advantages of companionship and the services of William Rivers, poached from Lancashire’s Maghull Hospital for shell-­shocked other ranks. Rivers was not the only enlightened practitioner on the staff: another was Arthur Brock who believed in what he called ‘ergotherapy’ or cure by functioning. He believed that ‘If the essential thing for the patient to do is to help himself, the essential thing for the doctor to do—­indeed, the only thing he can profitably do—­is to help him to help himself.’ This ‘ergo-­therapeutic’ approach is also what Sassoon put into practice (though he did not call it that) with Wilfred Owen. Owen edited the hospital magazine, Hydra, and he gave Sassoon sustained and detailed tuition, and vice-­versa, as evidenced in the four surviving manuscripts of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and those of ‘Strange Meeting’, which had their, and Owen’s, first publication in Hydra. In this sense, Craiglockhart became a re-­creation of the academic ‘good place’ but one in which Sassoon and Owen both played both roles, both acting as the self-­effacing facilitator as well as being the emergent artist. As is well known, on discharge, both insisted on returning to their regiments in France. Owen was killed a week before the Armistice, and his poetry manuscripts are now in the British Library whose website ‘Poetry Manuscripts of Wilfred Owen’ tells us that: Only five of Owen’s poems were published in his lifetime. However, after his death his heavily worked manuscript drafts were brought together and published in two different editions by Siegfried Sassoon with the assistance of Edith Sitwell (in 1920) and Edmund Blunden (in 1931). They are among some of the most visceral and heart-­breaking poems about World War One. The drafts were subsequently acquired by the British Museum Library in 1934.

Craiglockhart is now a campus of Edinburgh Napier University, and the hospital building is externally unchanged. Appropriately, the ‘Poetry manuscripts of Wilfred Owen’ website has become a major teaching resource available worldwide to those wishing to better their understanding of poetry, or wanting to try their hand at being a literary editor, or perhaps even desiring to apprentice themselves to the exacting discipline of poetry.

An Endnote on Methodology In writing this piece, I have been looking for ways of evaluating literary texts in forms that feel different from those I have practiced since publishing my first academic article in 1976. I have little desire to tell anyone else how to do it—­I only want to show an example of how it might be done. Usually, we speak about the structure of a piece of academic writing, but I found that I was becoming more interested in providing my work with a plot, as if it were a novel. I feel the value of the long quotation, but not the force of the received wisdom that tells us that a long quotation from a literary text should be followed by a detailed analysis of comparable length. That sounds logical, but makes it seem as if the critic is competing with the author and secretly wants to be seen as cleverer. Instead, using the free-­standing long quote seeks to prioritize the author and the text and subordinate the critic. I do not want to



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out-­perform the author, I am just hoping, mostly, to keep out of the author’s way, merely walking alongside the text, perhaps a bit like an altar server in relation to a celebrant. I take it for granted that the author’s vision is superior to mine and accept that this will be obvious to anyone reading us both. Also, I am quite happy, much of the time, ‘just’ to be descriptive, which is something more difficult and more useful than academics often imagine is the case. So the dialogue going on in literary evaluation should be more between the critic and the authorial text than between the critic and other critics. Many critics quote far more from other critics than they do from authors, and they often do so with too much deference. Generally, I don’t often wish to co-­build an argument with fellow critics—­in many articles and chapters nearly a third of the space is handed over to rival critics, and I don’t believe much in this model: I don’t want to keep saying ‘see X’, ‘see Y’, ‘see Z’ every few lines. I’m not writing a Ph.D. thesis, where a large part of the aim has to be to demonstrate that the candidate is au fait with all the relevant criticism on the topic. I’m not auditioning, I’m rather old, and for what it’s worth, this is me, following a train of thought to see where it gets me. When I do engage with other critics, it follows that I am usually disagreeing. But a long-­winded refutation of an intellectual position probably will not stick, so brevity and a certain lightness of touch seem to me more effective. When immersed in the writing of a piece, the mind continues to take in lots of other items read during the days and weeks of writing. Often, this material will fuse itself with the writing topic in hand, as if by accident. However, the truth seems to be that the writing topic, during those weeks, exerts a gravitational pull on everything we read, stripping away incidentals, and drawing apparently unrelated reading matter into alignment with this temporarily ‘deep’ source. Quite often, an oblique angle of incidence between today’s newspaper leader (say) and the writing topic will spark a new tangent, and I often try to find a place for ideas arising in this way. So the approach used here allows for intellectual mirroring, of a personal nature. I have drawn upon my own preoccupations in the early post-­millennial period, using them as a method of evaluation, because they have a degree of thematic consonance with the main body of the material. I quote from what I have previously written because the longer a writing life goes on, the clearer it becomes that the ‘project’ is always already embedded and ongoing. But like all of us I continue to search, in the broadest sense, for a ‘late style’ that will not be something wholly new, but something that subsumes all earlier preoccupations within a new-­seeming supplementary timbre. Elderly academics should be trespassers. In my own case, I had a long-­standing love for biographical writing that traced a person’s transition from obscure beginnings to prominence in some field—­academic, literary, political, ecclesiastical, or whatever. Sassoon’s book, however, was the first text I had read about the ‘rise’ from a relatively obscure yet highly privileged background into a world which his upbringing might have suggested he would not be capable of surviving in. Almost everything I found out about in his book was new to me, shifting my ideas about what achievement is, and bringing home the way much of it is inevitably owed to others. Academic writing carries huge and ever-­increasing onus of expectations, with constant ‘turns’ from one intellectual phase to another, and making heavy demands on us to continue to keep up to date. If you are retired, you do not have to worry about any of these demands, and even if you are not, you never have to worry about all of them. When you

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want to engage with others or explain things with them, do it without adopting the jargon used by members of any of the competing factions. Just say what you have to say with words of the plainest kind—­even banality is better than sinking yourself into any pre-­ approved vocabulary—­into what I call an ‘academic lilt’. Remember that once encumbered in that quicksand, you may never be able to speak in an entirely human voice again.

References Auden, W.H. (1930). Poems. London: Faber. Auden, W.H. (1974). Thank You, Fog. London: Faber. Barry, P.T. (2007). Literature in Contexts. Manchester: Manchester University Press. British Library. Poetry Manuscripts of Wilfred Owen. Available from https://www.bl.uk/collection-­ items/the-­p oetry-­m anuscripts-­o f-­w ilfred-­ owen#:~:text=Only%20five%20of%20 Owen’s%20poems,Edmund%20Blunden%20 (in%201931) (accessed 28 September 2023) Dottyville (2006). “Dottyville—­ Craiglockhart War Hospital and Shell-­shock Treatment in the First World War.” JRSM, Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 99 (7): 342–346, https://www. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1484566/ (accessed 28 September 2023)

Heaney, S. (1966). Death of a Naturalist. London: Faber. Heaney, S. (1969). Door into the Dark. London: Faber. Hemingway, E. (1933). Winner Take Nothing. New York: Scribner’s. Leavis, F.R. (ed.) (1968). A Selection from Scrutiny, vol. 2, p. 301. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McGann, J.J. (1986). The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sassoon, S. (1968). The Old Century & Seven More Years, with an introduction by Michael Thorpe. London: Faber.

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The Horrible Legacy of Modernism Richard Bradford

The title of this chapter offers a clear enough indication of its content and viewpoint. To imagine that we might rid ourselves of the legacies of Modernism is preposterous, but we should, I contend, accept that their effects upon literature and culture in general have been malign. Clearly, the novelists and poets who contributed to the birth of Modernism shared the vision of a new form of representation and communication. It would generally inherit the family name of literature, but it would also make a complete break with the past. The question of why these individuals strove toward a similar objective is usually answered thus: the developed world changed so radically at the close of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century that established artistic conventions could no longer deal with the new reality. The nature and extent of this change is difficult to quantify, but some obvious examples come to mind: the mass traumatizing effects of World War I, the rise of Socialism, Communism and Anarchism, new and previously unimaginable forms of energy and transport, electronic communication, and the encroachment of science and humanist–nihilist thinking upon traditional ideas, particularly religious faith. This cause-­and-­effect explanation for the arrival of Modernism is the one that will be found—­with various embellishments and adjustments—­in virtually all studies of the  phenomenon. It is sound enough, in that no other obvious motive is evident, but because of this it enables us to ignore its inadequacies. It takes for granted the assumption that what the modernists did with their turbulent world was appropriate and fitting. A simple question. Within a decade of 1922—­the annus mirabilis of High Modernism—­ Western Europe and America were struck by events just as traumatizing as any listed

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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above: The Great Depression. Why is it that the best-­known, widely celebrated novel in these years epitomizes the methods of classic realism? John Steinbeck, in The Grapes of Wrath (1939), chose to represent the lives and experiences of ordinary, desperate Americans in a manner that his immediate predecessors had abandoned as irrelevant to the new cultural and social ethos. Would a novel that replicated the technique of Woolf and Joyce tell us more than Steinbeck about the horrible effects of the Depression? That is, of course, a matter for speculation, but when forming an opinion, it should be borne in mind that Ulysses is determinedly “about” nothing at all, except the different ways in which a day in the life of an ordinary Dubliner can be represented. Perhaps a similar telescoping of perspectives would reveal new levels of distress and perplexity in the habits and mindset of Tom Joad. Perhaps. Treating Modernism as something that arose out of and addressed a complex historical crisis sidelines important questions about its true nature and significance. In 1992, John Carey produced The Intellectuals and the Masses. Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia 1880—­1939 (1992, Faber and Faber, London). Modernism’s heyday occurred roughly at the center of this period, and Carey’s venom is directed against a number of its leading players although he also aims at individuals who are unflinching traditionalists, notably Gissing and Wells. His point is that “modern” literary culture licensed an outbreak of elitism in which the “Masses” were routinely perceived as repulsive, irredeemably ignorant, and worthless. It is an excellent book though it should be remarked that Carey draws most of the evidence for his case from the ex-­cathedra non-­literary writings of these figures. There is, I would contend, something intrinsic to Modernism as an aesthetic movement, and latent in many of its works, which indicates a collective sense of superiority and a desire to alienate the common reader from access to an exclusive field of appreciation. One might, of course, contend that serious literature has always entailed an elevated sphere of activity, bringing with it an expectation of intellectual investment on the reader’s part. With Modernism, however, something more occurred. If it were simply the case that these works presented far more complex aesthetic, even existential, questions to the reader than had previously been raised—­and this, briefly summarized, is the position maintained by its supporters (that is, virtually everyone) in academia and the cultural hierarchy—­then, yes, one must concede that Modernism overall is a force for the good. One might even adopt the, in my view patronizing, position that in posing a greater challenge for the ordinary reader who wishes to improve their standing as a connoisseur of the arts it has provided an inadvertent public service. This opinion is now countenanced by the cultural establishment, and I dispute it. Modernism did not merely insult the ordinary reader by making itself more difficult to read than traditional literature. Rather it turned intellectual elitism into a cult, with a number of disagreeable consequences. It created a legacy of ideas about literature that are dangerous, in part because they carry the inflexible support of the intelligentsia, and are therefore immune from dissent, and because they license forms of writing of quite dreadful quality that are, for the same reason, protected from criticism. Ulysses, now regarded by most respectable literary commentators as the most important novel of the twentieth century, was greeted by the mainstream press, and those popular papers that bothered to mention it, with almost widespread derision: of the latter “Aramis” of The Sporting Times is typical.



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As readers of the Pink ‘Un know, I have dealt appreciatively with many unconventional books in these pages; but I have no stomach for Ulysses, and do not care to expose my editor to the imminent risk of appearance in court for countenancing the unprintable. James Joyce is a writer of talent, but in Ulysses he has ruled out all the elementary decencies of life and dwells appreciatively on things that sniggering louts of schoolboys guffaw about. In addition to this stupid glorification of mere filth, the book suffers from being written in the manner of a demented George Meredith. There are whole chapters of it without any punctuation or other guide to what the writer is really getting at. Two thirds of it is incoherent, and the passages that are plainly written are devoid of wit, displaying only a coarse alacrity intended for humour. (1 April 1922)

The unsigned reviewer of The Evening News (8 April 1922) seems in a state of dumfounded incomprehension, in that he/she is unwilling, or unable, to say much about the content of the book, electing instead for fact-­based observations. “Copies have just arrived in London from Paris of the new book Ulysses  ...  The volume is to be had by those who take the trouble to seek it out for about £3.10s ... The book itself in its blue cover looks at first glance like nothing so much as a telephone directory. It contains 739 pages ... Mr. Joyce was born in 1882 in Dublin; he lived in Zurich, Trieste and Rome; and has now settled with his family in Paris ... Ulysses is published by an American woman, Miss Sylvia Beach, whose shop ‘Shakespeare and Co,’ in the Rue do L’Odéon, is a great resort of the younger literary folk.” Having apparently exhausted their treasury of bland detail, the reviewer draws breath and tries to say something about what can be found between the covers. Mr Joyce is as cruel and unflinching in respect to poor humanity as Zola. His style is in the new fashionable kinematic vein, very jerky and elliptical  ...  It seems a pity that Mr Joyce ... restricts the appeal of his work by so many Zolaesque expressions, which are, to say the least, disfiguring.

The preposterous comparison with Zola, arch realist of the nineteenth-­century French novel, was, one must assume, a clutch at straws, evidenced by the reviewers’ apparent inability to put into words what Joyce actually does, aside from the enigmatic reference to his “jerky,” “elliptical,” “kinematic” manner. C.C. Martindale, a Jesuit writing for the Dublin Review (clxxi, 1922), set aside his sense of being led “down to a level where seething instinct is not yet illuminated by intellect” and tried to find an aesthetic pretext for Joyce’s endeavor, which in his view is a literary version of the formlessness of Futurist painting where “not only in the picture there was no ‘whole’ but you were quite unable to surmise a future Whole, and so you felt as mad as the picture looked.” ... Well, Mr Joyce gets as far down as he can to this level of animality which exists, of course, as an ultimate in every man, and then, consciously and by art, tries to reproduce it. And this requires the most strong mental effort. For he has to hold together what yet must somehow remain incoherent; never to forget that the conscious memory has never been in possession of; to put into the impressions of the evening all that the morning held but was never known to hold, and to put it there, not in the shape in which morning offered it, but in the shape into which noon and all the hours between have distorted it. Thus the author, by a visible violent

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effort of memory and intelligence, had to show us what essentially was never consciously known, still less remembered. Hence an angry sense of contradiction in the reader. Mr Joyce is trying to think as if he were insane.

Martindale refers to the lengthy passages of the novel where Joyce abandons coherence, as buttressed by grammar and syntax, and opts instead for a form of writing never previously attempted. The reviewer, albeit grudgingly, concedes that this is an unprecedented, daring experiment, an attempt to render as art that which is otherwise unrecorded—­thoughts that precede speech, impressions, and sensations that are, in their prelinguistic state, fragmented and disorderly. However, Martindale contends that there is a “contradiction” in this: how can he put into language what by its nature exists only beyond language? Sisley Huddleston, writing in The Observer (5 March 1922), discovers in the novel the same effect described by Martindale but comes to different conclusions. As for the matter, I think I can best convey some idea of Ulysses by reminding the reader how odd is the association of ideas when one allows all kinds of what are called thoughts, but which have nothing to do with thinking, to pass in higgledy-­piggledy procession through one’s mind—­one’s subconscious mind, I suppose it is called in present-­day jargon. Psycho-­ analysis is, I believe, very strong about this ... Now the purpose of Mr. Joyce is, of course, much larger than to jot down all the incongruous notions that rattle around the arena of the cranium; but described narrowly, that is what he does. Has anybody done it before? I do not know, but I am certain that no one ever did it at such length and with such thoroughness. It is obvious that if one tries to put down everything in the life of a man, a single day in that life will fill many volumes. The external events are really of little importance except as forming a starting-­point for reflection. Mr. Joyce’s style is such that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between what is taking place externally and what is taking place internally. The internal action is put on the same plane as the external action. Mr. Joyce indicates both with infinite humour and with extraordinary precision. One feels that these things are essentially, ineluctably, true. These are exact notations of trivial but tremendous motions, and these are truly the inconsequential but significant things that one says to oneself. There is Mr. Bloom at the funeral wondering how he can discreetly shift the tablet of soap which he has purchased and put in his tail pocket. As he passes the gasworks in the mourning carriage he wonders whether it’s true that to live near a gasworks prevents whooping-­cough.

Huddleston too recognizes that something unprecedented has occurred but rather than dismissing it as a “contradiction” celebrates Joyce’s technique as a moment of illumination, a bridging of the gap between “the higgledy-­piggledy procession [of thoughts] through one’s mind” and the external world of rational orderly existence. It goes without saying that the post-­1922 consensus of opinion on Ulysses favors Huddleston’s reading. The latter goes on to acknowledge that in parts, particularly the “monologue intéreur” of Molly Bloom, “Blasphemy and beauty, poetry and piggishness, jostle each other” but rather than condemn this, as most early critics do, he celebrates it as a new aesthetic of truth telling, something that had previously been the victim of self-­denial on the part of the writer: “Is that not high art?” Since Huddleston appears to be one of the few reviewers to have set aside, while acknowledging, the initial feelings of unease, distaste, or confusion that accompany a first encounter with the book, should we not simply acknowledge his judgment as extraordinarily prescient and perceptive and leave it at that? He knew that a



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book such as this would have to await a measured verdict on its importance, or otherwise, and that within a few years, the overall response to his daring suggestion might be a resounding “no.” He was wise to be cautious because other reviewers—­some pro, some anti—­supplemented the question of whether the book opened doors on new notions of perception and representation with another: what sort of person would want to read it? Holbrook Jackson in To-­Day (June 1922: ix) runs through the standard retinue of shock-­ and-­awe comments on “the arrangement of the book,” which is, apparently, “a chaos.” “All the conventions of organised prose which have grown with our race ... which have been reverently handed on by the masters ... have been cast aside as so much dross.” Holbrook generally allows fascination and a grudging sense of approval to sideline his intimations of dismay. Like Huddleston, he admits to being in the presence of something pioneering, possibly groundbreaking. However, “Mr Joyce evidently believes in making it difficult for his readers—­but perhaps he wants to scare them away ... It seems gratuitous to put unnecessary difficulties in the way of a proper understanding of his message, story or record.” Without referring to any specific manifesto for correct fiction writing—­because none existed, beyond the examples set by the largely realist authors of the previous century and a half—­Jackson implies that the generally accepted task of the novelist was to enable the reader to easily suspend disbelief, to find in the novel a near replica of the world they lived in. The result is that the reader is continually losing his way and having to retrace his steps. Ulysses is like a country without roads. But it is a novel, and if it will not amuse the idle novel reader, or even attract the lewd by its unsavoury franknesses, it must claim the attention of those who look upon fiction as something more than confectionery. With all its faults, it is the biggest event in the history of the English novel since Jude.

Jackson, like Huddleston, tempers enthusiasm with caution. Ulysses is, he admits, difficult to navigate, but he also suggests that a refusal to take up the challenge is the response of the “idle reader,” the sort of person who is content with fiction as “confectionery” by which he means easy entertainment. In the Dublin Review of September 1922, Shane Leslie, writing as “Domini Canis,” also finds that it is a novel deliberately designed to frustrate and even alienate the “general reader,” but while Holbrook treats this as a worthy raising of the intellectual bar, Leslie perceives the general reader as the conscience of the literary world, its electorate. In this respect, Joyce has, he avers, merely fed “the curiosity of the literati and dilletanti.” For everyone else, Ulysses is “so much rotten caviar.” Leslie, while largely agreeing with Jackson on what the book does, treats it as an exercise in elitism. “Nothing could be more ridiculous than the youthful dilettantes in Paris or London who profess knowledge and understanding of a work which is often mercifully obscure ...” It is not entirely uncommon to find two critics who, after reading the same book, reach entirely different conclusions as to its qualities or otherwise, but this tends to be a reflection of their inherent tastes and predispositions. With Holbrook and Leslie, the difference arises from something more complex. They diverge completely on what fiction is supposed to do and what purpose it is supposed to serve for the reader. Leslie claims to speak on behalf of the “general reader” who we must assume he perceives as a stable anchor for literary taste, while Jackson regards this same individual, the consumer who sustains the solvency of

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publishing houses and their authors, as the purblind victim of “cosmetic” populism. Who was correct? Subsequent history would favor Holbrook given that few, if any, in the literary establishment or academia of the present day would dare to side with Leslie. However, shift the perspective slightly and consider who is responsible for the elevation of Ulysses to a seemingly unassailable level of greatness. One must assume, by a process of deduction, that its status was conferred by those at the upper echelons of the literary and cultural world, especially during the period after the 1930s when universities became far more significant as mediators of opinion on modern writing and not, as previously, encampments for the scholarly pursuit of classical learning. If it were not for the growth of a pro-­ modernist consensus among what Leslie refers to as the literati Ulysses would very likely have become something of an aesthetic curiosity, a work that caused a controversy for a while but did not otherwise disturb the progress of the nineteenth-­century realist form then in the hands of respected and popular writers such as Arnold Bennett and a little later George Orwell. There are very few among that class which Leslie calls the “general reader” who would over the past ninety years have voluntarily read let alone purchased the volume: for those who did it was most often an involuntary encounter brought about by the massive post-­ war expansion of higher education and the fervent, unquestioning support for innovation and experiment by those who taught in the new universities. There is evidence, then, that Leslie’s charge of elitism was prescient and that the reputation of Joyce and his alleged masterpiece has been sustained despite the tastes and opinions of the so-­called “general reader.” Popularity is not, of course, a guarantee of quality but consider a variation on Leslie’s charge of elitism. There are, at present, a considerable number of novelists whose sales outsoar by far even the best-­known proponents of the so-­called “literary” novel. Jeffrey Archer is an obvious case as are Stephen King and J.K. Rowling. Recently, a previously unknown presence, E.L. James, has sold over one hundred million copies of a series of sado-­erotic novels that seem to appear on a monthly basis, a phenomenon that began with Fifty Shades of Grey. I have, so far, attempted to be even handed regarding differences of opinion on the qualities of literary works, but in these instances, generosity can be dispensed with. Perhaps with the exception of Rowling and King, who are reasonably accomplished within their somewhat limited genres, these novels are atrocious rubbish. This is, I accept, a rash unfounded judgment, but I stand by my assessment. The fact that they are far more popular than anything produced or celebrated by members of the literati proves that a reliance upon audience numbers as an index for taste is a dangerous strategy. However, should we treat the people who buy and presumably enjoy this dross as the modern equivalent of Leslie’s general reader? Given the changes that have taken place in the industry of publishing since the 1920s, the answer to this question is no. In actuality, there are spectrums of attraction and indifference that allow individual readers to transcend attempts to classify them as belonging to a particular group. It is quite plausible that a reasonably well-­ educated reader—­ perhaps with a university degree in the humanities or perhaps not—­will purchase and read books on the basis of past experience of what satisfies their particular mélange of pleasure, satisfaction, and appreciation. Somewhere in this mixture, a glimmer of what in higher learning is termed aesthetic discernment will be found, but for the time being let us make a clear discrimination between two levels of preference that are rarely if ever entertained by a single reader, and



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which are more accurate than, say, Leslie’s division of the “literati” from the “general reader” as an index to taste. Some readers, I would contend, read novels primarily because they expect to find therein a version of the world they know and inhabit. Inevitably, this will be distorted to suit the conventions of storytelling in prose. We will get to know characters not by meeting them, but through the skills a novelist brings to bear upon the building of a character, mainly by the use of dialogue and an accumulation of descriptive registers, from what they look like and how they behave to their private thoughts. More importantly, these personnel will be involved in a story, one which holds our attention because if the novelist is any good, we are as interested in the participants as we are in real people, and as a consequence we will want to know what happens next. This is the formula upon which virtually all so-­called realist novels are based. Joyce and a number of other Modernist fiction writers based their endeavors upon the pretext that the realist method was both limited and delusional, that it created, via the novel, the impression that reality is orderly and subject to rational modes of interpretation by those who inhabit it. In short, realist fiction is not “realist” at all; its claim to be mimetic is a pretense. The alternative, tested in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and more daringly explored in Ulysses, involved making language recreate the true nature of the human condition, made up, randomly, of insignificant recollections, unconnected observations on matters both mundane and fundamental, and unspecified allusions, while abandoning the framework of individual motivation and interpersonal drama. Even those who condemned Joyce as immoral or self-­indulgent conceded that he had attempted something quite remarkable and his supporters and begrudgers were also in agreement on another point: that Ulysses was at once unprecedented and unrepeatable. Huddleston, one of his most enthusiastic early champions, typifies this sentiment: “the book is a staggering first which, once attempted and more than half achieved, may never be attempted again—­the way of a cosmic atom under heaven during a day and a night.” The rationale for this opinion is provided at length by that stalwart of the realist technique that Joyce was attempting to unseat from its predominant position, Arnold Bennett, who reviewed Ulysses in Outlook (29 April 1922). Bennett, to his credit, begins in a self-­parodic manner, affecting a mood of bafflement at the storm of praise that followed all of Joyce’s publications in France, particularly the essay by Valéry Larboud in La Nouvelle Revue Française which declared Ulysses a masterpiece beyond compare. He is playing the part of a dyspeptic member of the old guard rendered uncomprehending by his usurpers. But gradually a far more commanding presence takes over, and the review mutates into one of the most thought-­provoking early responses. Of course the author is trying to reproduce the thoughts of the personage, and his verbal method can be justified—­does indeed richly justify itself here and there in the story. But upon the whole, though the reproduction is successful, the things reproduced appear too often to be trivial and perfectly futile in the narrative. I would not accuse him of what is absurdly called “photographic realism.” But I would say that much of the book is more like an official shorthand writer’s “note” than a novel. In some of his moods the author is resolved at any price not to select, not to make even the shortest leap from one point of interest to another. He has taken oath with himself to put it all down and be hanged for it ... He would probably defend himself and find disciples to defend him. But unless the experience of creative artists since the recorded beginning of art is quite worthless, James Joyce is quite

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wrongheaded. Anyhow, with his wilfulness, he has made novel reading into a fair imitation of penal servitude  ...  The author seems to have no geographical sense, little sense of environment, no sense of the general kindness of human nature, and not much poetical sense. Worse than all, he has positively no sense of perspective. But my criticism of the artist in this goes deeper. His vision of the world and its inhabitants is mean, hostile, and uncharitable ...

Bennett’s point is that there is a symbiotic relationship between what the reader expects of a novel and what the novelist delivers, and that the taste for realism that had prevailed so far was not an unambitious refusal to move beyond the routine and familiar, but rather the consequence of two centuries of gradual metamorphosis, in which novelists continually re-­examined the relationship between this relatively untested brand of writing and its audience. Bennett’s stance involves more than a reactionary intolerance of innovation. He charges Joyce with a failure in his duty to the reader. “Ulysses would have been a better book and a much better appreciated book if the author had extended to his public the common courtesies of literature.” By this, he does not mean that literature should for the reader be a passive, unchallenging experience. Rather,that the features of fiction that Joyce dispenses with—­such as a “sense of environment,” “a sense of perspective,” and the “poetical sense” of prose which causes us to adjust our expectations—­are what enable fiction to engage the reader in its unique game of hide and seek, with a narrative as addictive yet as unpredictable as life itself and characters who are sufficiently life-­like to be able to dissemble but also, often surprisingly, to disclose “the general kindness of human nature.” Bennett might appear to over-­sentimentalize the duties of the writer when he accuses Joyce of presenting “the world and its inhabitants” as “mean, hostile, and uncharitable.” He was not so naive as to perceive humanity as exempt from these features or to advocate that literature should pretend that we are. What he found unpalatable about Ulysses was its employment of a radical technique to leave the reader with no option but to comprehend only the “mean, hostile, and uncharitable” dimensions of existence. The reservations and objections of Bennett, Leslie, and many others have been swept aside by the overwhelming force of the literary and academic zeitgeist but it is, I think, unfair to ignore the principle that underpins Bennett’s article. Which is this: Even if a work of literature is a magnificent example of innovation should we question its inherent quality if it also in some way limits the reader to the role of alienated spectator rather than participant? Most would now contend that the latter was one of Modernism’s great accomplishments and that the failure of many early readers to appreciate this was the result of stubborn intolerance on their part rather than some defect in the work. In short, the more enlightened among us learned to experience that to which their predecessors had blinded themselves. I would disagree. This is the conventional opinion on what occurred, but it enables its advocates to sweep under the carpet fundamental questions raised by the doubters. The charges against Modernism in its early years and at its zenith were that it was gratuitously difficult and elitist, and among its defenders was Mark Van Doren, an academic, who offered solace to readers “who find themselves a bit bewildered among modern poets.” He concedes that “Poetry which is both new and good is also difficult to read. In a sense all good poetry is difficult to read, but we are not aware of the fact when we are considering the classics [by which he means the exalted authors in English as well



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as their “Classical” forebears], which centuries of human experience have taught us how to read” (p 10). There are a number of glaring inconsistencies in this statement which all subsequent commentators have for some reason overlooked. Van Doren takes for granted that literary quality—­“good poetry”—­must necessarily involve difficulty but does not bother to justify this sweeping generalization. Furthermore, he does not explain what he means by “difficult.” For example, the Imagists—­one of whose founders was Ezra Pound—­ were committed to making poetry far less complex than ever before; their objective was transparency. One also has to question his principal thesis that erudition and experience teach us how to read “difficult” poems. The “us” of his statement might be mistaken for some egalitarian notion of everyman, but it is clear enough from the rest of the piece that Van Doren is addressing people like himself or those he teaches. He does not directly state that a reader without experience as a literary sophisticate will never be able to make sense of poetry, let alone meet the new challenge of modernist poetry, but one suspects that by “how to read” he means “how to discuss and evaluate in an appropriately learned manner.” This suspicion is confirmed by a comment by another academic fifteen years after Van Doren when the apology for Modernism was in full cry. Donald Stauffer promises to select “three poems by Pope, Herrick, and Burns for their apparent simplicity, and study ... their actual poetic complexity” (p 160). This should be paraphrased as, “you might think you understand these poems but, as I will show, erudite scrutiny brings out their true complexity.” Aside from its patronizing subtext—­that is, ordinary readers need help even if they believe they understand poems—­it provides a cover-­all formula in the rescue mission for Modernism, contending that the apparently uncomplicated verse of the Imagists requires the assistance of the literati, just as much as the allusion-­laden obscurities of The Waste Land. In the work of apologists for Modernism, one finds persistent reference to an “audience” made up of “ordinary” or “general” readers, but this already vague constituency disappears in a puff of smoke when closely scrutinized. Elizabeth Drew, for example, urges that Shakespeare is just as difficult to understand as the likes of Pound and Eliot. His complexities have too often gone unnoticed because “it is only because he appeals at so many different levels to so many different types of audience and reader[s] that his difficulty has escaped much comment” (p 82). Despite her commendable attempt at diplomacy, she obviously feels that Shakespeare’s popularity among the common theatergoer, or reader if that sort of person is literate, had hindered his recognition as a genuinely difficult writer, at least for those sufficiently clever and well-­read to appreciate such a quality. The claim made by these critics to some knowledge of the “audience” or “readership” of poets such as Donne or Shakespeare in their own time is optimistic, verging upon fantastic. Even for the nineteenth century it is difficult for us to assemble an image of an “average reader” from the paucity of available evidence. I would contend that the oft-­referred to audience of long dead poets was in fact a projection of something rather more tangible and concrete: the sort of person who during the 1920s and 1930s divided their tastes between cinema, radio, popular theater, popular fiction, and very rarely, poetry. Harriet Monroe, as editor of Poetry, had in 1914 declared that the new poets should follow a dictum of Whitman’s: “To have great poets there must be great audiences too.” It is unlikely that Monroe deliberately intended to bewilder her readers, but if she meant, as is generally assumed, that avant-­garde verse should be egalitarian in its appeal, she might

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have chosen a less ambiguous motto. By “great audiences” did Whitman mean abundant or superior? Pound seems to have assumed the former, at least if his public letter of censure to Monroe is anything to go by. Had Dante the popular voice? He had his youthful companionship with Guido, and the correspondence with a man from Pistoja and with the Latinist De Virgilio. Must we restrict this question to poets? I ask the efficient man in any department of life. Can we have no great inventors without great audience for inventors? Had Curie a great audience? Had Ehrlich for his bacilli? Can we have no great financier without a great audience? Had the saviour of the world a great audience? Did he work on the magazine public? (1914: 30)

Pound’s opening question is not a rhetorical one. Most agree that Dante was perhaps the most challenging of the Renaissance poets, but the idea that this alienated his work from a large audience of his contemporaries is preposterous. Readers of his poetry were entirely composed of his educated peers; in fifteenth-­century Italy the notion of a widely read book was a contradiction in terms. What really troubled Pound is evidenced in his closing sentence. The “magazine public” as he puts it was an unprecedented phenomenon. During the nineteenth century, the novel had, for the first time, made literature a popular medium, but by the early decades of the twentieth, readers who did not belong to the intellectual and social elite were exercising new opportunities for diversion and entertainment via rapidly produced print media—­“magazines” for example—­or from words and images transmitted electronically. Literature had been swept into a new era of popular culture, and it now had to compete for prominence with forms of entertainment that were classed by the literary establishment as sub-­cultural. It seemed like the advent of aesthetic democracy, in which the quality of literature might still be debated by the few while its relevance would gradually be eroded by the choices and tastes of the masses. Modernism was motivated, to a large degree, by aesthetic protectionism, which involved two objectives: to cause literature to become sufficiently strange and incomprehensible so that the “magazine public” would reject it and to convince the cultural establishment to treat this as a favorable advance upon the status quo. These two would, thought Pound and others, wrest control of literature from the unedifying world of eminence-­ by-­ popularity and rebuild a cultural hierarchy with literature at its pinnacle, safely beyond the grasp of the ordinary reader. In 1930, Mark Van Doren reflected upon how the previous decade had caused middlebrow readers such confusion and distress. A reader, then or now, who had been brought up on the poetry familiar to his parents, the household poetry, shall we say, of late nineteenth-­century America, the poetry which millions of school children had memorized and politicians had quoted in their speeches, the poetry of Victorian England and of Victorian America, the poetry of Tennyson, Longfellow, and Swinburne (but chiefly of their innumerable and indistinguishable followers)—­such a reader had every right to be bewildered a decade and a half ago ... He frequently, indeed, resented the kind of poetry then coming upon the scene; or he refused to call it poetry at all. And no wonder. For the new poets were trying their best not to write like the new poets he had known; they were getting as far away from the usual thing as paper and ink could take them. They had declared war upon the current conceptions of poetry (1930: 10).



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Van Doren does his best, in a condescending way, to treat this kind of reader with respect. These people were inured to the style of Victorian poetry which had become familiar, almost idiomatic. A jolt to routine expectations was, he contended, a necessity. Why? He does not make this clear, but he implies a great deal. If we democratize taste, it becomes stale. We must, therefore, cause it to become an aspirational ideal. Joyce said of Ulysses, “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality” (Ellmann, p 521). His observation has been quoted on numerous occasions in academic studies yet hardly ever commented on, which is an embarrassing acknowledgment of Joyce’s prescience. He does not go quite so far as to state that he intended to put the book beyond the reach of the non-­academic reader, but he does not need to. Despite the view of some academics that Ulysses dragged fiction from the hands of the nineteenth-­century bourgeoisie into the real world of its hero, it is a fact that, as Joyce predicted, its status as a significant literary work would be sustained by academia. Without the assistance of careerist researchers and its unassailable position on the university canon of greats, it would certainly not have endured, like Dickens’s or Austen’s novels, as a bestseller. One might contend that other indisputably superb works would be, if not forgotten, then read only by a tiny number of enthusiasts were it not for the protective arm of the educational and literary establishment: Milton’s Paradise Lost is not most people’s choice for holiday reading. As we have seen, some have argued that the major texts of Modernism, not only Ulysses, are refreshingly egalitarian, inviting the ordinary reader to join more adventurous and erudite figures against the same intellectual challenge. Yet there is something about them which causes one to suspect that they neither expect nor would particularly welcome the interest of uncultured types. Joyce is frequently praised for affording us by far the most comprehensive depiction ever of a single fictional character. We witness Leopold Bloom’s habits when he visits the lavatory, share his secrets, his half-­formed speculations on everything from betting to God, look in on his erotic fantasies, are informed that he has not had sex with his wife Molly for ten and a half years since the death of their (on this we are even provided with an exact date) infant son, and we know his height, down to the half inch, and weight, to the nearest pound. We leave the book knowing Bloom as well as we know anyone outside it, but we experience more than a catalog of details. We learn of him via the consistently shifting lens that Joyce employs to show him from a different perspective in every chapter. It has been said that Joyce chose, or invented, Bloom as the focus of his gargantuan enterprise because he was everyman, a figure who covered a spectrum from private tragedy to the utterly pointless and mundane. But let us reconsider this by asking the question of what sort of individual he would most certainly not have used as his principal character. Stephen Daedalus, the hero of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, plays a secondary role in Ulysses, but even if Joyce had pondered the idea of bringing him center stage, the hypothesis would have immediately folded because a character such as Daedalus made him entirely unsuitable for the experiment that Joyce compels Bloom to undergo. Daedalus is a middle-­class intellectual with high aesthetic ambitions. In the first episode, we find Stephen reflecting on his mother’s recent death. Stephen, an elbow rested on the jagged granite, leaned his palm against his brows and gazed at the fraying edge of his shiny black coatsleeve. Pain, that was not yet the pain of love, fretted his heart. Silently, in a dream she had come to him after her death, her wasted body within its

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loose brown graveclothes giving off an odour of wax and rosewood, her breath, that has bent upon him, mute, reproachful, a faint odour of wetted ashes. Across the threadbare cuffedge he saw the sea hailed as a great sweet mother by the wellfed voice beside him. The ring of bay and skyline held a dull green mass of liquid. A bowl of white china had stood beside her deathbed holding the green sluggish bile which she had torn up from her rotting liver by fits and loud groaning vomiting.

Although this is related by a third person narrator, it is Stephen’s delicately nuanced intellect and sensibility that shapes the prose. It would have been quite possible of course to release this presence across the whole span of Dublin life that we encounter through the twenty-­ four hours of the book’s duration, but Stephen’s elevated mindset would have dominated, or at least clashed with, the constellation of techniques employed by Joyce to refract and dissect the life of Bloom. To put it bluntly, Stephen is too clever to submit to such minute scrutiny. Joyce needed a man with an unambitious, suppliant mindset, the kind who would not undermine an account of his eating habits such as those found in “calypso.” Mr. Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet sour, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liver slices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencod’s roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.

Our thorough familiarity with every aspect of Bloom’s existence, including his taste for foodstuffs redolent of “faintly scented urine,” comes with a good deal of prurient attention to detail. It is not impossible that Stephen or others of his class and temperament enjoyed a faint whiff of urine with their food, but such figures could not be portrayed in the way that Joyce deals with Bloom, from the outside like a specimen. Their intellect would short-­circuit the procedure, probably enabling them to treat the odors of the food as the foundation for an unspoken meditative discourse on life and its transient nature. In order to master the complexities of the novel, a reader from the same class as Bloom, with the same limited cultural and educational background, would need to position themselves alongside the controlling hand of the book, to rise to Joyce’s intellectual level and empathize with his daring experiment. At the same time, however, they would also adopt, like Joyce, a position of superiority over the man, Bloom, whose characteristics they once shared. Virginia Woolf famously disparaged Ulysses for its “indecency.” “Mr Joyce’s indecency in Ulysses seems to me the conscious and calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows.” (“Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown,” p 396). Clearly, Woolf believes that Joyce deliberately lowered standards to increase the shock effect of his formal experiment, but her ingrained snobbery causes her to overlook the fact that, despite appearances, his undertaking has a great deal in common with hers. Woolf’s most frequently quoted comment in defense of her own model of fiction is: Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a ­semi-­transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end. Is it not the task of the novelist to convey this varying, this unknown and uncircumscribed spirit, whatever aberration or complexity it may display, with as little mixture of the alien and external as possible?



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Earlier in the same essay, she attacks Arnold Bennett, the archetypical realist of the era, for his preoccupation with facts. He would, she argues, present a character by assembling details of what they wear, how they speak, and their body language, but in doing so, he would blind himself to a real understanding of this figure, their intangible inner presence: “I insubstantiate” she declares, “wilfully to some extent, distrusting reality—­its ­cheapness.” In The Waves, we encounter insubstantiation in action. Each of its six monologists—­ Neville, Louis, Jinny, Rhoda, Susan, and Bernard—­filters the “reality” of their life through a fabric of reflections on its fleeting or latent nature. Bernard is an artist whose vocation becomes the lens for his perception of the outside world. He states, “I must make phrases and phrases and so interpose and so interpose something hard between myself and the stare of the housemaids, the stare of clocks, staring faces, indifferent faces ...” Woolf’s novel is routinely celebrated for revealing how each of the characters in it is, to the others, a passive agent, that they have, willfully or otherwise, become “interposed” between what goes on in their minds and the network of emotions and feelings experienced by the others. It is, argue its champions, a meditation on the ineluctable tragedy of the human condition; we reach out to each other, but experience something only partial or, even worse, a void. I would disagree. At least the six intellectually mature, appropriately sensitive figures who inhabit the narrative are aware of their shared sense of distress and isolation. Persons such as the “housemaids” whose “stare” carries the same significance as that of “the clock” are thought unworthy, no doubt because of their limited intelligence, of taking part in such an exercise in mutual victimhood. Imagine what would have happened if Joyce had chosen to populate a novel with six versions of Stephen, moved them up to respectable middle-­class London and away from the mucky mercantile atmosphere of Dublin and expelled from the book—­excepting occasional references to them as objects—­figures such as Bloom or unnamed “housemaids”: The Waves by James Joyce. Woolf objected to being obliged to share narrative space with the smells and habits of Bloom, but she misread the parallels between Joyce’s technique and her own. We most certainly know more about Bloom than Bernard does of his “housemaids,” but we do not really “know” him in the same way that the shared, and most certainly superior, background of aesthetic sensitivity burnished with erudition enables the six monologists to intuit something of each other. Bloom and the housemaids are virtual figures viewed from the outside, by their authors, by other characters, and by the readers. To become part of this third category, real-­life Blooms and housemaids would have to cease to be the kind of person who permitted them to appear in the novels in the first place. John Carey describes the manner in which Woolf in Mrs Dalloway offers more than cursory attention to one of these low life figures. A beggar, singing for coppers, is generously allocated around one hundred and fifty words, but Woolf clearly runs out of patience with her continued presence and causes these same words to snuff out whatever claim to a personality she might have had. She turns her into a tree, a harrowing reminder of the countryside that once dominated the area around the Regent’s Park before urbanization and the Tube Station entrance where people like her now stand. She might claim that the nineteenth-­century novel did little to dismantle the divisions by wealth and class that informed the society it represented, but modernist fiction was far more effective and sophisticated in cementing a hierarchy of the privileged and the excluded. It turned the latter into nonpersons and excluded them as readers.

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There was no egalitarianism in poetry either. For most readers with an informed but unambitious interest in poetry, The Waste Land was incomprehensible. The critics who confessed to varying degrees of puzzlement and infuriation were not so much inflexible conservatives as spokespersons for the then consensus of opinion. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the consensus shifted in little more than a decade from a feeling of alienation to one of celebratory admiration. Nonetheless, the poem itself remained unaltered, and there are certain parts of it that reward the skeptical reader with a revisit. Eliot, generously enough, offered the perplexed a hint at how they might comprehend and appreciate the poem’s discontinuity and apparently ceaseless shifts of focus. In a note to the third section, he wrote Tiresias, although a mere spectator and not indeed a “character,” is yet the most important personage in the poem, uniting all the rest. Just as the one-­eyed merchant, seller of currants, melts into the Phoenician Sailor, and the latter is not wholly distinct from Ferdinand Prince of Naples, so all the women are one woman, and the two sexes meet in Tiresias. What Tiresias sees, in fact, is the substance of the poem.

Clearly, Eliot wishes to avoid anything quite so simplistic as a speaker or persona. Tiresias is more a philosophical concept, a junction of nuances that defies any attempts to connect him, or indeed her, with what we would generally understand to be a recognizable human being. The note recalls Joyce’s remark on how his legacy will at least provide professors with years of gainful employment. Tiresias too offers wondrous prospects for academics who would use him as a pretext for challenging exercises in intellectual improvement, without actually explaining what he is: that would injure the majestic profundity of the poem. Yet the more closely one examines the work, the more Eliot’s enigmatic note betrays, perhaps unwittingly, the disagreeable function of Tiresias and the equally unpalatable mindset of his/her creator. One of the most famous passages of the poem occurs in “The Fire Sermon,” the section to which Eliot appended his note and involves the encounter between the typist and “young man carbuncular.” At the hour, when the eyes and back Turn upward from the desk, when the human engine waits Like a taxi throbbing waiting, I Tiresias, though bling throbbing between two lives, Old man with wrinkled female breasts, can see At the violet hour, the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea, The typist home at teatime, clears her breakfast, lights Her stove, and lays out food in tins. Out of the window perilously spread Her drying combinations touched by the sun’s last rays, On the divan are piled (at night her bed) Stockings, slippers, camisoles and stays. I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest—­



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I too awaited the expected guest. He, the young man carbuncular, arrives, A small house agent’s clerk, with a bold stare, One of the low on whom assurance sits As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire. The time is now propitious, as he guesses; The meal is ended, she is bored and tired. Endeavors to engage her in caresses Which still are unreproved, if undesired. Flushed and decided, he assaults at once; Exploring hands encounter no defence; His vanity requires no response, And makes a welcome of indifference. (And I Tiresias have foresuffered all Enacted on this same divan or bed; I who have sat by Thebes below the wall And walked among the lowest of the dead.) Bestows one final patronizing kiss, And gropes his way, finding the stairs unlit ...

One cannot help wondering if Eliot’s invention of Tiresias is a pre-­emptive not guilty plea against charges of rampant detestation of the lower orders. By making him pitiable in his own right (“blind,” “Old man with wrinkled female breasts,” etc.), Eliot assimilates him to the state of dreadfulness evoked everywhere else in the poem and absolves himself of responsibility for Tiresias’s observations. But one has to speculate: does Tiresias protest too much? After the minutely detailed description of how the couple have sex, apparently forced, in what was, up to 1922, the most meticulously seedy portrait of a room in ­literature, Tiresias proffers what seems a note of consolidation, almost sympathy: “I Tiresias have foresuffered all/Enacted on this same divan or bed.” The hint that they are all in this together is, however, soon dispersed. Tiresias continues: “I who have sat by Thebes below the wall/And walked among the lowest of the dead.” We have been told by Eliot that Tiresias transcends ordinary notions of time and space, yet the obsessive concentration upon the shiftless, faintly unhygienic lifestyle of the couple leaves us in no doubt that this pair of philistines would be left dumbstruck by any reference to Thebes. Such classical tokens are, we suspect, Tiresias’s solace against the world of commoners in which he has the misfortune to spend much of his time, as are his quotations from sixteenth-­century drama, Renaissance French poetry and Hindu fable. If one requires further confirmation that, despite his plea, Eliot disguises himself as Tiresias consult the original draft which included the line that Eliot removed from the end of the passage above and replaced with the three dots: “And at the corner where the stable is,/Delays only to urinate, and spit.” Along with the discarded lines is a comment from Pound who advised him to drop them. “[P]robably over the mark” remarked Eliot’s co-­pioneer in this new literary aesthetic. We certainly should not mistake Pound’s observation as a token of his benevolence toward the couple. Quite the contrary. He is protecting his friend from possible accusations that he has gone “over the mark,” and the fact that he seems content with the rest as within the bounds of fair representation further demonstrates that Eliot and Pound are part of the

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social and cultural elite to which Tiresias too belongs, and from which the young man and his girl are, by virtue of their foul ordinariness, most certainly excluded. The poem bears a close similarity to Ulysses despite Joyce’s bringing a little more humanity to his treatment of Bloom. In each case, the complexities of the new literary enterprise become not only the preserve of an elite but also the means by which the text itself becomes an exercise in cultural and aesthetic apartheid. We have already seen how supporters of Modernism treated its difficulties, its ­self-­ evident inaccessibility as a necessary antidote to the fearful prospect of a newly expanded cultural marketplace where popularity overturned aesthetic standards. The task of cultural and intellectual acclimatization demanded by these new works would improve the mindset of the general reader. Yet there seems to be an anomalous relationship between this ideal and the inherent elitism of the works themselves, something that went far beyond their being difficult to comprehend. It is worth examining again some of the claims made about the improving capacities of Modernism because beneath the reformist altruism something a little more sinister stirs. Gwendolyn Murphy compared the Modernists with their immediate traditional predecessors, the Georgian poets, who are in her opinion “comparatively timid” (1938: xv). This evocation of strength and power features regularly in defenses of the Modernist project. Cleanth Brooks, one of the most influential academics of the mid-­twentieth century, writes of the late, more complex verse of Yeats that “the average reader will balk  ...  at the amount of intellectual exercise demanded of him” (pp  63–64). Interestingly, Brooks leaves open to question the issue of whether such an “average” individual should be encouraged to work harder at their Yeats or, because of their innate laziness, be left outside the charmed circle of those prepared to engage in such an “exercise.” The analogy between intellectual effort and physical exertion might simply be that, a convenient conceit, but it crops up so frequently that one begins to wonder about what really motivates these polemicists. Geoffrey Grigson, reviewing Pound’s Cantos in 1933, wrote of it as “athletic writing, of a kind which has only been made possible by long service training and dieting” (262), and seven years later, David Daiches reflected on how T.S. Eliot’s “themes” exposed the “emptiness and flabbiness of modern life and thought, while in technique he employed every means he could to avoid that flabbiness which he was criticising” (1940: 115). Edith Sitwell did not quite allow the rhetoric of the gymnasium into her disparagement of ordinariness, but she comes close to involving corporal punishment as a cure for lazy readers. Modernist poetry should “come as a shock to people who are used to taking their impressions second-­hand—­to people who want comfort and not the truth” (1926: 22). Q.D. Leavis was not a wholehearted supporter of Modernism, but she felt that, in 1932, something ought to be done about “the reader—­ who spends his leisure in cinemas, looking through magazines and newspapers, listening to jazz music ... [which] does not merely fail him, it prevents him from normal development” (224). As another cultural reformist put it in the early 1930s, the “older ones are used up ... rotten to the marrow ... This is the heroic strength of youth. Out of it will come the creative man.” Certainly Adolf Hitler was no great litterateur, but his enthusiasm for the cathartic effects of effort and struggle and his preoccupation with a lean, virile state of mind finds an echo in a remarkable number of apologies for Modernism. Hitler and Nazism were repugnant enough, but there was an anomalous, indeed bizarre, sense of loathing for the ordinary citizens abroad among advocates of leftism. In a passage from David Lodge’s



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Nice Work (1988), Vic—­the no-­nonsense self-­made businessman—­explains to Robyn Penrose, an academic and fan of Modernism, his reading preferences or rather his lack of them. “‘But reading is the opposite of work,’ says Vic. ‘It’s what you do when you come home from work to relax’.” No, no, contends Robyn. “Difficulty generates meaning. It makes the reader work harder.” Lodge’s portrait of the legacy of Modernism—­difficulty is good for us—­is wryly amusing. For him, a Senior Professor of English and novelist, the institutionalization of Modernism and its abiding educational benefits, had become commonplaces of the literary and academic establishment. However, his humor also enables him, and us, to overlook the murky ways in which all of this began half a century earlier. Eliot made it clear that the duty of the poet reached beyond a commitment to his genre. “Poets of our civilisation, as it exists at present, should be difficult.” The protection of civilization through the art of complexity sounds an honorable, if somewhat perverse, nostrum, but elsewhere in Eliot’s writings on art and society it becomes clear that he sees the danger as coming from a particular quarter. He is upset by the likely twofold consequences of the expanding education system, involving “lowering our standards” which, once lowered, will allow into hallowed cultural ground “barbarian nomads of the future” who will there “encamp in their mechanized caravans.” We can’t help noticing that Eliot’s snobbish observations are given an apocalyptic twist in Yeats’s question on “what rough beast, its hour came round at last/Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” presumably without its caravan. Both images are vivid, hyperbolic, and faintly ludicrous, but if we work back through Eliot’s pronouncements to his poetry, we can discern a degree of continuity. The sort of persons whose recreational tastes involve “mechanized caravans” are close cousins to the “young man carbuncular” and his typist, who Eliot only permits into his poem on the tacit understanding that their real counterparts will be discouraged from reading it because it is “difficult.” Juan Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish liberal philosopher, expressed the case more succinctly in his The Dehumanisation of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925, trans 1968). Modernism, in his view, is a necessary “social agent” that cleaves from the dangerously amorphous notion of egalitarian society and popular culture “two different castes of men.” Those who cannot appreciate, indeed make sense of, the new aesthetic will become the “inert matter of the historical process”; the rest, the justly “privileged minority,” are the “illustrious,” gifted with “fine senses” (pp  5–13). Marxism and Darwinism share a commitment to the inexorability of processes, respectively economic/ political and biological. Ortega y Gasset and many other Modernists, right and left leaning, offer us an aesthetic version of this model of history in which inert and superfluous matter, people included, is cast aside. Those who advocate difficulty as remedy for social and cultural decay believed that to cause readers to question what a work means or even why they are reading it was a vital test of intellectual earnestness. Those who gave in would identify themselves as part of the encroaching temper of drab populism and could be left to their simple tastes. The pioneers, a minority, would forge ahead and master or at least savor the complexities of the text; they would form the new vanguard of discernment and erudition. Literature before Modernism had often courted the entitlements of High Art and with them the collaboration of selected readers but never before had it been quite so discriminatory in its nature. Ever since the invention of the printing press and the explosion of popular theater in the sixteenth century, the audience could decide on what type of book

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or spectacle best suited their tastes. However, the Modernists and their apologists seemed intent on excluding those who had swelled the tide of market-­orientated reading by ensuring that the books, poems, and plays of the new age would alienate them. As shown, such a cultural and artistic program, coinciding as it did with the rise of tyrannical fascism and communism, appears monstrous, or it would were it not also utterly fatuous. The first piece of writing to take a step outside the polarized critical debate on Modernism was a short story by J.C. Squire called “The Man Who Wrote Free Verse.” It appeared in 1924 in the London Mercury that was edited by Squire. At just over twenty thousand readers, the Mercury could claim to cover a whole spectrum of interests ranging from the new moving pictures and popular theater to art exhibitions and contemporary poetry. Its readership was an index to the literary culture of the 1920s; it did not shun Modernism and nor did it look down on those with an appetite for Bennett or crime fiction. Squire’s story is one of the few documents that accompanied the emergence of Modernism and has never been reprinted. Not only is it absent from all of the anthologies published for academic study, and despite the fact that it was read by an enormous number of people in the mid-­1920s, it has been consigned to virtual oblivion, and the reason for this is straightforward: it provides an astonishingly accurate exposé of the egregious self-­contradictions of Modernist writing and as such poses questions regarding the now venerated status enjoyed by much of it. The two principal characters are Adrian Roberts and Reggie Twyford, upper-­middle class gents who evidently enjoy a private income and find themselves, while guests on the country estate of Lady Muriel, reflecting upon current literary fashions. Of the two Reggie is the more open minded, admitting that while he does not pretend to understand what is presently being talked of as a new regime in writing, he is fascinated by why so many eminent figures are attracted to it—­Lady Muriel herself has assembled an impressive collection of experimental novels and volumes of avant-­garde poetry—­and what has motivated this generation of authors. Despite the Wodehousian tone of the opening, the story soon mutates into a more serious engagement with the phenomenon of transformation, with Adrian taking on the role of Socratic Sceptic, a foil to Reggie’s puzzled musings. Eventually, Reggie reaches something of a conclusion to the reasons for Modernism. It is, he suspects, inspired by a much more extensive overturning of established ideas. “Scientific and social conceptions can’t alter without modifying art; music changes and poetry may change; and I can conceive of new things being said in a new way.” Against Adrian’s objections he continues, and by illustration points to the correspondence between communist revolution, Dadaist verse and Cubism, adding that it is “significant that when the Bolsheviks got into power in Russia they made all the Cubists ... official artists” (128). Reggie’s formulation of the origins of Modernists will seem familiar to us: Nietzsche, Darwin, Marx, and other groundbreaking nineteenth century thinkers altered conceptions of society, and the human condition, and art, as a consequence, shifted away from its mimetic, representational complacencies. However, we should remind ourselves that such cause-­and-­effect commonplaces were gradually devised from the 1940s onward, largely by academics and with benefit of hindsight. In 1924, no one—­and certainly not the Modernists themselves—­ could offer a clear comprehensive explanation of what was happening. Bradbury and McFarlane’s (1970) volume of essays by academics on the nature of Modernism was the first major summation of scholarly wisdom on what it is and how it



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came about, and it is interesting to compare Richard Sheppard’s chapter on “The Crisis of Language” with Reggie’s postulations. Like Reggie, Sheppard treats Modernist poetry as symptomatic of the demise of both the ruling classes and industrialized capitalism “when poetry ceases to be a printed exercise in individual excellence ... art (if that term is not anachronistic in this context) becomes revolutionary gesture ... the right of everyone to practise poetry as he wishes becomes the equivalent of the right of everyone to political self-­determination; the lowering of the status of language implies the rejection of all forms of elitism ... then the imaginative capacities of human nature must affirm themselves in what amounts to a social revolution” (p  335). Sheppard does not go quite so far as to endorse revolution as an ever-­reliable cause for the improvement of humanity, but he takes for granted the symbiotic relationship between aesthetic and political upheaval, and in this regard, he represents the collective opinion of academia and much of the literary establishment half a century after the zenith of Modernism: literature was conscripted as an index to an epoch of turbulence and change. In the 1970s, Sheppard’s thesis was the received wisdom and did not provoke objections, unlike that of his predecessor Reggie. Adrian replies that “I’m sure that highly elaborate nonsense means nothing whatever to the proletariat ...” In Adrian’s opinion, Bolsheviks sanctioned Modernism as an insult to the bourgeoisie, the kind of lower middle-­class reader who would be appalled and perplexed by its “rape of language and the murder of ideas” (p 128). Adrian and Reggie embody the polarity of opinions on Modernism during the 1920s, but Squire, to his credit, does not advertise either as the more convincing advocate. Instead, he provides a dramatic enactment of the current debate and a means of drawing their exchanges toward some kind of conclusion. Adrian suggests what Reggie should embark on a career as a poet. If he does not succeed, then his inability to match the quality of his peers will be a convincing endorsement of his enthusiasm for them as important literary pioneers; if, however, he is taken seriously, his own hoax, as a man who does not pretend to any talent, would expose the entire enterprise as fraudulent. Adrian takes the experiment seriously, instructing his friend in the essentials of a particular sub-­ genre of modernist verse: “You must begin ... by emptying your mind completely and recording only disconnected impressions. You can work in the rebellion and work out the verbs later” (p 129). He might seem facetious, even dismissive in his manner but no more so than Tristan Tzara in his manifesto “To Make a Dadaist Poem” published in the same year as Squire’s story. Take a newspaper. Take some scissors. Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your poem, Cur out the article. Next carefully cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them all in a bag. Shake gently. Next take our each cutting one after the other. Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag. The poem will resemble you. And there you are—­an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though ­unappreciated by the vulgar herd. –­Tristan Tzara, “To Make a Dadaist Poem,” 1924

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The two of them begin with an attempt to create a poem from an unrehearsed record of an actual but apparently inconsequential event, in this case Reggie hurrying to a lunch appointment The chimney cowls Gyrate In the wind There is a blot of ink On my paper. I am going to have lunch Before long And I am glad there is A Lobster.

This is not, as Adrian’s comment on it makes clear, an attempt by Squire to parody Imagist-­ style verse: he gives it grudging approval as a first attempt, but points out its faults and principally that Reggie has redrafted what amounts to a passage of note-­form prose on his thoughts about lunch. The flaw in this compositional method, Adrian contends, is that it preserves and, through the line breaks, gives preposterous emphasis to Reggie’s petty sensibilities: “you actually express, in one place, a genuine emotion: I mean when you refer to the lobster” (p 130). Squire, via Adrian, is a perceptive analyst of the new poetic. If Pound had inserted a link term such as “are like” or even “recall” between the first and second lines of The apparition of those faces in the crowd Petals on a wet black bow

“In A Station of the Metro” would have suddenly become a little less abstract and impersonal and carried a slight trace of its author’s involvement, like Reggie’s first draft. Following Adrian’s advice, Reggie rewrites the piece, and like Pound and the Imagist eradicates connectedness and with them any hint of subjective input. Gyrating cowls. Ink. Oh God! A Lobster!

Imagist verse might seem an easy target in this respect, but Adrian is equally alert to a counter-­trend, pioneered by Eliot. “Don’t forget the classical one and don’t forget the one which is allowed to rhyme, by way of compensation for its especially polysyllabic obscurity.” Again, Reggie follows Adrian’s advice and comes up with a poem that goes beyond parody and is as close as is possible to a replica of Eliot’s “Sweeney Among the Nightingales.” Consider the following: Apocalyptic chimney cowls Squeak at the sergeant’s velvet hat Donkeys and other paper fowls Disgorge decretals at the cat



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Gloomy Orion and the Day Are veiled; and hushed the shrunken seas The person in the Spanish Cape Tries to sit on Sweeney’s Knees

If you are familiar with Eliot’s poem, you might recognize which of these stanzas comes from it, but recollecting a passage is different from distinguishing it from the other by virtue of its intrinsic superiority or stylistic character. Squire is not so much launching a polemic against Modernism as pointing up a ­self-­evident fact: that one of its largely overlooked features is its insistence upon stark disinterestedness. Poets and novelists always shy away from blatant personal ­ involvement—­such an arrangement would blur the distinction between literature and autobiography—­but they leave in place an intermediary, a storyteller or simply a voice, something that would maintain a bond, however slight, between the work and the world of feelings, fears and dilemmas shared by the reader and the author. The most evident example of this presence is the author’s stylistic signature; craftsmanship combined a trace of something more capricious and temperamental. As Squire shrewdly discerned, Modernism was set upon the depersonalization, indeed the dehumanization of literature. His imitation of “Sweeney” testifies to much more than his skill as a mimic. He is able to replicate the poem so well because Eliot has displaced his private register—­the most difficult feature of any work to convincingly reproduce—­with a technique that turns in upon itself and remains untainted by the idiosyncrasies of self-­determination. Here, we come upon the inherent paradox of Modernism. The preoccupation of many of its practitioners with the growing and dangerous encroachment of popular culture, ­ordinariness, upon high art gave birth to poems, novels, and plays, which, by virtue of their complexity, would alienate the lazy or uninitiated. As a consequence, however, literary works that spurned evidence of individuality or personal involvement also became endlessly imitable. Squire, whether he knew it or not, was not only diagnosing a flaw in the works of Eliot and Pound. He was foretelling a quite dreadful legacy. We see it now throughout the cultural infrastructure that is the inheritance of Modernism, in “installations” such as Tracey Emin’s unmade bed. That too is horribly easy to imitate; some of us do it every morning. As art it is worthless. One of the best-­known poets of the past four decades remains a teenager. E.J. Thribb (17½) is the in-­house versifier of the satirical magazine Private Eye. Thribb’s particular métier is the poem upon an occasion, usually the death of an eminent figure, done in the manner of early Pound or, as his style evolved, William Carlos Williams or Charles Olsen. Thribb is a laughable institution, yet he endures as a serious critique of Modernism. His style is archly dreadful but consistently so, and the fact that at least thirty individuals have been responsible for him should tell us something about our respect for the more “serious” practitioners of this form of writing. A Thribb poem of the mid-­1970s will appear to have been written by the same person who produced the 2013 vintage. We associate the style with a name, but only in the sense that the latter is appended to each poem; in truth, the technique has extinguished any proper notion of presence.

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The following poem is called “Changing” unlike men must primary and swimming and the what she be served he meets Sophia startling that people could but she never -­in keeping too much to pretend estranged him

It is an example of the school generally known as L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, which can trace its roots as far back as Modernism—­though most involved with it would descry anything so conventional as influence or affiliation. Two of its foremost champions and practitioners, Bruce Andrews (author of the above piece) and Charles Bernstein, proffered a cautionary account of what it involved in their preface to a 1984 collection of verse. Throughout, we have emphasized a spectrum of writing that places its attention primarily on language and ways of making meaning, that takes for granted neither vocabulary, grammar, process, shape, syntax, program, or subject matter. All of these remain at issue. Focussing on this range of poetic exploration, and on related aesthetic and political concerns, we have tried to open things up by beyond correspondence and conversation: to break down some unnecessary self-­encapsulation of writers (person from person, & scene from scene), and to develop more fully the latticework of those involved in aesthetically related activity. (Andrews and Bernstein 1984: ix)

Andrews and Bernstein are energized by the same objectives as the first Modernists. They want to move ahead and distance themselves from precedent because precedent inhibits “aesthetic” advancement. I place inverted commas around their notion of the aesthetic because they are pursuing an agenda very different from that we would routinely associate with literary art. For them, “language” is a laboratory for the radical perceptions of existence, while the notion of the artist is an “unnecessary self-­encapsulation.” Joyce’s career as a novelist is exemplary in this regard. Dubliners carried traces of a break with the nineteenth century naturalist mode; literary impressionism had arrived. A Portrait of the Artist As A Young man explored the boundaries between the representational novel and the then uncharted territory of introspective fiction. Ulysses broke the link between fiction as it was previously known and what Modernism could make it become. Like its predecessors Finnegans Wake polarized critics. Naysayers such as Richard Aldington (Atlantic Monthly, June 1939: clxiii) ran out of patience—­“Common honesty compels this reviewer to state that he is unable to explain either the subject or the meaning (if any) of Mr Joyce’s book ... Mr Joyce claims that he understands and can explain every syllable of the book. Doubtless, but who cares? Readers are not interested in what the author’s words mean to him, but in what they mean to them.” In Aldington’s view, the 628 pages of the book are entirely devoid of meaning. Malcolm Muggeridge (Time and Tide, 20 May 1939) is equally confounded but a little less repulsed. He too finds it unreadable in any conventional sense yet allows for some metaphysical impulse behind the incoherence. “Words instead of straining to contain what has been dimly understood, to signify truth, strain to confuse. They desert experience and understanding, and signify only chaos, in the process inevitably disintegrating, ceasing to



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be words at all.” French critics could generally be relied upon to defend Modernist enterprises against Anglo-­Saxon abhorrence, and Georges Pelorson (Aux Ecoutes, xxxiii, 20 May 1939) goes further than Muggeridge and celebrates Finnegans Wake as a philosophical triumph. He concedes that the book involves no characters, no sense of place or narrative, but, he argues, that is the point. “We are not even in the presence of a semblance of a novel ... the master of the action, in this book, is in fact time, this enormous and cavernous belly where nothing is created which has not first been consumed, used up, submitted to endless digestions.” Pelorson can claim to be one of the first to discern in the book a feature that has ensured its endurance as the archetype of pure experiment. It is not “about” anything in the sense that when we write about experience, or feelings, we rely both in literary and non-­literary language on relatively secure linkages between words and points in time and space. Pelorson is excited because the book promotes literature to the elevated level of philosophy—­beneath his florid image of “the cavernous belly” of time lurks the then very fashionable thesis of phenomenology explored in the work of Edmund Husserl—­and once again we find that Modernism is championed as setting a new agenda for poetry and fiction, causing us to confront the ways in which our easy presuppositions regarding experience and thought are being overturned. What must be recognized is that rather than animating a previously inert potential of literature, this notion compromises its uniqueness. Although the parallels between Joyce’s final novel and Duchamps’s famous, and notorious, “Fountain” (1917) might seem tenuous—­for one thing Joyce toiled over his piece for sixteen years while Duchamps’s is the definitive “found” work, comprising as it does a standard urinal basin, purchased locally—­they have much in common. Duchamps is credited with initiating Conceptual Art, in which the intellectual gesture that underpins, generally speaking precedes, the execution of the work takes precedence over conventional aesthetic concerns. This brings to mind Tzara’s instructions on how to make a Dadaist poem (see above), and while much Modernist literature involves a good deal of compositional input from the writer—­Eliot’s poems and Joyce’s novels are clearly not “found” pieces—­it shares something much more significant with Conceptual Art. The existential and intellectual questions generated by it are as significant as its self-­contained aesthetic of thematic features. In short, what goes on outside it is as important as our recognition of its inherent qualities. The following is a passage from Gertrude Stein’s The Makings of Americans: The boy stayed home, and the man said to him you must be clear in your wonder at the world around you, the place we share will not be that of later years when you have done many things and I am an old man. The boy put all he had in a bag and told the man that this is my world and the man looked at him and spoke, of a tree they had seen and stood beneath that day it rained. The boy took his bag outside and held it by the tree and soon the man, it was his father, touched the boy and the tree and then the boy said that he was interested and sad. He wanted all, but had not made the tree his own and now he would never do it. The father said the boy was bright and then they went back, to the home and other, other things.

Stein’s novel should be treated as the prototype for the most innovative Modernist fiction, Finnegans Wake included. Unlike the latter, its manner is primitivist, marrying the words to the unambitious mindset of a group of characters who never attach themselves to an enduring narrative. But, in common with Finnegans Wake there is no story; in both, we encounter a literary spectacle designed to be contemplated rather than experienced. It is

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the sort of book that one might open at random, do so again, and perhaps once more, without feeling that we have lost anything of its thematic coherence or narrative continuity. In the same way, we might visit a gallery containing a conceptualist installation the day after we first viewed it. Our ideas about its significance might have changed in the interim, but this has more to do with us than with anything activated in us by the work in question. At the end of “The Man Who Write Free Verse,” Britain has become a Bolshevik republic and Reggie installed as “Poet Laureate of the Revolution.” His conditions of employment are that he serves the interests of the proletariat and his employers make it clear that “so long as [he] could not be understood they were quite satisfied with him.” The “they” are the heads of the British Soviet, not the newly disburdened masses. What they feel about Reggie and his verse is never disclosed, and despite its air of farcical hyperbole, one aspect of Squire’s closing scenario is extraordinarily prescient. Jump forward almost half a century to the posthumous publication of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Adorno was a Marxist critical theorist who praised Modernism, stating that “‘the task of aesthetics is not to comprehend’ artworks as hermeneutical objects [that is, things that might in a conventional sense be understood]; in the contemporary situation, it is their incomprehensibility that needs to be comprehended” (1997: 118). Adorno contends that art should alienate itself from the discourses of bourgeois society and mass culture, which would otherwise co-­opt it to a capitalist system that assigns a function, or meaning, to everything. It is difficult to decide on whether this perception of Modernism’s cultural and social function is absurd or sinister. Historical evidence would encourage the former verdict given that the complexity, some might say the arbitrary meaninglessness of high Modernism, has endured largely as the preserve of the educated, usually left-­leaning, bourgeoisie, while mass culture has remained generally indifferent to it. What is generally ignored by modern theoreticians and indeed those whose work litters the history of aesthetics since Aristotle is the simple issue of why we enjoy literature. I do not refer here to the notion of “enjoyment” as some form of psychoanalytical displacement, nor to any of the other intellectual or ideological states that only those not experiencing them claim to understand. No; my conception of enjoyment involves both a conscious apprehension of what makes us enjoy the book we are reading and a more visceral sense of pleasure: in short, we like a book or a poem, and we also know something of why we like it. It is possible, for example, to be enthralled or repulsed by a character in a novel by Austen, Dickens, or Waugh, caused to empathize with them, or hate them, as we might someone real, while at the same time remain conscious of the degree of craftsmanship that lies behind their creation. We may suspend disbelief, allow the story and its figures to draw us into the delusion, and take a step back, sideline this personal inducement, and see the book as an artifact that raises questions about who we are and how we behave. The advocates of Modernist complexity wish to deny us this double perspective. The book or poem will become something that is assessed and analyzed in the same way that Conceptualist art becomes the springboard for debate on the nature of representation, and my reference here to non-­linguistic art is purposive. Language is part of us. We can choose not to paint or we can elect to be uninterested in this year’s winner of the Turner Prize, but we cannot opt out of language, and language is the raw material of literature. All non-­ literary art forms make use of dead matter—­paint, wood, canvas, sounds generated from contact between objects, etc.—­to construct artifacts, either representational or abstract.



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Literature is exclusively composed of language, and language is what makes us human beings. For this reason, we feel an empathetic, elemental closeness to literature, which sometimes, especially in novels, causes us to forget that the art work is comprised of words alone. Some prefer pure escapism to what might be termed appreciative reading but most of us enjoy a compromise, involving ourselves in the work while at the same time allowing for an objective perspective upon its form, its qualities, and the question of whether or how it reflects its author’s state of mind. In a much misunderstood passage, the novelist Thomas Wolfe (1936) reflects upon the transformation over fifteen years of Ulysses from an inaccessible conundrum to a classic. As people overcame their own inertia ... became familiar with its whole design, they began to understand that the book was neither an obscene book nor an obscure book, certainly it was not a work of wilful dilettante caprice. It was, on the contrary, an orderly, densely constructed creation, whose greatest fault, it seems to me, so far from being a fault of caprice, was rather of almost Jesuitical logic which is essentially too dry and lifeless in its mechanics for a work of the imagination.

Wolfe’s point is twofold: that Ulysses earned its eminence not through its intrinsic qualities but through a gradual process of persuasion and instruction by those who championed radicalism as something to be valued in its own right; that Joyce’s self-­ conscious preoccupation with writing per se turned the book into an inert “lifeless” artifact. He did not mean by this that the reader is alienated from an involvement with its manifold allusions and structured complexities. Quite the opposite. This book requires an infinite amount of attention and enquiry. That is his point: we will never really be able to stop reading it. It asks questions that lead us only to yet one more crossroads in a maze of dilemmas. Yet this perpetual game of intellectual scrutiny will never yield to the kind of intuitive involvement allowed by conventional novels. In the latter, we often find ourselves hoping that a character gets away with something less than creditable, sympathizing with a figure whose crisis is otherwise intimate and internalized and hoping that what happens next compounds our own, inevitably biased, sense of sentimentality or empathy. As a consequence, the text begins to fade into the background, but crucially, if the book is any good, it maintains a polite, mischievous presence. The most conspicuous post-World War II example of the enduring power of Modernism to extinguish notions of character and presence was Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The first performance of its English language version was directed by Peter Hall at the Arts Theatre in London in 1955. Modernist fiction and poetry had become part of the furniture of British high culture, still disliked by some, particularly the loose affiliation of Robert Conquest’s affiliates, but indulged as a capricious legacy. But drama, at least in Britain, remained largely immune from the advances of the literary avant-­ garde. Consequently, Beckett’s play prompted early reviews that could have been written by those variously confounded and disgusted by the groundbreaking works of 1922. On this occasion, the innovation enthusiasts took only a few days to upbraid recalcitrants and remind them of what they were missing. Harold Hobson first defended its qualities in The Sunday Times and more famously Kenneth Tynan praised it in The Observer. “Waiting for Godot” he declares, “has no plot, no climax, no denouncement, no beginning, no middle

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and no end.” It “jettisons everything by which we recognise theatre. It arrives at the custom house, as it were, with no luggage, no passport and nothing to declare: yet it gets through as might a pilgrim from Mars. It does this, I believe, by appealing to a definition of drama much more fundamental than any in the books” (7 August 1955). Hobson and Tynan raise without properly addressing a question that had dogged Modernism since its arrival almost half a century earlier. The work might well undermine our complacent expectations of literature and shock us into a new level of apprehension, but in doing so does it cease to be something that we actually enjoy? As Hope-­Wallace put in The Guardian, “the play bored some people acutely.” In fact, during the first performance, almost half of those present left the theater between the two acts, but Tynan does not regard this as a failing on Beckett’s part. “Were we not in the theatre,” he observes, “we should, like [Beckett’s characters], be clowning and quarrelling, aimlessly bickering and aimlessly making up—­all, as one of them says, to give the impression that we exist.” Tynan’s point is the premise for a large number of the more elaborate critical explorations of the play’s significance (it punctures the delusion that life is meaningful), but it is no less ludicrous for that. It might well be the case that we spend much of our time “bickering” and “quarrelling” without reaching a satisfactory conclusion regarding the matters addressed, but unless we have been visited by some horrific condition such as advanced Alzheimer’s disease, we do not sound remotely like Vladimir and Estragon. One suspects that, despite himself, Tynan feels this too. He adds that the play will be “a conversational necessity for many years” or, as he might have put it, an event discussed at dinner parties by those proud enough to have endured two hours of ruthlessly unintelligible dialogue. The performances in New York the following year were greeted even less indulgently than the Peter Hall production, and the first audience to treat the English language version with seemingly unanimous approval saw it in San Francisco in November 1957. It was directed and acted for one night only by members of the San Francisco Actors Workshop before an audience of 1400, a record number. All of the latter were inmates of San Quentin Prison, and the stage was the defunct gallows in the dungeons where prisoners had been treated with extraordinary cruelty until their evacuation in the 1930s. There are few records of what the members of the audience actually felt about the play itself. Obviously, they did not, like their counterparts in London and New York, have the opportunity to walk out half way through, and all we do know of the enthusiasm allegedly fostered by the performance comes from actors such as Alan Mandell who went on to direct the San Quentin Drama Workshop, but it would I think be fair to surmise that the fascination of the San Quentin audience was inversely related to the spectrum of feelings, from unendurable boredom to intellectual snobbishness, that registered among those who could leave the theater to go home or discuss the experience over a late meal with others. Most intellectuals and academics treat the San Quentin production as a testament to Beckett’s greatness as a writer. Martin Esslin in his widely celebrated study The Theatre of the Absurd (1969), for example: Or Perhaps they were unsophisticated enough to come to the theatre without any preconceived notions and ready-­made expectations, so they avoided the mistake that trapped so many established critics who had condemned the play for its lack of plot, development,



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characterization, suspense, or plain common sense. Certainly the prisoners of San Quentin could not be suspected of the sin of intellectual snobbery, for which a sizable proportion of the audience of Waiting for Godot have often been reproached; of pretending to like a play they did not even begin to understand, just to appear in the know. (1963: 3)

Beckett had, argued Esslin, short-­circuited the middle-­class taste for plays that involve plot or coherence, and those who knew the world as a visceral, unprotected experience—­ that is, convicts—­appreciated the immensity of his achievement. With all due respect to the inmates of San Quentin prison, circa 1957, it is unlikely that this one-­night audience was equipped with the same range of erudite cultural reference points and interpretive skills that enabled Tynan and others to compare it with conventional drama and celebrate its radicalism. What is more likely is that they found in it a brand of realism denied to all other audiences. The US legislature was, in the 1950s, even more ruthless in its use of consecutive sentences than it is today. Many inmates never expected to experience life outside the zoo-­like cells in which they were confined and subjected to inhumanely routine inspection by guards for most of each day. For them, the sheer pointlessness of existence evinced by the inane pronouncements of Estragon, Vladimir, Lucky, Pozzo, and a Boy mirrored their own condition. It certainly did not enrich it or endow it with purpose—­ nothing could—­but for the first time they found themselves witnessing a darkly farcical account of their lives written and acted by someone else. It would not have made them feel any better, but as countless defenders of Modernism have preached, literature is not supposed to be an improvement on the world but rather a reminder that life cannot not be improved upon; it is in fact more complicated and usually worse than we routinely persuade ourselves that it might be. Beckett had found his ideal audience: men who had given up hope, whose existences were as meaningless and futile as those of his characters, and this scenario involves an unsettling corollary. Those, such as Tynan, who promoted themselves as the intellectual vanguard because they had endured two hours of unintelligible drivel, would exist for the rest of their lives in a world where sentences have subjects and contexts, people have lives and histories, doors could be opened rather than persistently bolted, and the first night of Beckett’s play would be treasured along with a collection of equally grand cultural prerequisites. Like Eliot, Woolf, and Joyce, it is an example of art as hypocrisy and exclusivity. The only people who can properly appreciate its terrible pointlessness are members of the intellectual aristocracy and men serving life sentences. Those in between, the unenlightened who continue to regard it as a wearisome exercise in self-­indulgence, will be regarded as philistines. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal but instructive nonetheless, that some time after the launch of Tracey Emin’s My Bed installation at the Tate in 1998 a new shift of cleaners was brought in to vacuum and tidy the Gallery after closing time. Uninstructed that the empty bottles, stained knickers, used condoms, and other detritus surrounding the piece were part of its formal structure, one cleaner decided to tidy it up. She was stopped before she changed the sheets, stained as they were with bodily secretions. She was, she claimed, only doing her job, but several weeks later, two performance artists, Yuan Chai and Jian Xi, decided that it was their job, or perhaps part of their vocation, to stage a pillow fight on the bed: it was, after all, a “living” installation. Other onlookers cheered. How should we treat these interventionists? I ask because their acts beg comparison with the only recorded

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comment from a member of the audience at the San Quentin performance. Asked if he would attend another play, the unnamed convict answered “Maybe next month, or next year—­or whenever ... Like the man said. Nothing happens!” (San Quentin News, 28 November 1957). Routinely, the man’s observation is seen as proof that when the “sin of intellectual snobbery” that dogged the play’s reception by middle class audiences is swept away, its significance can be “immediately grasped” (Esslin 1969: 1) The convict was not given the opportunity to expand on his comment, and one is caused to wonder if by treating it as an astute insight into Beckett’s Nietzchian vision theorists are, in effect, conflating the act of the cleaner at the Tate with that of the two performance artists. Perhaps his statement that “Nothing happens!” is a reference to life in San Quentin rather than the philosophical implications of Beckett’s work; perhaps he was willing to put up with a slightly farcical two-­hour enactment of his daily life in preference to being locked up for the same period. There is certainly no evidence to show that he expected any other play to be different from what he had just seen. It is of course pure hypothesis to speculate on how he would have responded to a performance of a play, by say, Eugene O’Neill; something that made sense and was, more significantly, based on a recognizable version of the world he recalled before incarceration, or is it? What is reasonably certain is that he would not have felt, at least in his present circumstances, as though the boundary between the world he would return to after the play and the play itself was virtually non-­existent. In this regard, the convict, the cleaner, and the performance artists have a great deal in common, except that the latter crossed the invisible boundary self-­consciously. If one strips the text, or the installation, of the stylistic and formal features that separate it from the detritus of the lived-­in world or ordinary language, then participation by the viewer, reader, or spectator is encouraged and some might exalt in this as a leveling of the hierarchies of art: we feel that we are part of what in other cases seems remote. But does not the reader or viewer consequently lose any sense of respect for the artist as, in basic terms, a craftsman? Why admire a beautiful object if no apparent effort or skill has contributed to its formation? Marina Abramovic, an artist comparable with Emin, staged in 2010 (14  March to 31  May) an event called The Artist is Present in New  York Museum of Modern Art. Abramovic spent 736 hours seated statically, silently, on one side of an unadorned wooden table, while a group of “sitters” booked places via Facebook to occupy the chair on the other side for short periods. An already vast exercise in mass fetishism was boosted by the participation, as a “sitter,” of the singer Lady Gaga. Again, the cleaner, the convict and the performance artists come to mind, but we should remind ourselves that those who undertook acts of participation as a self-­conscious gesture became, as it were, part of the dynamic of the artifact; they did so with a sense of having joined the artist, becoming equal collaborators in an aesthetic enterprise. They are of course free to countenance such thoughts, but they should be reminded that in doing so they are also cooperating with the artist in a process of aesthetic devaluation. If art can simply be made or contributed to without a collateral sense of effort or talent, it is worthless. How do I know? Turn back to pages ... of this chapter, to the extract from a L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poem and from Stein’s The Making of Americans. Read them, consider your opinion on their value, and then turn forward to the conclusion of this Chapter.



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In 2008, Zadie Smith wrote an article for the New York Times Review of Books that, by virtue of the comments generated, must be regarded as diagnostic of the mood of the Anglo-­American literati in the early twenty-­first century. I have yet to encounter a respondent who goes against her general thesis. It is, ostensibly, a review article on two novels, Netherland by Joseph O’Neill and Reminder by Tom McCarthy, but these are the pretext for a nine-­thousand word rumination on the state of contemporary fiction. She begins with Netherland, a story about a transatlantic city-­trader whose mindset reflects the traumas of post 9/11 Western culture. She does not judge it as in itself a bad piece of writing; it is much worse than that. It is, she reflects, the sort of book that might well grace the bedside table of President Obama and that can claim its place in the legacy of Balzac and Stendhal, scions of that old and powerful dynasty, “literary Realism.” Despairingly, she quotes one of its principal characters, “People want a story,” and replies: “But is this really what having a self feels like ... Do they not sometimes want its opposite?” It brings her to Tom McCarthy’s Remainder, a novel whose first person narrator remains anonymous. Smith calls him “The Enactor” because, of course, without his participating presence the book would not exist. The opening fifty pages are puzzling because we learn little more than that he has been hit on the head by some enormous “thing.” Eventually, he receives a phone call from his lawyer. “I stood there for some time, I don’t know how long, holding the dead receiver in my hand ...” His sense of shock comes from having learned that whoever or whatever is responsible for the blow from the “thing” has agreed to eight and a half million in compensation. Thereafter, we follow him and some equally vaguely sketched companions through an unpalatable London where self-­absorption and nepotism predominate, at least for those not terminally destitute. It seems, so far, a parvenu nod toward the type of novel that Smith derided in her account of Netherland. But then we learn of what it is really “about.” The “Enactor” has toyed with the idea of becoming a benefactor, using his newly found wealth to relieve the condition of dejected figures on the street who contrast so horribly with the obliviously pleasure-­seeking lives of everyone else. “‘What I want to know’—­my homeless person asked.” We never learn what the homeless person is about to ask because suddenly “the waiter” (who is referred to both as “he” and “she”) first removes the tablecloth, then the table, and the Enactor observes “there wasn’t any table. The truth is, I’ve been making all this up.” Later, the Enactor meets one Nazrul Ram Vyas of so-­called Time Control UK who promises to relieve him of the burden of thinking and therefore creates the world on his behalf. Fascinated as we might be by Smith’s account of this game of metafictional smoke and mirrors (“impeccably written,” as she puts it), she interrupts herself to tell of something that occurred in the “real” world, specifically the foundation of the International Necronautical Society, before a small audience in New York on 25 September 2005, by its General Secretary, Tom McCarthy, and its Chief Philosopher Simon Critchley. I will offer you a flavor of their manifesto. “We begin,” announces General Secretary, “with the experience, a failure that is at the core of the Gen Sec’s novels and the Chief Philosopher’s tomes. Being is not full transcendence, the plenitude of the One cosmic abundance, but rather an ellipsis, an absence, an incomprehensibly

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vast lack scattered with debris and detritus. Philosophy as the thinking of Being has to begin from the experience of disappointment that is at once religious (God is dead, the One is gone), epistemic (we know very little, almost nothing; all knowledge claims have to begin from the experience of limitation) and political (blood is being spilt in the streets as though it were champagne).”

As Smith explains, the INS “freely admit ... to stealing openly from Blanchot, Bataille, Heideggar, Derrida and of course Robbe Grillet.” Far more important are the parallels between this and documents of a century earlier. Glance through an anthology of creative manifestoes from about 1905 to the mid-­1920s. Kandinsky (1912), Tzara (1918), Schwitters (1921), Grosz and Herzfelde (1925), Gan (1922), and Gropius (1919) among about a dozen more from literature, the visual arts and music might have been writing extracts and appendices from the INS manifesto. True, not all the former idolize “debris and detritus,” but such contraries are overwhelmed by an abundant harmony of gibberish, particularly on the nature of “form.” It does not matter if one agrees or otherwise with Smith or the INS. What is difficult is to suppress a gasp of astonishment that someone who writes novels and, one assumes, knows about literature (a Cambridge graduate no less) should be so ignorant of what has happened to it. She observes that “the received wisdom” of literary history is that Finnegans Wake did not fundamentally disturb Realism’s course as Duchamp’s urinal disturbed Realism in the visual arts ... metafiction that stood in opposition to Realism has been relegated to a safe corner of literary history, to be studied in postmodernity modules.” This is astonishingly inaccurate. The Duchamps mode of art without craftsmanship has over the past three decades generated vast amounts in auction houses (see Hirst, Emin et al.). It is, by cost alone, outrageously elitist. Finnegans Wake has lagged behind in terms of sales—­for the simple reason that few if any want to read it—­but as Smith concedes its progeny survive as the aristocracy of high culture, “studied in postmodernity modules” in the kind of Ivy League universities that purchase Smith’s services as writers in residence. Smith seems not to realize that “literary history” as she puts it came to an end about a hundred years before she wrote her honorarium for Modernism. Her cultural blindness is not an uncommon affliction; endemic would be a better term. Glance, if you will, at “Experimental Fiction: Is It Making a Comeback?” (W. Skiddsky, The Observer 1 August 2010). “Whatever Happened to the Avant Garde” (Robert McCrum Telegraph, 20  July 2009), “The End of the English Novel” (Billy Buford, Granta, 3, 1980, p 9; prompted by an article by McCrum in The Bookseller), the introductions to All Hail the New Puritans (ed. Matt Thorne and Nicholas Blincoe) and New Writing 13 (Picador, 2005; ed. Ali Smith and Toby Litt), and Peter Ackroyd’s Notes For a New Culture (Vision Press, 1976). All are by practicing writers, but you will find their equivalent, albeit much more verbose, in academic volumes: John Sutherland’s Fiction and the Fiction Industry (Athlone, 1978), Bernard Bergonzi’s The Situation of the Novel (revised ed. Macmillan, 199), and Jean Baudrillard’s Simulations, Semiotexte, New  York, 1983). Each involves a defense of Modernism just as staunch and resolute as those prompted by the conservatives and doubters soon after the opening of the twentieth century. Imagine that in 1900 or thereabouts advocates of the Romantic lyric and its aesthetic correlates were continuing to defy the still prevailing late Augustan view that such things



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were, by degrees, self-­indulgent and incomprehensible. Or, for that matter, envisage debates in the London journals of the late 1800s on what this new phenomenon the “romance” or “the novel” actually involves and whether it qualifies as a minor province of literary writing. In each instance, the hypothesis is ridiculous because radicalism or uncertainty had become part of a productive engagement with what had gone before, not absorbed or fragmented but rather incorporated as an element of a dialogue between the past and the present. Modernist innovation, by definition, cannot allow for this. It must involve an incessant forward movement that continually disavows both the past and the present. Modernism is the terminus of literary history, in that all subsequent and forthcoming attempts at innovation are versions of what has already been done. It is certainly the case that novels such as McCarthy’s will continue to be written and published, but as Smith points out, they will by scions of the legacy of “Barth, Barthelme, Pynchon, Geddis, De  Lillio, David Foster Wallace.” Her list might include Becket, Malcolm Lowry, B.S. Johnson, Christine Brooke-­Rose, John Berger, David Caute, Paul Auster ... but in noting this I should also refer the reader to the colossal irony that underpins it. Experimentation maintains an addictive attraction among the literary intelligentsia, yet no one seems courageous enough to admit that it is now also a key element of deeply entrenched tradition. The defining characteristic of the avant-­garde was its rejection of institutionalized practice, so how can it be expected to overturn itself? The movement that promised to project literature forward from a condition of stagnation has now itself created a static, immutable impasse. Modernism, or postmodernism if you prefer, is in its own right a web of self-­contradictions and it has caused an endemic bias within our conceptions of literature in general. Its intrinsic superiority to pre-­1910 practices is seen as a foregone conclusion, and as such we are reluctant to fairly judge the quality of work that in some way invokes the techniques of the former. Experiment has become a sine qua non for literary quality, and as a consequence the notion of doing it differently has displaced more balanced uncommitted notions of evaluation. In bringing literary history to a close Modernism has also procured a widespread culture of evaluative prejudice. To conclude, I must refer you above to the poem by Bruce Andrews, avatar of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E school, and the passage from the fiction of Gertrude Stein. Look at more pieces by both writers and others who exemplify related aspects of avant-­gardism and consider the endemic features of such writing. But in doing so bear this in mind. The above pieces are not by Andrews and Stein. They were written by someone else, someone who has not published anything creative and turned each them out in less than half an hour: me.

References Adorno, P. 1997. Aesthetic Theory, trans. R. Hullot-­ Kentor, Vol 8: Theory and History of Literature, eds. G. Adorno and R. Tiedmann. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota.

Andrews, B. and C. Bernstein (eds.) 1984. The Language Book. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

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Bradbury, M. and J. McFarlane (eds.) 1970. Modernism: A Guide to European Literature. London: Penguin. Daiches, D. 1940. Poetry and the World. A Study of Poetry in England Between 1900 and 1939. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Esslin, M. 1969. The Theatre of the Absurd. London: Doubleday. Leavis, Q. D. 1932/1965. Fiction and the Reading Public. London: Chatto and Windus.

Murphy, G. 1938. “Introduction.” In The Modern Poet, ed. G. Murphy. London: Sidgwick and Jackson. Sitwell, E. 1926. Poetry and Criticism. New  York, NY: Henry Hold and Company. Squire, J. C. 1924. “The Man Who Wrote Free Verse.” London Mercury, 121–137, June. Van Doren, C. 1930. “Introduction.” In Prize Poems, ed. C. A. Wagner, 5–20. New York, NY: Charles Boni.

Bibliography Grigson, G. 1972. “The Methodism of Ezra Pound.” In Ezra Pound: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Moore, M. 1986. “Feeling and Precision.” In The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, 396–402. New York, NY: Viking, pp.; first published in 1944.

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This chapter is divided into three parts: Style as an Evaluative Focus, Popular Culture, and The Moral Dimension. At various points we refer to the “double pattern’’. By this we mean the relationship between the constituent features of all language and those which are unique to poetry.

Style as an Evaluative Focus Aside from such involuntary functions as breathing, everything that we encounter causes us to judge it. Look at a building, a landscape, a chair or indeed another human being, and somewhere among the spectrum of registers and distractions that attends the experience will feature an elementary, sometimes embarrassing reflex, whether or not we like it. This could involve all manner of judgments and instincts, from the aesthetic to the visceral, and the same heedless impulsive sensation accompanies our first reading of a poem or a novel. For some of us, dissatisfaction, boredom, or perplexity might constitute our conclusive experience of the work, but most will press ahead, read it again and question their initial response. This next, measured stage of scrutiny—­perhaps involving a comparison of the work with others we know—­is the doorway between subjective impression and the complex procedure of putting our thoughts into words, talking to others about the piece and the more formal activity of recording our observations on the page. The latter constitutes the activity of literary criticism. In what follows, we want to examine the question of how much of our initial evaluative judgments we leave behind when we pass through that doorway and whether literary criticism, with its various rules and conventions, permits us to make judgments regarding the quality of literary writing. We shall not promote i­ ll-­considered A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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caprice as a substitute for learning and sophisticated scrutiny; rather it will be our intention to consider how the various formal and theoretical ideas covered above might be marshaled as a means of preserving our rudimentary impressions as a prism for discriminatory judgments on the relative value of literary works. Abstract principles such as excellence only become tenable through their exemplification in specific texts, and further verification of prestige will be found when these are contrasted with texts that are demonstrably inadequate. Evaluation therefore entails comparison, and in what follows we shall attempt an impartial estimation of the relative qualities of a number of poems. We shall begin with poems by Philip Larkin and William McGonagall. Our choice of the latter might seem to question our premise of impartiality given that his name has become synonymous with laughable incompetence. He is treated with indulgent condescension by everyone within, and indeed outside, the literary establishment, and the Oxford Companion to English Literature (Drabble 1997) cursorily refers to him as “the world’s worst poet.” However, it is impossible to locate detailed measured assessments of his work upon which such judgments could be founded. He is, then, ranked by all-­comers as an incompetent poet, but this in effect amounts to condemnation without trial. There is an intriguing article by Paul Werth called “Roman Jakobson’s Verbal Analysis of Poetry” (1976), which presents Jakobson’s methods as embodying the flaws and failed objectives of conventional criticism. Werth correctly claims that the application of Jakobson’s exhaustive stylistic methodology to a poem by McGonagall discloses levels of complexity and sophistication comparable with those that Jakobson and Jones found in a Shakespeare sonnet. Werth’s point is that there is no predictable relationship between “linguistic evidence and critical instinct” and that it is impossible to prove the general opinion that “the value of [McGonagall’s poem] is  ...  abysmally low.” It is true that Jakobson does not supplement his analyses with evaluative comments—­he leaves that to the reader—­but such an omission does not disprove the contention that a knowledge of the primary, formal features of the poem properly enables us to substantiate our judgment of its quality. This is McGonagall’s poem: All hail to the Rev. George Gilfillan of Dundee, He is the greatest preacher I did never hear or see. He is a man of genius bright, And in him his congregation does delight, Because they find him to be honest and plain, Affable in temper, and seldom known to complain He preaches in a plain straightforward way, The people flock to hear him night and day And hundreds from the doors are often turn’d away, Because he is the greatest preacher of the present day. He has written the life of Sir Walter Scott, And while he lives he will never be forgot, Nor when he is dead, Because by his admirers it will be often read. And fill their minds with wonder and delight, And wile away the tedious hours on a cold winter’s night.



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McGonagall uses irregular rhythm and line lengths, but so did Coleridge in “Christabel” and Blake and Whitman in their most celebrated work. His rhyme scheme—­aa bb cc dd—­ juxtaposes a note of regularity against an otherwise flexible formal pattern, and one might even contend that his piece is a modest forerunner to Modernism, particularly since he eschews metaphor and ostentatious imagery; he could almost be cited as an early quasi-­ Imagist. So far, then, McGonagall appears to be an engaging innovative writer but his failure as a poet is due to his apparent unwillingness or inability to decide whether he is writing poetry or prose. The rhymes interfere with the progress of the syntax, but not in a way that creates a purposive, let alone elegant, tension between the two dimensions of the double pattern, the poetic and referential registers. The rhymes are found and dumped at line endings as a duty to poetic custom, and syntax is altered only as a concession to this convention. Consequently, we encounter embarrassing sequences of non-­sequiturs. The line “He has written the life of Sir Walter Scott” is not in itself clumsy or awkward, but one senses that once McGonagall has launched himself into the next one his desperate search for a rhyme—­or perhaps his predecision regarding the rhyme word he intends to use; “forgot”—­blinds him to the ponderous unintentionally droll character of the resulting couplet. Then, we encounter the eye-­poppingly inept, laughably incompetent coda: Nor when he is dead,

Again, one must assume that in his desperate attempts to find matching rhyme words for each unwieldy chunk of syntax, he has lost any cognizance of the terrible effects than can be caused when the two halves of the double pattern are ineptly coordinated. McGonagall, in his chaotic, mildly endearing way, poses a serious question for evaluative criticism. We may judge him to be a bad poet because his failure to control and command the poetic stratum of the work compromises his ability to absorb its non-­ literary dimension and to offer the reader an unexpected and possibly enlightening perspective on the relation between language and perceived reality. If he had written a prose essay about the activities and characteristics of the Reverend Gilfillan and told us roughly the same as he does in his poem, stylistic evaluation would be suspended. But because he uses a form in which the structural dimensions of the text constantly interfere with its communicative purpose, we begin to ask questions about how, and how well, he deals with this provocative merger of style and function. In effect, making sense of the poem becomes an evaluative rather than a purely practical procedure. McGonagall, by writing a poem, provokes our wish to understand the text, only to leave us disappointed. His literary style is an encumbrance, an irritation, rather than a medium that transforms or even constructs the message. Despite being loathed by the more sanctimonious among the literary and academic establishment for his alleged personal shortcomings, Philip Larkin, unlike McGonagall, is treated by them as an an accomplished poet. Few, if any, have doubted the quality of his “An Arundel Tomb,” but what justifies its ranking as a first rate poem? The following are the opening and closing stanzas: Side by side, their faces blurred, The earl and countess lie in stone,

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The poem adheres to the complex stanzaic formula of iambic, octosyllabic lines, rhyming abbcac, but the syntax maintains the unforced manner of detail and reflection that one might expect in a private journal. The first three stanzas are dominated by the speaker’s description of the details of the tomb, and among the diction and syntax a light distribution of registers is found, which are, if not quite anachronistic, self-­consciously unusual. “Proper habits vaguely shown” carries a hint of the naughty ambiguity of the Renaissance lyricist, and the words “lie in stone” would if found in a poem three centuries older than this prompt a suspicion that the verb “lie” is playing beyond its apparent reference to a recumbent final posture. The poetry that engages most with the brutal contrariness of life as brief, nasty, and pointless while pretending to be something else is that of the seventeenth century lyricists, the Metaphysicals, and “An Arundel Tomb” seems to nod sardonically toward that tradition. This suspicion is further encouraged in the final stanza, in which we learn that Time has transfigured them into Untruth

The enjambment is meticulously disingenuous, in that he hesitates but only to delay the acceptance of a grim certainty hinted at throughout the poem. Many commentators upon the work have failed to recognize that its speaker is robustly unpersuaded by everything he apprehends and that the poem is in truth an affirmation of cynical disbelief both in the significance of love as anything beyond the emblematic and the possibility of there being something after death. Such misreadings testify to the brilliance of Larkin’s counterpointing of the deferential manner of the poem against what it actually says. The closing stanza comes close to being a triumphant celebration of love’s abiding power, but the deceptively innocuous modifiers, “hardly” and, twice, “almost” assassinate this optimistic motif; an “almost true” will always be a lie. Larkin’s achievement here is threefold. His orchestration of a demanding stanzaic formula with a relaxed yet shrewd manner is exemplary; the two parts of the double pattern, by their nature incompatible, are elegantly amalgamated. If this were his only accomplishment, then the poem might be classed as a fine example of technical proficiency, but Larkin’s meshing of the poetic devices and ordinary language serves as the perfect vehicle for an effect at once beguiling and unimprovable. As we follow the eye and the reflections of the speaker, he appears fascinated yet uncertain about the significance of the tomb, but gradually—­particularly when we read the poem two or three



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times and consider more closely its delicate nuances of meaning—­it becomes apparent that the speaker’s polite esteem for this tribute to the endurance of love and the spirit is simply that; in truth he has no illusions regarding anything beyond lived experience. The double pattern frames and orchestrates an interplay between routine and elemental states of mind. In the non-­literary world, there is a consensus on the appropriateness and suitability of idioms or vocabulary. We would not, for example, reply to an email from a boyfriend with “Your manner of linking the consciousness of deviation to translatability in fact condemns what one wants at least to describe” when “Are we meeting later, or what?” would do. Nor would we begin a job application or complaint to a council official with a phrase such as “My dearest Johnny-­boy, I wish so much ...” In general, we have an intuitive alertness to what is required by the context of the statement, but in verse this is complicated by the formal architecture of the poem, capable as this is of throwing into bold incongruous relief phrases or habits of speech that outside the poem might be more cautiously or appropriately situated. Philip Hobsbaum’s “A Lesson in Love” is a brief narrative piece in which an academic tells of how he seduced one of his students, apparently during a tutorial. These are the closing stanzas: Which is the truer? I, speaking of Donne, Calling the act a means and not an end, Or at your sweet pudenda, sleeking you down: Was there no other way to be your friend? None, none. The awkward pauses when we talk, The literary phrases, are a lie. It was for this your teacher ran amok: Truth lies between your legs, and so do I.

Hobsbaum, unlike McGonagall, earned himself a respectable level of esteem within the literary establishment, but there is, at least in our view, something about this poem that recalls the former’s work. One can observe, without comment, that it is comprised of regular pentameter quatrains, is in tone conversational and reflective with hardly any recourse to figurative language, with the exception of that memorably vivid closing line. Some poems telescope their substance into a brief phrase that is often recalled or quoted as a condensation of the themes addressed. (Yeats’s “A terrible beauty is born” from “Easter1916” is a prime example.) The closing line of “A Lesson in Love” has a comparable though lamentable effect. From the first line onward, one begins to detect an uneasy relationship between the personal idiosyncratic tone of the piece and the dry formality of its structure. If, in a novel, a somewhat condescending pretentious lothario were to use the term “modest Irish miss” (stanza 1), then go on to revel in his recollection of her “full mouth” and in due course “legs thrashing” (stanza 2), “stocking tops,” and “tight blue pants bursting to be off” the author might be commended for a grating blend of caricature and candor—­especially if that author was male. In a poem as formally painstaking as this, however, the contrast between the locutionary manner and its containing framework seems, to put it lightly, inappropriate. The speaker who, in a novel or even in the real world, would appear in his own right a blend of the odious and the absurd is here a constituent controlling element of the text, and his presence does considerable damage to the quality of the latter as a work of literature. The dreadful counterpoint between his

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pompous erudition—­ “speaking of Donne”—­ and his visceral intent, including the prurient phrasing of “your sweet pudenda, sleeking you down,” would in any context cause one to recoil (or if male perhaps issue an apology on behalf of one’s gender). But when framed within the cool exactness of a regular quatrain, the presence seems anomalous and embarrassing. One even recalls the tragi-­comic spectacle of McGonagall as he seeks desperately to cram his unwieldy syntax into a rhyme scheme. Here, the execution is more controlled, and the effect is all the worse for it. Consider the rhymes. They are in purely technical terms correctly disposed, but the parallelisms of sound point up the grotesque transposition of the speaker’s lexicon with his state of mind. “I knew”—­“your eyes gave me a clue” (stanza 1); “your tight blue pants”—­“our romance” (stanza 2). The closing line exemplifies the speaker’s, and it must said the poet’s, blindness to stylistic malapropisms. It is a conceit that defies any attempt to make sense of it but not because of its complexity: critical analysis does not immunize one from unendurable disquiet. It is not too difficult to identify incompetent writing in regular verse in the sense that a poet’s inability to properly reconcile the twin demands of the double pattern will become painfully evident. But with free verse there are no particular syntactic or metrical rules that the reader might invoke to judge the quality of a poem. Jonathan Culler (Structuralist Poetics, Routledge, 1975) can turn a prose discourse into a free verse poem by visually foregrounding parts of its syntactic framework, and Stanley Fish (Is There A Text In This Class?, Harvard University Press, 1980) claims to have distilled impressive interpretations from his students in response to a poetically “shaped” list of surnames on the blackboard. At the less serious end of the aesthetic spectrum Private Eye’s resident free versifier, E.J. Thribb (“a poet, 17,” though by now probably 57) has produced absurd and amusing examples of “occasional” free verse. Erratum In my last poem ‘Lines on the 100th Anniversary Of the Birth of W. Somerset Maugham’ The word ‘Yorkshire’ Appeared as ‘Workshire’. Keith’s mum Spotted it Immediately though I confess I did Not when I read The proofs. I regret the Inconvenience this May have caused to readers.



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One misspelt word Like this can Completely destroy A poem. 8 February 1974

Thribb has established himself as a comic institution (four of his works feature in D.J. Enright’s Penguin Book of Light Verse, 1980) because we, his amused readers, are still uncertain about what the writing and interpretation of free verse actually involve. The cognitive pattern of the above poem makes its context clear enough: an erratum by an unselfconsciously adolescent poet (“Keith’s mum spotted it immediately”). As a prose note, this text would function as an engaging, even charming, example of ingenuousness, but it becomes comic because its division into lines projects it into the “serious” sphere of the poetic. But why do we not find William Carlos Williams’s “This Is Just To Say” (1934) equally laughable? This Is Just To Say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast Forgive me they were delicious so sweet and so cold.

Culler (p175, 1975) proposes that the only reason that we interpret this as a poem is because we have become accustomed to the typographic design of free verse, and that once this signal of high-­cultural intent registers we bring to it a lexicon of interpretative and evaluative responses. He reprints the poem as if it were a note left on the fridge to demonstrate that the two texts differ only in terms of the reader’s programed response; in short, we would not, if sane, interpret a similar message from whoever else uses our kitchen as a solemn reflection on “immediate sexual experience” and the “order of personal relations.” One suspects, however, that Culler has allowed the bulldozer of Reception Theory to crush any nascent, personal register of aesthetic cognizance. His model of interpretation depends upon the assumption that Williams assembled the poem almost at random from a piece of prosaic, raw material; the sentence containing the note on the icebox is the text that he actually “wrote,” while the poetic structure, comprised of three free verse paragraphs, is the equivalent of Andy Warhol’s famous framing of a soup tin or the positioning of Damien Hirst’s decaying cow’s head in an art gallery as an “installation.” We would contend

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that when Williams wrote the poem he was fully alert to how the lines would play the predominant role in the poem’s demonstration of how the mind can, in no more than thirty words, begin to intuit something subtle and transcendent in the otherwise commonplace. The free verse lines attend to no abstract pattern, but they maintain a degree of consistency, never allowing a significant syntactic sequence to overrun their governance of the text. They separate, even mobilize and counterpoint, brief noun and verb phrases (which surely is evidence more of planning than, as Culler avers, the random redistribution of a pre-­existing sentence). This design is immensely effective. The first and the third verse paragraphs are structurally almost identical, yet the latter unfolds the moments of pleasure in such a way that we forget the banality of the opening and are entranced by a speaking presence seemingly preoccupied with his own guilty indulgences. As a poem that marshals the opposing dimensions of form to create a portrait of a sentient mind at work, it begs comparison with Larkin’s despite their superficial stylistic differences. What then of E.J Thribb? Thribb is, of course, the creation of several talented satirists, but his self-­evident incompetence, his role as a postmodern McGonagall, raises significant questions with regard to quality and evaluation. Specifically, if Thribb’s creators are capable of making conspicuous stylistic abominations in a free verse poem, then there must, by implication, be ways in which an accomplished poet can create quite the opposite effect. Clearly, Thribb’s piece invokes the twentieth century sub-­genre of the “found” poem, pioneered by the Imagists and exemplified in Williams’s “This is Just to Say”; a poem whose manner and diction seem to have more in common with casual, unalloyed moments of thought or expression than with the self-­conscious stylization of much literary writing. Thribb is guilty of the very compositional bungling of which Culler falsely accused Williams. His poem does indeed, when reprinted as prose, seem as though it was originally intended as an erratum on one of his previous poems. The line breaks point up, give absurd prominence to, domestic banalities: Keith’s mum Spotted it Immediately

They also testify to the fact that if the writer of this piece had intended it as a poem and, more significantly, was far more technically proficient than Thribb, he would not first have written it as prose and then redistributed it typographically. He would instead have given attention to the continuous interaction between the line and syntax. Thribb demonstrates, fortnightly in his appearances in Private Eye, the pitfalls and dire consequences of misusing the deceptively simple form of free verse. Williams in “To A Poor Old Woman” (1934) shows how its potentialities can be handsomely realized: To A Poor Old Woman munching a plum on the street a paper bag of them in her hand They taste good to her They taste good



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to her. They taste good to her. You can see it by the way she gives herself to the one half sucked out in her hand Comforted a solace of ripe plums seeming to fill the air They taste so good to her.

How, then, do we justify our claim that Thribb’s and Williams’s poems belong at different ends of the aesthetic spectrum? The subject of Williams’s poem is an episode of unadorned unremarkable simplicity—­a woman eating plums on the street—­yet he invests the moment with vividness by allowing his language to become a mimetic index to an image which, visually, the reader can never apprehend. The movement of the woman’s hand from the bag to her mouth and the apparent sense of satisfaction she derives from the experience is telescoped by Williams into his own similar fascination, perhaps even delight, at the shape and texture of the very ordinary phrase, “They taste good to her.” Just as the woman derives pleasure from “the way she gives herself/to the one half/sucked out in her hand,” so Williams savors the texture of five words, the meaning of which—­“the taste”—­is altered slightly with each reshaping. In terms purely of skill and technique, good poets are those who create a fertile contrapuntal relationship between the two dimensions of the double pattern, and in this respect, Larkin and Williams are exemplary. McGonagall’s, Hobsbaum’s, and Thribb’s work involves clumsy and often embarrassing mismatches between these two dimensions. More significantly, the quality of a poem is concomitant with the poet’s success in creating from the double pattern a perspective upon a theme, idea, experience, or object that cannot be obtained via non-­poetic language. Larkin, without reaching any manifest conclusions, shows how complementary, and sometimes competing, emotional and intellectual impressions attend an encounter with a sculpted tribute to life beyond death; he does so, moreover, in a manner that belies the normative logic of prose. Williams crystallizes a moment of apparent insignificance as a model of how perception, empathy, and language interact, and again he demonstrates how poetry is not merely an autonomous genre but one which is possessed of unique expressive capacities. Given that McGonagall and Thribb are patently incapable of orchestrating the formal structures of verse, the reader is preoccupied almost exclusively with the spectacle of a poet failing to master the fundamentals of his vocation, and as a consequence any indulgent questions regarding what the poet might be attempting to achieve become immaterial. Hobsbaum is not so much technically inept as guilty of the gauche mismatching of two stylistic registers. The effect is not entirely dissimilar to that caused by Thribb but, since it was unintentional, more likely to cause embarrassment than amusement.

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Popular Culture It would be inappropriate to leave out from this overview of evaluating verse a subspecies of lyric poetry, popular music, especially since one of its best known practitioners, Bob Dylan, was recently awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Academia treats rock and pop music with a mixture of condescension and inverse snobbery. On the one hand, rock music is dealt with as part of a broader discourse, one that also includes such allegedly high cultural forms as lyric poetry. At the same time, however, few if any are prepared to ask questions about why a song by the Smiths is as good as a lyric by Wordsworth or vice versa: that would open a door on the forbidden territory of evaluation and aesthetic judgment. Monographs such as Rimbaud and Jim Morrison. The Rebel as Poet (W. Fowlie 1994), and such volumes as The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan (ed. K.H. Dettmar 2009) bespeak a hierarchy of renown and esteem without actually addressing the implied question of why Morrison and Dylan deserve special treatment. Predominantly, we encounter books and articles where Cultural Theory is let loose upon popular music in much the same way that it has overwhelmed academic literary criticism over the past four decades. The titles of J. Shepherd’s Music as Social Text (1991) and Paul Freidlander’s Rock and Roll. A Social History (1997) are self-­explanatory: the aesthetic qualities of individual songs are subservient to their status as socio-­political artifacts. Similarly, Popular Music, Gender and Postmodernism (N. Nehring 1997), and The Beatles with Lacan (H.W. Sullivan 1995) give no consideration to the qualities, or otherwise, of the music; theory has no time for distinctions between high art, low art, or for the nature of art per se. I offer this as a preamble to one of the most extraordinary works of literary evaluation of the past few decades, Christopher Ricks’s Dylan’s Visions of Sin (HarperCollins 2003). Throughout his career, Ricks has avoided the habits that commonly impoverish the work of university-­based critics. He has no time for theory and relies instead on a blend of discernment and a playful elegance of his own. He does not attempt to outclass his subjects; rather he implies that literary greatness demands a collateral degree of refinement on the part of the commentator. His best known works are on Milton, Keats, T.S. Eliot, Tennyson, and Beckett, so when his book on Bob Dylan was published, reviewers were dumbfounded. How did this literary meritocrat intend to deal, in excruciating detail, with a man whose verse is comprised entirely of folk-­rock songs? As a student at Cambridge long ago (1928?), the young William Empson impressed his teacher, the not much older I. A. Richards, by his spirited dealings with a Shakespeare sonnet. “Taking the sonnet as a conjurer takes his hat, he produced an endless swarm of rabbits from it and ended by ‘You could do that with any poetry, couldn’t you?’” But only if the poetry truly teems, and only if the critic only seems to be a conjurer. What, then, is the Critic’s enterprise? To give grounds for the faith that is I him, in us, in those of us who are grateful. It is a privilege.

Critical discernment, Ricks contends, alerts us to the inherent qualities of a poem, features created by a talented poet. Bob Dylan is just such an artist, a man who has been waiting



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for a critic who will treat it as a “privilege” to introduce the reader to his triumphs and profundities. His case is at once rhapsodic and farcical. In the end, Ricks simply asks us to trust him as an honest, reliable guide rather than someone who will prove that a middle-­ranking songwriter is a great poet: no convincing evidence to support this case is provided. The book itself is an embarrassing example of critical coat trailing. During every encounter with a Dylan lyric, he drags in passages from the accepted greats, everyone from Shakespeare to Philip Larkin, as a means of performing exactly the kind of trick that Empson played on Richards; picking out quotations from the canon that in some way echo those from Dylan but which at the same time obscure our sense of the latter’s groaning inferiority. His selections and orchestration of our attention to detail are meticulously calculated. He finds and discloses echoes as adroitly as he disguises and deflects the sheer ordinariness of Dylan as poet. His method is intriguing enough but less interesting than the question of why he employs it. Rock music has, like football, always exercised an uncomfortable fascination for the intelligentsia. It is quite likely that a number of intellectual high flyers derive a genuine pleasure from both, but two issues arise from this. The first is unproblematic: politicians, top-­order journalists and writers of various sorts continue to believe that their well-­ publicized cultivation of a taste for activities enjoyed by the masses will improve their image. The second is far more troubling. Apart from stating that they have always supported, say, Arsenal, or that they have favored a particular band since their undergraduate years, how do they explain why, in their opinion, this team or that group are superior to others? Most avoid such questions for obvious reasons. The Monty Python comedy team one ran a sketch in which a plumber with a Cockney accent switched seamlessly from his account of why the boiler had broken down to reflections on Kierkegaard. Imagine this in reverse—­shifting from high culture to the mundane—­and one has a clear enough idea of what happens when an intellectual moves downmarket; the manner of address is absurdly ill matched with the subject. At one point, Ricks gives attention to Dylan’s “Day of Locusts,” a lyric on his experience of receiving an honorary doctorate in music from Princeton. Oh, the benches were stained with tears and perspiration The birds were flying from tree to tree There was little to say, there was no conversation As I stepped to the stage to pick up my degree

As verse, the four lines are engaging in a disposable simplistic way, but Ricks is determined to haul them into the higher canon and begins with a quotation from Matthew Arnold, on Wordsworth: One can hear them being quoted at a Social Science Congress; one can call up the whole scene. A great room in one of our dismal provincial towns; dusty air and jaded afternoon daylight; benches full of men with bald heads and women in spectacles; an orator lifting up his face from a manuscript written within and without to declaim these lines of Wordsworth; and in the soul of any poor child of nature who may have wandered in thither, an unutterable sense of lamentation, and mourning, and woe! (Ricks, after Arnold: 194)

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This, in Arnold’s view, is the destiny of great literary art once the middle-­classes begin to “analyze” it. It is robbed of its life and inspiration. Just as Arnold wished to preserve the likes of Wordsworth from this, so Ricks takes it upon himself to rescue the brilliance of Bob Dylan from the suffocating maul of academe. This is followed by references to, among things, the rhetorical flourishes of Winston Churchill’s speeches, and after a page and a half we are still not finished: Oh, the benches were stained with tears and perspiration The birdies were flying from tree to tree Why is “birdies” so endearing there? I feel about it as a Kingsley Amis hero did about sex, that he knew why he liked it by why did he like it so much? Partly, the open poeticality of it, its calling up the songs of Robert Burns: “Ye birdies dumb, in with’ring bowers.” Yes, the birdies are dumb in this song, they are not singing but flying, and they leave it to the locusts to be the songsters. And those “with’ring bowers”? “Benches stained with tears and Perspiration”? Or, watching the birdie, the songs of Tennyson: “She sang this baby song. What does little birdie say/In her nest at peep of Day?” Nothing about a doctorate of music, you may be sure of that—­and yet the world or primary education is there, on its way to the tertiary.

Persistently, grievously, Ricks take us on a tour of the top echelons of literary culture, whispering at every point: Bob Dylan belongs here too. While Dylan’s Vision of Sin is a colossally embarrassing attempt to salvage popular writing as art, it is not an isolated case. Even worse is James Wood’s The Fun Stuff and Other Essays (Farrer, Strauss Giroux 2002), and in particular Wood’s chapter on The Who drummer Keith Moon. The drumming is staggeringly vital, with Mood at once rhythmically tight and massively spontaneous. On both that song [Won’t Get Fooled Again’] and “Behind Blue Eyes” you can hear him do something that was instinctive, probably, but which is hardly ever attempted in ordinary rock drumming: breaking for a fill, Moon fails to stop at the obvious end of the musical phrase and continues with his rolling break, over the line and into the start of the next phrase. In poetry, this failure to stop at the end of the line, this challenge to metrical closure, this desire to get more in, is called enjambment. Moon is the drummer of enjambment.

With all due respect to fans of The Who, particularly those drawn to them in their anarchic early years prior to Moon’s death in 1978, one has to wonder if any ever thought to themselves: yes indeed, Keith is “the drummer of enjambment,” worthy of comparison with Milton and Wordsworth at their best. Throughout the passage, he appears to be gradually releasing clues toward what will become, for his reader, an epiphany. The two closing sentences are his moments of revelation. Rejoice, he seems to say: Moon is a poet, “the drummer of enjambment.” He is trying desperately in reconcile his high cultural state of mind with something else, something which most other people—­particularly those who did not attend Eton or gain a First in English from Cambridge—­treat simply as entertainment. If he is attempting to enlighten such persons, it is an exercise in condescension, but I suspect that his intended audience is actually himself. For all I know



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Wood does indeed enjoy listening to Keith Moon’s drumming, just as Ricks takes a good deal of pleasure from the lyrics of Bob Dylan, but for both there is a mismatch between something simple, even visceral, and their scrupulous evaluative mentalities. Perhaps, they feel guilty about liking something that is certainly not part of high culture, and as a compensation they feel they should dress it in the kind of critical language that is the currency of aesthetic superiority, The problem is that the clothes do not fit. Wood continues: For me this playing is like an ideal sentence of prose, a sentence I have always wanted to write and never quite had the confidence to: a long passionate onrush, formally controlled and joyously messy, propulsive but digressively self-­interrupted, attired but dishevelled, careful and lawless, right and wrong. (You can encounter such sentences in Lawrence’s prose, in Bellow’s sometimes in David Foster Wallace’s.) Such a sentence would be a breaking out, an escape. And drumming has always represented for me that dream of escape, when the body forgets itself, surrounds its woeful self-­consciousness.

The last phrase is painfully, inadvertently apt, given that only an onrush of very “awful self-­consciousness” would rescue this passage from itself. The thesaurus of descriptive excess leads us into a hushed, bracketed, sequence of grand introductions: “Keith Moon, please meet D.H. Lawrence, Saul Bellow, David Foster Wallace. You too are now one of the ‘Greats”’; the subtext being that I, James Wood, gatekeeper to this grand imperium, can admit you as a member.

The Moral Dimension The most controversial statement on modern poetry came from Theodor Adorno in Prisms (1955); that is “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” What he means is that since the range of subjects that can be covered by poetry is limitless, this must now include the Holocaust. Therefore, in his opinion, poets face two incontestable prohibitions. They cannot pretend to be ignorant of the Holocaust as an index to the horrible potentialities of humankind. At the same time, there is a ghastly incompatibility between something so transparently horrific and a genre that by its nature abjures transparency. Adorno was wrong. Poets have written about the Holocaust, and their work is by no means “barbaric” (and one can assume here that Adorno means that poetry must by its nature trivialize its subject). At one extreme, we come upon the work of the Polish poet Tadeusz Rózewicz, who in his first two volumes (1947 and 1948) prefigured Adorno by virtually reinventing the modes and idioms of Polish verse as a suitable medium for writing about the war. His pieces are stripped bare of rhetorical posturing; there is no meter, rhyme or metaphor. Others attempted to reconcile the humane elegance of verse with inhumane subjects. Consider the following extracts from Dannie Abse’s “White Balloon.” Dear love, Auschwitz made me more of a Jew than Moses did. but the world’s not always with us.

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Amy Burns and Richard Bradford Happiness enters here again tonight like an unexpected guest .... into our night living room where, under the lampshade’s ciliate, an armchair’s occupied by a white balloon. ...but what does it matter now as the white balloon is thrown up high? Quiet, so quiet, the moon above Masada and closed, abandoned for the night, the icecream van at Auschwitz.

There is an unsettling disjunction between the statement that opens the poem and the fissiparous, unfixed images of the balloon, the embodied state of “Happiness” (“with no memory of the future”), and the intimate domestic setting shared, we assume, by Abse and his wife. These closing lines return us to Auschwitz, surreally attended at night by an ice-­cream van. This is not in our opinion “barbaric.” Abse assumes that, once invoked, the Holocaust requires no elucidation—­and in this respect he is in accord with Adorno. It is something that immunizes itself from speculative discourse; it simply exists as a record of gargantuan suffering and systematic inhumanity. For Abse, however, it carries a special resonance. It has “made me/More of a Jew than Moses did.” He did not, he infers, witness it, but at the same time the entire spectrum of his consciousness carries a trace of it. We are tempted by this contextual placement to comb for resonances the curious dreamlike sequence sandwiched between the two specific references to Auschwitz. Is the ghostly embodiment of Happiness symbolic of a sense of resignation and despair? It leads them up the “lit staircase/towards the landing’s darkness.” Does the whiteness of the balloon indicate unaffiliation, innocence, naivety, or any other of the various states of hope that are now foreshadowed by dread: it sits on an armchair “as if there’d been a party.” Virtually, every phrase in the poem is puzzling, pointing to no clear extrinsic fabric of meanings. But having been introduced to the poem’s one unambiguous theme, we cannot help but use this as an interpretive key to what would otherwise be a tantalizingly incoherent sequence. This, as I have stated, is the effect that attracts us most to poetry: being caught between our desire to interpret and make sense and our equally powerful impulse to submit to illogic and leave the text to its own devices. In this instance, however, the experience goes far beyond an intellectual or aesthetic exercise. We recoil from interpreting the images as symbols of the Holocaust because to do so we would be interfering with a very personal, very tragic example of mimesis. Abse uses the unique capacities of verse to simulate a state of mind that is too conflicted and shifting for prose. He is fully, brutally aware of what happened at Auschwitz, and it has become part of his life, yet he implicitly raises the question of how he can describe this condition. His answer is “The White Balloon,” a poem that invites us into its web of interpretive possibilities and allows us to go no further. We have a picture of an unsettled consciousness, restlessly, painfully connecting the minutiae of his everyday world—­ice-­cream vans, armchairs, balloons, etc.—­ with something that is both ever present and inexplicable. Poetry is something we understand in the sense that when we read it we appreciate its effects and arbitrary spirals of meaning, yet at the same time it remains uniquely



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unanswerable. Unlike the enquiry from the man in the street or the opening page of Wittgenstein, we cannot assimilate and translate the message into a shared discourse. We know or at least are fascinated by what happens in the poem, but the key to the magnetism of this experience is twofold. We might claim to feel a similar sense of awe when we encounter a painting by Van Dyck or Pollack, a building by Palladio or Le Corbusier, a piece of music by Beethoven, or simply the raw spectacle of an ocean or a mountain. But none of the latter is assembled from the material that effectively makes us who we are, language. Poetry is about language. It shows us that language is brittle, magical, untrustworthy, arbitrary, but unlike a philosophical essay on such topics it does not enable us to answer back. It demonstrates that on the one hand language creates us, that consciousness and language are coterminous, but also that we can step outside it and contemplate its autonomous operations and peculiarities. Read a poem, or indeed write a poem, and you abscond from the depersonalizing system where language has a specified purpose. At the same time, however, you feel that language and everything else about the unspecified quixotic nature of the human condition are bound together. No other form of writing or expression enables us to simultaneously experience both of these apparently antithetical, exclusive states. This is why we write and read poetry and will continue to do so as long as we exist as a species. It can tell us anything about anything, yet in the end it will only be about one thing: the bizarre arbitrary nature of language.

Index

Ableman, Paul, 152 Abse, Dannie, 344 “White Balloon,” 343–4 academic writing, 297–8 Acevedo, Elizabeth, 214 Ackroyd, Peter, 152 Addison, Joseph, 20, 71 address, triangulation of, 218 Adorno, Theodor W., 1 Aesthetic Theory, 322 Prisms, 343 aesthetic appreciation, 5, 233, 251 aesthetic asymmetries, 62, 73 aesthetic experience, 16, 17, 38n16, 220, 233 autonomous, 229 and knowledge, 77 aesthetic judgment, 4, 19, 20, 158, 162, 229–30 and popular culture, 340 as a science, 121, 132 aesthetic object, 5, 57, 69, 216–17 analysis of poetry as, 212, 213, 216–17 aesthetic pleasure see pleasure

aesthetic protectionism, 308 aesthetic reflection, 3 aesthetic(s), 1, 2 affect and effect, 232–4 autonomy, 26, 61 canonicity, aesthetic criterion of, 26 and the historical, 62 historical causes and aesthetic reasons, 25–8 and intentionality, 239–240 Marxist, 61 and technology, 130 terminology, 156 traditional Kantian, 62 of translation, 116 affect affective power, 6 and effect, 232–4 fictional narratives, 47 and poetry, 220 affective fallacy, 216 Alabama State Textbook Committee, banning of Anne Frank’s Diary, 157 Aldington, Richard, 320

A Companion to Literary Evaluation, First Edition. Edited by Richard Bradford, Madelena Gonzalez, and Kevin De Ornellas. © 2024 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Published 2024 by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Index algorithm ATG, 128 of beauty, questioning existence of, 120–34 defining, 120 generation of literary texts, 129 imperfect, 127 see also beauty Allister, Mac, 123 alliteration, 126 Althusser, Louis Pierre, 136 American Dream, 126 Amis, Kingsley, 153, 342 Ammons, A.R., 101 anagnorisis (recognition), 43, 54n5 analytical philosophers, 8 Andersen, Hans Christian New Fairy Tales, 157 Tales from the Thousand and One and Nights, 157 Anderson, Gary, 6, 244 Andrews, Bruce, 320, 329 Anglo‐Spanish wars (1625–1630), 182 applied theater (AT), 6, 226–42 and aesthetic judgment, 229–30 aesthetics, affect and effect, 232–4 authenticity, authorship and authority, 237–9 autonomy and heteronomy, 229–32 and community theater, 227 disrupting definitions, 227–9 paternalism and the deadly, 234–6 the practical and the aesthetic, 227–8 social and cultural value, 236–7 Young Farmers’ Clubs of Ulster (YFCU), case study, 226–7, 240, 241 see also community theater; theatrical performance appreciation, 11, 27, 29, 71, 99, 127, 157, 186, 209, 228, 267 aesthetic, 5, 233, 251 associated values, 12–13 of beauty, 278, 281 of the literary work, 14, 17, 18, 34, 78, 217, 219 novels, 147, 306 poetry see below translation of, 117 and meaning, 59–60 and Modernism, 300, 301, 307

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of poetry, 5, 103, 104, 217 body and voice, 213, 215, 216, 219–20, 224 distinctiveness from narrative(s) forms, 218 effects, 344 page poems, 213, 218, 220 The Waste Land, 312 of reading, 16, 323 see also pleasure Archer, Jeffrey, 304 Aristotle, 1, 3, 33, 76, 77–8, 84, 89 on man/machine link, 129–30 on pleasure, 77, 238 works of Nicomachean Ethics, 111 Poetics, 43, 77, 78, 120, 238 Arnold, Matthew, 2, 32, 57, 62, 121, 341, 342 Empedocles on Etna, 59 Preface to Poems, 59 Arrojo, Rosemary, 115 art, 2, 3, 4, 77–79, 82, 84, 229 abstract, 89 appreciating literature as, 10, 14, 28 Aristotle on, 77, 78 conceptual, 321, 322 defining, 121 fine versus applied arts, 227–8 High Art, 228, 237, 315 and instability of literary works, 1–2 literary, 2, 234 works of see literary works; literature; works of art Artaud, Antonin “To be Done with the Judgement of God” (1947 radio play), 6, 243–58 pioneering of Theatre of Cruelty, 244 prefiguring Deleuze and Braidotti, 245–50 prison setting of work, affective encounters in, 6, 244 and the radio play, 244–5 see also Beyond Judgement (critical community engagement project); prison settings; “To be Done with the Judgement of God” (1947 radio play by A. Artaud) artificial intelligence (AI), 127, 128, 131 “black box” of, 133 artistic production, techne in, 129 Arts Alliance Evidence Library, UK, 251, 252

348 Index Arts Council of Northern Ireland, 235 Asimov, Isaac, 161 I, Robot, 130 assemblage theory, 250 Astalli, Camillo (Cardinal), 185 Astley, John, 180 Aston, Elaine, 195, 198 AT see applied theater (AT) Atwood, Margaret, The Handmaid’s Tale, 163 Auden, W.H., 4, 95, 97 “Miss Gee,” 96 “Musee des Beaux Arts,” 254 “Out on the lawn, I lie in bed,” 290 ‘Thank you, Fog,’ 290 audiences, 6, 34 production and audience interaction, 205–6 queerness and audience interaction, 207–8 and reception theory, 201–2 Austen, Jane, 160, 309 Emma, 105 Sandition, 166 authenticity, 6, 25, 68, 69, 88, 197, 237–9 applied theater, 238, 240 of authority, 239 of emotions/feelings, 237–8 of The Globe, 206 inauthenticity, 67, 238 and interpretation, 71 and originality, 203, 205 quasi‐authentic status, 205 thinking authentically, 74 authority, 20, 237–9 assessment, 67 authenticity of, 238 authority figures, 141 and authorship, 238, 239 canonical works, 25 classical, 180 controlling, 27, 44 coordinated, 27 cultural, 24 ecclesiastical, 24 institutional, 164 judicial, 23 meanings, 238 and musicality, 215 participant, 238 textual, 115, 199, 289

authorship, 227, 237–9, 289, 293 and authority, 238, 239 autonomy, 229–32 avant‐garde writers, 7, 307, 316, 323, 329 Avignon project, 129 Axelrod, Mark, 136, 138 Bachelard, Gaston, 142 Bacon, Francis, 97 Bailey, Rebecca, 261 Bal, Mieke, 42–3, 54n4 Balzac, Honoré de, 147 Baret, Michael, 180 Barnes, Julian, Flaubert’s Parrot, 122 Barrett, Syd, 285 Barry, Peter, 7, 294–5 Literature in Contexts, 294 Barthes, Roland, 2, 27, 61, 67, 121, 126, 127, 136, 239 Death of the Author, 124, 163 Mythologies, 123 The Pleasure of the Text, 124 S/Z, 124 Bataille, Georges, 138 Bateson, F.W., 295 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, 97 Baudrillard, Jean, The Transparency of Evil,132 Bauhaus School of Art and Design, Germany, 289–90 The Beano, 158, 161 Beardsley, M, 216 “The Intentional Fallacy,” 163 Beaumont, Francis, 259 The Custom of the Country, 266 A King and No King, 263 The Scornful Lady, 265 The Wild Goose Chase, 266 beauty, 4, 10, 55n7, 74, 93, 131, 162, 278, 279 abstract standard, whether, 120 algorithm, 4, 120–34 questioning existence of, 120–34 appreciation of, 278, 281 big data, 131 “Brute beauty,” 12 definition considerations, 73, 120, 122, 131 of Earth, 169 of football, 122 as a form of cognition, 93

Index “laying bare the device,” 124–8 machine‐created, 130 practice of, 122 reconceptualizing, 129 referring to impression an object makes on a subject, 19, 71 systematization of, 4, 127–30 “terrible beauty” (Yeats), 335 of text, 126 value judgments, 20 Beckett, Samuel, 24, 162, 340 Waiting for Godot, 163, 323–4 Bedingfield, Thomas, 181, 182 beholding, 220 Bellamy, Edmond de, 133 Benn, Gottfried, 85 Bennett, Arnold, 304, 305, 306, 311 Bennett, Tony, 124, 196–7, 199, 200, 201 Bergson, Henri, 138, 201 Berlant, Lauren, 208 Bernard, Philippa, No End to Snowdrops, 107 Bernstein, Charles, 320 Best, George, 285 Beyond Judgement (critical community engagement project), 6 under HMP2Hope project series, 243–4, 252 Bible (King James edition), 158 big data, 131 biographical writing, 297 Black Lives Matter, 63 Black Mountain College, North Carolina, 289 Blake, William, 59, 333 Raine’s study of/great admiration for, 4, 92, 97–9, 100 Blanchet, Linda, Killing Robots, 130–1 Blanchot, Maurice, 138, 144 Bloom, Harold, 26, 138, 146, 148, 244 Blundeville, Thomas, 179, 180 body and voice of performance poet, 213–16 embodied meaning, 219–22, 224 subvocalization, 216 body language, 280, 311 Bolaño, Roberto, 2666, 168, 171 Bolshevism, 317 book reviews, 150–5 Borges, Jorge Luis, 3, 77, 86 “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” 112 Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, 86

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Bourdieu, Pierre, The Rules of Art, 121 Bradbury, M., 316–17 Bradbury, Ray, Fahrenheit 451, 161 Bradford, Richard, 7, 233, 234 Is Shakespeare Any Good? 66, 122 Braidotti, Rosi, 6, 243, 245–6 Braschi, Giannina, United States of Banana, 125–7, 130, 132 Brecht, Bertolt, 59, 94, 96–7 Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, 111–12 “To Posterity,” 93 Verfremdungseffekt, 202 British Association for Romantic Studies Conference (Liverpool University, 1991), 293 Brock, Arthur, 296 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, 10 Brook, Peter, 233 Brooke, Arthur, The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, 27 Brooks, Cleanth, 67, 314 Understanding Poetry, 66 Browne, William, The Arte of Riding the Great Horse, 182 Bruegel the Elder, 254 Bruni, Leonardo, 111 Büchner, Georg, Woyzeck, 167 Budd, Malcolm, 16–17 Bulgakov, Mikhail, The Master and Margarita, 163 Bunyan, John, 71 Pilgrim’s Progress, 20 Burke, Edmund, 1 Burns, Amy, 7 Burns, Robert, 342 Butler, Octavia E. creative process, 172 Fledgling, 172 Octavia E. Butler Papers archive, Huntingdon, 168 Parables series Parable of Chaos (unfinished), 168, 173 Parable of Clay (unfinished), 168, 173 Parable of the Sower, 168, 172, 173 Parable of the Talents, 168, 172–3, 176 Parable of the Teacher (unfinished), 168, 173 theme, 168–9 see also Parable of the Trickster (Butler’s unfinished work)

350 Index Butler, Octavia E. (cont’d) personal circumstances, 174 utopian vision, 174–5 writer’s block, 172, 173, 174 see also unfinished works Butler, Samuel, Erwhon, 132 Butter, P. H., 93 Buzzati, Dino, 139, 140, 143, 146, 147 The Tartar Steppe, 4, 139, 144, 147 Byron, George Gordon, 294 Don Juan, 166 Calvinism, 93 Calvino, Italo, 3, 77, 90 Canavan, Gerry, 172, 173, 174, 176 see also Butler, Octavia E.; unfinished works canonicity, 22, 23, 24–8 aesthetic criterion of, 26 “backfiring” discussion of canonical texts, 68 canon formation, 26–7 historical causes and aesthetic reasons, 25–8 idea of a literary cannon, 2, 24 “life‐enhancing” literature, 71 memorizing of canonical works, 69 reading of canonical works, 26, 60 scriptural notion of, 25 and tradition, 24 canonization processes, 138–9 Capek, Karel, Russum’s Universal Robots, 130 capitalism, 96 business, 127 fascism perceived as, 97 flows of, 132 industrialized, 317 late, 125 postindustrial, 168 Capote, Truman, Summer Crossing, 168 Caracciolo, Pascal, 186 Carey, John, 74, 150, 231, 311 The Intellectuals and the Masses, 300 “Viewpoint,” 150 What Good Are the Arts? 73 Carroll, Noël, 33, 34–5 Carter, Angela, Nights at the Circus, 163 cartoons, 36 Catesby, Robert, 271, 279 changeling plots, 264, 265, 266

Charakteristik (critical sketch), 81–2 Charles I, King, 271–3, 285 Charles III, King, 285–6 Chatto & Windus, 151 Chaucer, Geoffrey, The Canterbury Tales, 166 Chekhov, Anton, 254 children’s books, 156–7 Chopin, Kate, The Awakening, 163 Christie, Agatha, 159 Churchill, Winston, 342 Cinquini, Lelio, 188 Il Cavallo ammaestrato, 187–8 Clark, John Lee, 223 Clarke, Arthur C., 131 2001 A Space Odyssey, 130 class consciousness, 61, 64 Clifford, Jo, The Taming of the Shrew, 202 close reading, 67, 137, 204, 209 of The Court Secret, 6, 260, 261–6 historicist, 294 New Criticism, 66, 216 see also close reading Coates, Dame Sally, 252 Cocteau, Jean, 245 codes of structural linguistic analysis (Barthes), 127 Cohn, Jim, 223 “The New Deaf Poetics: Visible poetry,” 222 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 2, 60, 101, 333 ‘Dejection,’ 294 “Kubla Khan,” 97 The Lyrical Ballads, 72 Collins, Wilkie, The Woman In White, 158 comics, 157–8 commercial realism, 138 Communism, 93 community theater, 227, 228, 232, 236 see also applied theater (AT); theatrical performance complexity, 42–56 approaching, 43–6 of character, 54n2 cognitive, 42, 54n2 complexity science, 42, 43, 44, 55n8 in fictional narratives, 47–53 and linearity, 49–53 and multiperspectivity, 47

Index and perspective, 3, 47–9 plot, 260, 266 reflecting on, 53–4 systems, 44 and truth of feeling, 45 computational creativity, 128–30 conceptual art, 321, 322 Conrad, Joseph, The Secret Agent, 3, 46, 49–51 consciousness, 17, 133, 136, 139, 147, 200, 310 aesthetic, 72 artificial, 131 class, 61, 64 and language, 345 machine, 131, 132 popular, 69 self‐consciousness, 79, 80, 292, 343 unsettled, 344 contextualism, 295 Corte, Claudio, 186 Il cavallerizzo, 181, 182 Cotrupi, Caterina, 174 The Court Secret (Shirley) casualty of theater closures (1642), 268 characters and plots, 261, 262–6 close reading of, 6, 260, 261–6 dramatis personae, 265–6 and early‐1640s England, 261 first edition (1653), 266 first staging of (1664), 266 as Shirley’s “last” professional play, 260 sibling plots, 264 title, 265 as a tragicomedy, 260, 261 COVID‐19 pandemic, 255 Cowper, William, 94 Craig, Heidi, 6 Craiglockhart Military Hospital for Shell‐ Shocked Officers (Edinburgh), 296 creativity computational, 128–30 creative process, 172, 174, 238 creative reading, 69 and criticism, 3, 76, 84 reflection on, 82 Crichton, Michael, Micro, 168 Crimea Square (Belfast community play), 236 criminology, 250

351

critical analysis, literary, 19 criticism, 4, 7, 62, 66, 81–3, 138, 148, 208, 300, 306 academic, 7, 340 aesthetic, 26 affective fallacy in, 216 Arnoldian approach to, 73, 124 conventional, 332 and creativity, 3, 76, 84 and disinterestedness, 73 divinatory, 80 dramatic, 6 ethical, 31–8 evaluative, 333 feminist, 25, 26, 63 Anglo‐American, 25 formalist, 37 functions, 31, 73 Leavisite approach to, 124 literary, 3, 9, 73, 86, 88, 90, 121, 136, 331, 340 modern, 269 New Criticism see New Criticism of Northrop Frye, 174 poetic, 5, 76, 80, 83 as a profession, 122 rhetorical, 294 self‐criticism, 140 shortcomings with classical approach to, 82–3 skill and training, 21 “thick” descriptions in, 28 translation, 112 cross‐gender performance, 207 Cubism, 316 Cuddon, J.A., A Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, 124 Cull Ó Maoilearca, Laura, 249, 256 Culler, Jonathan, 337 Structuralist Poetics, 336 Theory of the Lyric, 217–18 cultural code (Barthes), 127 cultural materialism, 198 Cultural Theory, 339 Cunningham, Valentine, 121 Daiches, David, 314 The Dandy, 158

352 Index Dante Alighieri, 308 Danto, Arthur C., 71, 77 The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art, 70 Darwinism, 315 Day, John, 259, 267 de Duve, Thierry, 121, 122 de Man, Paul, 86, 87 de’ Medicis, Francesco, 188 De Ornellas, Kevin, 6 de Saussure, Ferdinand de, 88 Dead Poets Society (film), 57, 58, 66, 74 Deaf poetry, 222, 223 deep learning, 131 defamiliarization, 124, 127 defining literature, 3, 76–91 and Aristotle, 77–8 modern literary theory, 76 poetry defining essence of, 76 and philosophy, 85–8 transcendental, 78–83 Romanticism and transcendental poetry, 78–83 Deism, 97 Deleuze, Gilles, 6, 243–50, 256 Deriu, Elisabetta, 5 Derrida, Jacques, 61, 121, 124, 136 Derrington, Edmund, 205–6 descriptions, thick and thin, 28–9 Dettmar, K.H., The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, 340 Di Maria, Angel, 122 Dickens, Charles, 309 Bleak House, 10, 30 The Christmas Carol, 159 Hard Times, 32 Nicholas Nickleby, 159 The Tale of Two Cities, 159 Dollimore, Jonathan, 198 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 72, 159 Doyle, Sir Arthur Conan, 158 drama, 66, 67, 79, 162, 164, 167, 196, 205, 241, 319, 325 art, 79 complexity and perspective, 47–8 disrupted chronologies, 49

Elizabethan‐style history, 272 heroic, of Dryden, 267 of Jonson, 268 “new,” 268 Pepys on, 266, 267 popular, 199 printed plays, 259 professional, 268 radio, 244 see also Artaud, Antonin; radio Renaissance, 48 Restoration, 268 of Shakespeare see Shakespeare, William of Shirley see Shirley, James theater architecture, 200 Drew, Elizabeth, 307 Drugan, Joanna, 113 Dryden, John, 267, 268 DubbelJoint Theatre company, 235 Dublin Review, 301, 303 Duchamp, Marcel, 128 Duffet, Thomas, 267 Dylan, Bob, 7, 339, 340, 343 “Day of Locusts,” 341 dystopian genre, 161 see also science fiction The Eagle (comic), 157, 161 Eagleton, Terry, 51, 62, 196 Antigone, 137 Criticism and Ideology, 61 The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 120 Literary Theory, 66 Oedipus the King, 137 early modern dramatic corpus, 261 horses/horse‐related activities, 5, 179–94 Interregnum dramatic publications, 266 ranking in the late seventeenth‐century, 266–9 Eco, Umberto, 90 “Name of the Rose,” 9 edification issue, 31–2 education artistic, 82 basic, 159 benefits, 315 Cambridge, 59 early, 175

Index educational writing (1980s), 59 establishment, 309 expansion of, 315 formal, 6, 59, 243 good quality, 159 higher, 304 literary, 11, 13 moral, 32, 37 normative programs, 246 outreach provision, Liverpool Hope University, 243–4 Oxbridge, 154 primary, 342 in prison system, 251, 252, 253, 255 purpose of, 253 radical projects, 250 secondary see secondary education writers, 58, 61 see also secondary education Egan, Jo, 236 Elam, Keir, 195 Eliade, Mircea, 148n2 Eliot, George, 55n7, 137 Middlemarch, 14 The Mill on the Floss, 44–5 narrating complexity, 44 Silas Marner, 29 Eliot, T.S., 9, 215, 340 “Burnt Norton,” 126 compared with Raine, 4 “Sweeney Among the Nightingales,” 318 themes, 314 “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” 24 The Waste Land, 24, 94–6, 100, 307, 312–14 elitism, 14, 234 and Modernism, 300, 303, 304, 314, 317 Elizabeth II, Queen, 285 Elizabethan drama, 260 Ellis, Brett Easton, American Psycho, 33, 34 emergence, 44 emotion, 2, 45 and feeling, 219 genuine, 318 and humans/machines, 130 and imagination, 31 inauthentic, 238 and materialism, 129

353

and the senses, 130 and sublimity, 1 Empson, William, 4, 67, 95–6, 340 “Aubade,” 95 End Violence Against Women project, 63 English Renaissance, 261 The English Review, 62 Enlightenment, European, 97 Enright, D.J., Penguin Book of Light Verse, 337 Essays in Criticism, 295 ethical criticism edification issue, 31–2 ethical flaw issue see ethical flaw and value, 31–8 ethical flaw, 36–8 see also moralism evaluation, literary, 287–98 actions, works as, 174 and complexity, 42–56 creative process rather than aesthetic product, works as, 174 criticism, 333 events and not objects, works as, 174 individual evaluation, 81 and interpretation, 87–8 and learning, 110 lifetime of, 156–65 methodology, 296–8 poetry, 331–45 problems, 6 process, poetics of, 5 Romantic, of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 82–3 style, 331–9 subjectivity, 69–72 of theater in performance, 5, 195–6, 197–203 of translation see translation, evaluating Evans Pritchard, J., 58 Understanding Poetry, 57 examinations board requirements, 58 “open‐book,” 67 see also secondary education Faber, Geoffrey, 94 Faber, Secker & Warburg, 151 Faber poets, 94, 95

354 Index fairy tales, 156–7 Falci, Eric, 213 The Value of Poetry, 212 Fawkes, Guido, 271 Feltch, Susan, 254 feminism, 62, 63–4, 94, 116, 151 Brechtian‐feminist techniques, 202 feminist criticism, 26, 63 Anglo‐American, 25 feminist movement, 157, 163 Ferraro, Giovanni Battista, 182, 183, 186 Ferraro, Pirro Antonio, 182 Fiaschi, Cesare, 182 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 79 Theory of Knowledge, 82 fiction, 9, 47, 121, 152, 163, 237, 239, 305, 306 complexity, 43, 44, 45, 47, 53 contemporary, 4, 327 crime, 158, 316 escapist function of, 157 fictional characters, 8, 42, 138, 309 generally accepted task of novelist, 303 genre, 14, 15, 36, 168 graphic, 157 high‐art, 157 introspective, 320 investigation of, 46 literary, 15, 53, 137, 138, 168 literature and philosophy, 89 metafictions, 174, 327, 328 Modernist, 168, 305, 311, 321, 323 morally deviant, 35 new, 153 physical corruption and decay, 30 and plot, 147 and poetry, 58, 87, 213, 218, 321 popular, 307 purpose of, 303, 310 reading, 127, 137 and reality, 49, 53, 204 science fiction, 158, 160, 161, 168, 172 spy stories, 158 “supermarket,” 138, 147 temporal, 44 texts, 44, 53, 54

and theater, 200, 204, 206, 231, 233, 238 translation, 115 ultra‐contemporary, 121 utopia, 175 widely acclaimed, 4 works of, 8 see also literary works; narrative(s); narratology; novels; works of art Finch, Amanda, 5 Fire of London (1666), 271, 272 Fish, Stanley, Is There A Test In This Class? 336 Flaubert, Gustave, 147 Madame Bovary, 54n4 Un Coeur simple, 122 Fletcher, John, 259, 260, 266, 267 The Custom of the Country, 266 A King and No King, 263, 264–5 The Scornful Lady, 265 The Wild Goose Chase, 266 Floyd, George, 63 football, 122–3 Forced Upon Us (DubbelJoint play), 235 Formalism/Formalist school, 16, 17, 60, 121, 125–7 and moralism, 37–8 Russian Formalists, 124 Forster, E.M., A Room With A View, 159 Forsyth, Frederick, 159 Forsythe, Robert Stanley, 262 Foucault, Michel, 67, 136, 247 four elements theory, 183, 184, 185 Fowlie, W., Rimbaud and Jim Morrison, The Revel as Poet, 340 Frankel, Nicholas, 154 Fraser, Russell A., 260 free verse evaluating, 336 interpreting, 337 misuse of, 338 “occasional,” 336–7 pattern, 338 translation of, 115 turning prose into, 336 typographic design, 337 Freidlander, Paul, Rock and Roll A Social History, 340 Freud, Sigmund, 14, 27

Index Frost, Robert, “The Road Not Taken,” 69–70, 71 Frye, Northrup, 174 Gadamer, Hans‐Georg, 87, 88, 89 Galenus, 183 gambling, 273, 282 Gaut, Berys, 36, 37 genre fiction, 14, 15, 36, 168 novels, 10, 14, 15 Gentzler, Edwin, 116 George the Poet, 212 Georgians, 23 Gibson, John, 174 Gibson, Rex, Teaching Shakespeare, 65 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Yellow Wallpaper, 163 Ginsberg, Allen, Howl, 217, 218 Giordano, Peggy C., 252 Girl (comic), 157 Godard, Jean‐Luc, 68 Godwin, William, 64 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, 82–3 Goetz, Benoît, 130 Golden Treasury (Palgrave), 69 Gonzalez, Madelena, 4, 1133n2 Gorman, Suzanne, 230, 236 Great Depression, 300 Great Fire of London see Fire of London (1666) Greene, Graham, 151 Griffith‐Jones, Mervyn, 235 Grigson, Geoffrey, 314 Grimms, FairyTales, 157 Grisone, Federico, 181 Gli ordini di cavalcare, 180 The Guardian, 154 Guénon, René, 99 Crisis of the Modern World, 98 Guerraoui, Rachid, 128 Gupta, Tanika, 204 HAL 9000 computer, 131 Hall, John, 259, 261, 268, 269 Hall, Peter, 323 Hall, Stuart, 122

355

Hamish Hamilton (publishing firm), 151 Harari, Yuval Noah, 132, 133 Homo Deus. A Brief History of Tomorrow, 131 Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind, 132 Haraway, Donna, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” 130 Hardenberg, Friedrich von (Novalis) see Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg) Hardwick, Nick, 251 Hatim, Basil, 115 Hays, H.R., 93 Heaney, Seamus ‘The Forge,’ 289 ‘Personal Helicon,’ 288 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 83–4 Heidegger, Martin, 85–6 Heisenberg, Werner Karl, principle of, 95 Hemans, Felicia, 293 Hemingway, Ernest, 295, 296 The Old Man and the Sea, 160 Hennell, Sarah, 55n7 Hensher, Philip, 152 Herbert, George, “The Collar,” 65 hermeneutic circle, 30 heteronomy, 229–32 Heywood, John, 268 Heywood, Thomas, 259 Hieronymus Bosch, 254 High Art, 228, 237, 315 “high cultural” authors, 159 High Modernism, 299, 322 see also Modernism Highsmith, Patricia, 159 Hilborn, Neil, 214 Hippocrates, 183 Hirst, Damien, 337 history/the historical, 6, 11, 24, 64, 67 the aesthetic and the historical, 25–8, 62 ahistorical transcendence, 61 analogy, 45 audiences and reception theory, 201 Elizabethan‐style, 272 empirical–historical reality, 87 historical attitudes, 21 historical circumstances, 137 historical enquiry, 23 historical events, 162, 186

356 Index history/the historical (cont’d) historical reductionism, 61 historical time, 137 Marxist historicism, 62 materialism, 198 obscure history, 199 poetry and philosophy, 85 social history, 14 and unfinished works, 167 Hitler, Adolf, 314 Hoang, Lê Nguyên Hoang, 128 Hobbes, Thomas, 1 Hobsbaum, Philip, 339 “A Lesson in Love,” 335 Hoddle, Glenn, 285 Holden, John, 233, 235, 236, 237 Hölderlin, Johann Christian, 85 Holocaust, 343, 344 Homer, 22, 59 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 9 “The Windhover” (sonnet), 11–12 horsemanship, 179–94 early modern debate, 180–1 the horse, 183–9 ‘loving horse,’ 189 masters, 180–2, 187, 188 and nobility, 5 nobleness of horse riding, 182 theory of, 179, 181, 183 value of horse in early modern writing, 5, 183–9 worthiness of a gentleman rider, 182 Hourd, Marjorie, 62, 65, 72 Educating the Poetic Spirit, 59, 60, 61 Howells, D. J., 3 Huddleston, Sisley, 302 Hudson, Kerry, Low Born, 154 Hughes, Howard, 163 human and machine, 129 humanly relevant matters, and literary value, 135–49 Hume, David, 28, 35 “Of the Standard of Taste,” 70–1 “true judges,” notion of, 2, 20–2, 34 see also Kant, Immanuel Husserl, Edmund, 321 Hynds, S. D., 54n2 hyperempathy, 175

idealism, 79, 80 identity, 222, 229, 263, 289 absolute, 89 body and voice of performance poet, 213, 214 corporate‐cum‐cultural, 151 cultural, 232 false, 48 genre, 49 linguistic, 43 of literary text, 89 mistaken, 261 and place, 159, 236 racial, 214 sense of, 202 ideology, 62, 139, 157, 198 dominant, 199 feminist, 163 and values, 196–7 Imagination, 3 Imagists, 307, 338 Imagist‐style verse, 318 quasi‐Imagist, 333 imitation, 6, 13, 77–9, 239, 306, 319 Aristotle on, 77, 239 art as, 77 principle, normative value of, 80–1 immoralism, 34 immorality, 35 Industrial Revolution, 279 institutions, 179, 247 arts, 6, 250 authority of, 164 bourgeois, 26 contexts, 198 conventions of, 19 high art, 251 “institution” of literature, 2 institutional objects, 10–11, 18 literary, 10–13 norms of, 14 psychiatric, 243 public, 251 state‐sanctioned arts, 6 training, 61 instrumental values, 15–17, 19 intentionalism, fallacy of, 70, 71 intentionality, 197, 231, 237

Index and aesthetics, 240 International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 175 Internet, 68, 287, 289–90 interpretation, literary, 2, 8, 32, 69 and value, 29–30 intersubjectivity, 19, 20 intricacy, sense of, 3 intrinsic values, 15–17, 19, 37 invocation, 218 Irish literature, 162 Irvin, Sherri, 214 Iser, Wolfgang, 220, 221 Ishiguro, Kazuo, Clara and the Sun, 161 Jackson, Holbrook, 303, 304 Jacobean drama, 260 Jakobson, Roman Osipovich, 76, 88, 124, 332 Linguistics and Poetics, 88 James, Henry “The Figure in the Carpet,” 121–4 prose of novels, 14–15 James, Peter, 159 James I, King, 271 Jameson, Fredric, 2, 168 Jeffers, Alison, 238 Jennings, Pat, 285 Jensen, Wilhelm, Gradiva, 14 Jeppesen, Sandra, 227 Jerome, Saint, 111 Johnson, Mark, 221 The Meaning of the Body, 219–20 Johnson, Samuel, 138, 147 Jonathan Cape (publishing firm), 151 Jong, Erica, 152 Jonson, Ben, 259, 267, 272 Catiline, 266 Jordan, Robert, The Gathering Storm, 168 Jourlin, Pierre, 133 Joyce, James The Dubliners, 162, 320 “Gas from a Burner,” 162 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 305, 309–10, 311, 320 Ulysses, 300–6, 309, 310, 314, 320, 323 judgment culture, 6, 243 Just William, 158

357

Kafka, Franz, 168 Amerika, 167 The Castle, 167 The Trial, 167 Kaneko, Michiko, 223 Kant, Immanuel, 1, 20, 62, 78, 79, 129 Critique of Judgement, 58 Keanie, Andrew, 3, 4 Keats, John, 96, 340 Keegan, Kevin, 285 Kermode, Frank, 26–7 relative notions of, 27 Kewes, Paulina, 267 Killigrew, Thomas, 266 King, Stephen, 304 King Charles Bible (Authorised Bible), 1611, 272 Kiraly, Don, 115 Kirkman, Francis, 259, 267, 268, 269 knowledge, 4, 8, 31, 76, 80, 307 and aesthetic experience, 77 arcane, 66 and art, 3 claims, 328 common bodies of, 127 diffusion of, 111 horsemanship, 182 and ignorance, 103 intellectual, 78 life, 138 limited, 10 lost, of the Imagination, 3 moral, 16 objective, 85 poetry as, 93 rational and objective, 79 scientific, 99 self‐knowledge, 140, 143, 144, 146, 147 specialized, 238 specific, 85 spiritual, 98 superior, of the reader, 51, 52 techne, 129 and truth, 45 of works of art compared with philosophy, 78 Knowles, Ric, 196, 197, 198, 201 Knuth, Donald, 121 Kohl, Herbert, Reading, How To, 71

358 Index Kristeva, Julia, 142 Kubrick, Stanley, 130 La Brouë, Salomon de, Cavalerice français, 181 La Nouvelle Revue Française, 305 “Lady Chatterley Trial,” 235 The Lady of Pleasure (Shirley) Act One, 273–5 Act Two, 275–7 Act Three, 277–9 Act Four, 279–82 Act Five, 282–4 blank verse, 274 characters Aretina Bornwell, 273–84, 286 Thomas Bornwell, 273–82, 284, 286 Celestina (widow), 274–84, 286 Madam Decoy, 277–80, 283 Frederick (nephew), 275–6, 278–80, 282, 283 Haircut, 275–7, 284 Isabella, 276 Alexander Kickshaw, 273–5, 277–80, 282–4 John Littleworth, 274, 280, 283 Bella Maria, 277, 281, 284 Mariana, 276 Master of the Revels, 283 Sentlove, 277, 282, 284 Steward, 273, 274, 276, 280, 284 Unready (Lord), 277–8, 281, 283, 284–8 Lamarque, Peter, 2 Lane, Anthony, 34 Langbaine, Gerard, 260–1, 267–8, 269 An Account of the English Dramatick Poets, 259 language, 18, 24, 57, 66, 105, 125, 136, 147, 264, 266, 320, 343, 345 accurate, 157 body language, 280, 311 caustic, 281 codes of structural linguistic analysis (Barthes), 127 colloquial, 162 and consciousness, 345 contemporary, 202, 204 Deaf poetry, 222 dehumanization of, 137 and empirical or perceived reality, 90, 333

English, 120, 222, 286, 323, 324 equivalence, 114 everyday/ordinary, 7, 76, 79, 81, 87, 88, 90, 106, 326, 334 figurative, 73, 160, 335 foreign terminology, 5, 115, 180, 181 grammatic structures, 128 literary, 2, 76, 87–8, 90, 321, 323 lyrical, 218 as medium of interpretation, 87 and Modernism, 168, 322 narratives, 46 non‐literary, 335 non‐poetic, 339 and philosophy, 87, 88, 219 poetic, 81–2, 83, 85, 88–9, 126, 215, 218, 222–4, 278, 339, 345 primal, 85 of primary texts, 68 printed, 287, 289 radio plays, 244 second language (SL), 114 sexual, 63, 64 of Shakespeare, 27, 73, 234 as a sign system, 197 signifier and signified distinction, 197 sign‐language, 222, 223, 224 status of, 317 suggestive, 69 technical, 79–80 translation see translation, evaluating Wittgenstein on, 88 Larboud, Valéry, 305 Larkin, Philip, 4, 94, 332–4, 339 and Austen, 105 on Raine, 103–8 works of “An Arundel Tomb,” 333–5 Further Requirements, 104, 106–7 The Letters of Kingsley Amis, 104, 105 Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse, 107 “A Study of Reading Habits,” 72 “Talking in Bed,” 59 see also Raine, Kathleen Laruelle, François, 245–6 Lauscher, Susanne, 114

Index Lawrence, D.H. Fantasia of the Unconscious, 58 Lady Chatterley’s Lover, 160, 235 The Rainbow, 60 “laying bare the device,” meaning, 124 Le Carre, John, 159 learning, 16, 51, 59, 98, 132, 238, 276, 290, 332 agreed outcomes, 253 automatic, 128 classical, 304 deep, 131 deliberate, 61 and evaluation, 110 flipped, 72 to forget, 60–1 by heart (rote‐learning), 59, 68–9 higher, 304 imitation, 238 inconspicuous, 60 interactive environment, 73 machine‐learning, 132 from mistakes, 132 peer learning, 175, 253 processes, 110, 253 reading of performance, 197 see also secondary education Leavis, F.R., 9, 32, 59 The Great Tradition, 24, 58, 121 New Bearings in English Poetry, 23 Leavis, Q. D., 314 Lee, Harper Go Set a Watchman, 167 To Kill a Mockingbird, 167 Lefebvre, Henri, 135, 147 Lefevere, André, 111–12 Leighton, Angela, 218–19 Lennon, John, 285 Leslie, Shane (“Domini Canis”), 303, 304, 305 Levy, Pierre, 129 Lezard, Nick, 152 Liberati, Francesco, La perfezione del cavallo, 185 linearity, and complexity, 49–53 Lineker, Gary, 122 Lippens, Ronnie, 250 literary cognitivism, 137 literary criticism, 3, 9, 73, 86, 88, 90, 115, 121 literary institution, 10–13

359

literary interpretation see interpretation, literary literary language, 2, 76, 87–8, 90, 321, 323 literary theory, 43, 76, 78, 136, 171, 293 literary tradition, 27–8 literary value(s), 2–3, 8–41 being valued/being valuable, 22–4 canonicity, 2, 24–8 descriptions, thick and thin, 28–9 and ethical values, 3 hermeneutic circle, 30 and humanly relevant matters, 135–49 Hume, lessons from, 20–2 interpretation and value, 29–30 key distinctions, 13–15 literary institution and appreciation, 10–13 relativizing of, 23 subjective/objective, 19 text/work, 18–19 translation, 111–12 valuing as x, as y, 13–15 varieties of literary value judgements, 8–10 literary works, 28 algorithm, produced by, 4 appreciation of, 14, 17, 18, 34, 78, 117, 219 novels, 147, 306 poetry see below spatial and temporal context, 217 translation, 117 of art see works of art chess analogy, 18–19 contextualist ontology for, 11 defining, 3 good and bad elements within, 10 incompleteness factor of a text, 195 individual evaluation, 81 instability of, 1–2 versus non‐literary works, 2 poetic nature of, 80 reader involvement, 220–1 reading of, 21 reflection on, 77, 80, 83, 84, 89 self‐reflective character of, 3 survival of contemporary circumstances, 62 truth in, 84, 85, 87 unfinished see unfinished works valuable, 10, 11, 13–14 see also works of art

360 Index literature as art, appreciating, 28 associated features, 13 as communication, 138 and complexity, 42–56 concept of, 23 defining, 76–91 dehumanization of, 319 function and purpose, 1 instability of literary works, 1–2 modern literary theory, 76 non “life‐affirming,” 3 and philosophy, 13, 89–90 and programming, 129 prophetic, 161 value judgments about, 23 Locke, John, 97 Lodge, David, 124 The Modes of Modern Writing, 124 Nice Work, 314–15 Working with Structuralism, 124 London Mercury, 316 Longenbach, James, 218, 219 Longinus, 1 Lopez, Jeremy, 260, 261 Lowdon, Claire, 153 Lukács, Georg, 2 Lyotard, Jean‐François, 1, 136 lyric poetry, 5, 212, 218 as an event, 217–18 and performed poetry, 213 re‐evaluating, 222 and verse, 340 see also page poetry; poetry The Lyrical Ballads (Coleridge and Wordsworth), 72 McAuley, Gay, 195–6, 198, 200, 201 McCann, John, 230, 231 McCarthy, Cormac, The Road, 161 MacCathmhaoill, Donall, 5 McFarlane, J., 316–17 McGann, Jerome, 292–4 McGonagall, William, 332–3, 335, 336, 339 McGrath, John, 202, 205 A Good Night Out, 234 McGregor, Rafe, 5 McHale, Brian, Postmodernist Fiction, 125

machine consciousness, 131, 132 MacKenzie, Elizabeth, 115 “magazine public,” 308 Maghull Hospital, Lancashire, 296 Mahon, Derek, “A Disused Shed in Co Wexford.,” 162 Maier, Carol, 114 Malone, Niamh, 6, 244 Manuche, Cosmo, 267 Markham, Gervase, 181–2 Cavalerice, 182, 183 Marlowe, Christopher, 272 Hero and Leander, 166 Marquez, Gabriel Garcia, One Hundred Years of Solitude, 163 Martindale, C.C., 301–2 Maruna, Shadd, 252 Marxism, 3, 315 Marxists, 32 masculinity, 12, 63, 64, 157, 281 Masefield, John, “Cargoes,” 65 Mason, Ian, 115 Massinger, Philip, 259 materialism contextual and materialist conditions, 203–4 cultural, 198 and emotion, 129 materialist conditions, 198–201 media, 6, 135 alternative production, 227 infinity, 147 manipulation, 286 print, 308 prophetic literature, 161 social, 154 time‐based works, 250, 251 visual, 71 melodrama, 64, 123 Meredith, George, 9 Meriton, Thomas, The Wandering Lover, 268 Messi, Lionel, 123 metafictions, 174, 327, 328 Michelangelo, 254 Middleton, Peter, 214, 215, 218 “Poetry’s Oral Stage,” 217 Middleton, Thomas, 55n9, 259, 266, 267 The Revenger’s Tragedy, 3, 46, 47–9, 51, 53–4

Index Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare), 5, 195, 203–4 audience–performer relationship, 208 Bottom, 204 Cobweb, 206 cross‐gender performance and representation, 207 Demetrius/Helena relationship, 207 Helenus, 206 Lovers, 206 Lysander, 207 Mechanicals, 204, 206 Oberon, 206 Puck, 204, 206, 209 pansexuality of, 204, 208 queerness and audience interactions, 207–8 Quince, 204, 208 Titania, 206, 207 Mill, John Stuart, 15 Miller, Henry, 160 Milton, John, 340 Paradise Lost, 20, 72, 158, 309 Mitchell, Bill, 236 Mitchell, Melanie, 47 moderate moralism, and failure of uptake, 33–6 Modernism, 3, 23, 126, 299–330 as an aesthetic movement, 300 anti‐Modernists, 7 and appreciation, 300, 301, 307 cause‐and‐effect explanation for, 299–300 charges against, 306–7 complexity, 322–3 cultural and social function, 322 egalitarianism of texts, 309 and elitism, 300, 303, 304, 314, 317 and fiction, 168, 305, 311, 321, 323 High Modernism, 299, 322 legacy of, 315, 318 paradox of, 319 poetry, 9, 314, 323 see also Beckett, Samuel; Eliot, T.S.; Pound, Ezra; Ulysses (Joyce); Waiting for Godot (Beckett); The Waste Land (Eliot); Woolf, Virginia Monroe, Harriet, 307–8 Moon, Keith, 342, 343 moralism, 21

361

and formalism, 37–8 moderate, 33–6 poetry, moral dimension, 343–5 Morgan, Nicholas (of Crolane), 180, 186–7, 189 Perfection of Horse‐manship, 184 Morris, William, 292 Moscow Linguistic Circle, 124 Mother‐of‐God of Kazan (medieval painting depicting Russian orthodox religion), 232 Muecke, Douglas Colin, 145 Muggeridge, Malcolm, 320, 321 Muir, Edwin, 4 “The Animals,” 93 Müller‐Wood, Anja, 3 multiculturalism, 204–5 Murdoch, Iris, 153 Murdoch, Rupert, 153, 154 Murphy, Gwendolyn, 314 Musil, Robert, The Man Without Qualities, 168 mystery novels, 158 mythology, 79 Nabbs, Thomas, 267 Nabokov, Vladimir, 160 The Original of Laura, 167 Nancy, Jean‐Luc, 130 narrative(s), 6, 10, 13, 29, 68, 90, 127, 129, 136, 146, 147, 156, 158, 159, 169, 170, 175, 202, 218, 233, 306, 311, 321, 322, 335 complexity‐generating, 42, 43 complexity in fictional narratives, 47–53 cycle of failure, 172–4 dystopian, 161 fictional, complexity in, 47–53 first‐person, 131 incomplete, 33 interlocking, 10 and linearity, 46 literary, 3 metanarrative(s)s, collapse of, 168 pared‐down definition of, 46 personal, 252 plot, 47 points of view, 43 process‐oriented notions of, 3, 43

362 Index narrative(s) (cont’d) and proliferation of meaning, 46 reflexivity, 53 representation, 45 self‐reflection, 54 and sense‐making, 46 strategies, 261 terminology, 46 narratology, 3, 42–3 Nason, Arthur H., 261, 262, 265 National Criminal Justice Arts Alliance, UK, 251 Nazism, 314 Nehring, N., Popular Music, Gender and Postmodernism, 340 neo‐Spinozism, 250 substance monism, neo‐Spinozist, 245 New Criticism advent of, 216 aim, 67 close reading, 66, 216 evaluative legacy of, 66–9 New Labour government, UK, 233 New Statesman, 153 Newton, Isaac, 97 Nicholson, Helen, 227, 230, 236 Nida, Eugene, Toward a Science of Translating, 114 Nieminen, Elina, 115 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 151 9/11 terrorist attacks, 125 Northern Ireland, Democratic Unionist Party (DUP),, 230 Norton‐Taylor, Richard, The Colour of Justice, 238 Novak, Julia, 219 Live Poetry, 224n2 Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), 78, 81–4, 90 Fragments, 88 novels, 2, 8, 18, 29, 66, 136, 139, 154, 164, 296, 299, 321 aesthetic qualities, 67 Agatha Christie style, 159 complexity, 50, 54, 310 conventional, 323 detective, 158, 159 dystopian, 132, 160–1 English, 303 escapist function of, 157

everyday life, depicting, 161, 303 evolution of novel form, 122 feminist, 151 film adaptations, 69 first person, written in, 169, 327 first reading, 331 flaws in, 9 genre, 10, 14, 15 Gothic, 294 hardback, 152 heros, 34 and history/memory, 160 interpretations, 69 introspective fiction, 320 irony in, 145 and language, 323 literary, 304 and literary writing, 329 and magazines, 308 modernist, 168 mystery, 158 nineteenth‐century, 14, 44, 301, 311 and plays, 51 pleasure of reading, 29 plots, 50 published, 152 ranking of, 14 readers’ expectations of, 306 reading as literature, 29 realist, 168, 305 reception of, 30 reflexivity of, 53 representative, 320 sado‐erotic, 304 scope of, 51 skills of novelist, 305 speakers in, 335 spy stories, 158 twentieth‐century, 300 unfinished see unfinished works Victorian, 167–8 violence in, 33 see also fiction; narrative(s); narratology; specific novels and novelists Nussbaum, Martha, 32, 143, 144, 147–8 Poetic Justice, 31

Index objectivity, 20, 21, 22, 28, 51, 72 disinterested, 59 literary, 154 and subjectivity, 2, 19 O’Brien, Edna, The Country Girls Trilogy, 162 O’Donoghue, Emma, The Room, 163 Ofqual (examinations regulator), 68 Ogilby, John, 20 Olsen, Charles, 319 Olsen, Stein Haugom, 38n7, 39n38, 139 originality, 3, 85, 123, 137, 267, 268 Ortega y Gasset, Juan, The Dehumanisation of Art and Ideas about the Novel, 315 Orwell, George, 304 A Clergyman’s Daughter, 151 Collected Journalism, Essays and Letters, 152 Nineteen Eight Four, 161 Osborne, John, 24 Ovid, 21 Owen, Katy, 208 Owen, Wilfred, 295, 296 page poetry conceiving as an event, 224 and performance poetry, 5, 213–19, 222 bridge between, 219 presentness in, 218 sound, role of, 215, 216 see also lyric poetry; performance poetry; poetry Parable of the Trickster (Butler’s unfinished work), 5, 166, 168 allegory, 169 cycle of narrative failure, 173–4 literary value of, 172, 173, 176 parables in the Books of Luke and Matthew, 169 part of Earthseed series, 168 plotlines, 170–1 as poetics of process, 174–6 summary, 169–71 untypical of unfinished works, 176 The Passion (community play, National Theatre of Wales), 236 passivity, avoiding, 72 Pater, Walter Horatio, 1 Patterson, Don, 212–13 Pavel, Thomas S., 48

363

Pavis, Patrice, 197 Pears, Iain, An Instance of the Fingerpost, 9 Pelé, Icon, My Life and the Beautiful Game, 122 Pelorson, Georges, 321 Penrose, Robyn, 315 Pepys, Samuel, “The Diary of Samuel Pepys,” 266, 267 performance “problem” of performance analysis, 198 reading, 5, 6, 197, 201, 209, 243 teaching, 66 theatrical see theatrical performance performance poetry, 212–25 body and voice of performer, 213–16 and contemporary culture, 224 embodied meaning, 219–22, 224 locative function of situated works, 221 and lyric poetry, 213 more inclusive poetics, 222–3 and page poetry, 5, 213–19, 222 bridge between, 219 poem as an object and as an event, 216–19 practice of, 221 white space, 212 Perry, Seamus, 292 perspective, and complexity, 47–9 Pessoa, Fernando, The Book of Disquiet, 166, 168, 171, 176 Peterloo Massacre, 294 Phelan, J.W., 137–8 phenomenology, 321 philosophy analytical philosophers, 8 knowledge provided by, 78 and language, 87, 88, 219 and literature, 13, 89–90 philosophers and poets, 83–4 and poetry, 77, 85–9 Pignatelli, Giovan Battista, 181, 182 Pinsky, Robert, 69 place “good place,” 291 of human, in universe, 245 physical, 220 sense of, 321 and time, 162, 209, 286

364 Index Plath, Sylvia, 94, 163 Plato, 1, 3, 76, 77, 78, 98, 129 plays see drama pleasure, 12, 13, 15, 140, 275 aesthetic, 11, 16, 26–7, 77 and appreciation, 27 Aristotle on, 77, 238 of learning, 238 moments of, 338 music, from, 341, 343 versus pain, 127 of reading active and creative, 221 canonical works, 37–8 novels, 29 shared response, 201 seeking, 327 sensual, 122, 322, 339 sexual, 281 Shakespeare, appreciation of, 65 sports, from, 122, 341 in suffering of others, 175 terminology, 122 works of art, from, 77 plot, 45, 47, 52, 53, 69, 86, 137, 147, 170, 172, 261, 268, 278, 284, 285, 296, 325 ability to follow, 266 changeling, 264 and circularity, 50 complex, 260, 266 development, 244 elaborate, 262 facets of, 51 incest, 264–5 “plot grammar” of Renaissance drama, 48 plot‐structure, 265 Plotinus, 3 poetry as aesthetic object, 212, 213, 216–17 ancient vs. modern/romantic, 80 appreciation of, 5, 103, 104, 217 body and voice, 213, 215, 216, 219–20, 224 distinctiveness from narrative forms, 218 effects, 344 page poems, 213, 218, 220 The Waste Land, 312

as art of words, 79 as aura of exile, 101–2 Deaf, 222, 223 defining essence of, 76 deliberate understanding, 60 distinguished from everyday language, 79 and Earth, 85–6 essence of, 85 evaluating, 331–45 and fiction, 58, 87 “first‐rate poets,” 259 as knowledge, 93 laws of, 84 and linguistics, 88–9 lyric see lyric poetry Modernist, 9, 314, 323 see also The Waste Land (Eliot) moral dimension, 343–5 and music, 215 oral, of antiquity, 213 originality of poetic word, 85 performance, 212–25 and philosophy, 77, 85–9 Plato’s treatment of poets, 1 poem, as a mode of discovering, 218–19 poem as an object and as an event, 216–19 poetic and critical works, 81 poetic language, 81–2, 83, 85, 88–9, 126, 215, 218, 222–4, 278, 339, 345 poetic spirit, nurturing, 58–61, 72 poets and philosophers, 83–4 popular culture, 340–3 reading of, 23, 57, 213, 215, 295, 331 and reality, 81–3, 85, 88–9 reception of embodied experience in, 219 lyric poetry, 5 and physical voice, 216 Romanitic, 9 second‐rate poets, 260 sense‐making, 90 sign‐language, 222 silence, 212 sound of, 218 style, as an evaluative focus, 331–9 transcendental, 78–83 understanding of, 344–5

Index and verse see verse and World, 85, 86 see also Auden, W.H.; Blake, William; Eliot, T.S.; Empson, William; Faber poets; Hopkins, Gerard Manley; Keats, John; Larkin, Philip; page poetry; performance poetry; Plath, Sylvia; Raine, Kathleen; Shirley, James ‘Poetry manuscripts of Wilfred Owen’ website, 296 Pompidou Centre, Paris, 250 popular culture, 340–3 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce), 305, 311, 320 Stephen Daedalus character, 309–10, 311 Portrait d’Edmond de Belamy (painting), 4, 128 Posner, Richard A., 31, 32, 33, 37 postmodernism, 3 Post‐structuralism, 121, 124 Pouey, Fernand, 244 Pound, Ezra, 9, 307, 308, 313–14, 318, 319 Cantos, 314 Prentki, Tim, 227 Preston, Sheila, 227 Priestley, J.B., Time and the Conways, 49, 55n10 Prison Radio Association (PRA), 251 prison settings affective encounters in, 243, 244, 251 Association for the Defence of the Rights of Prisoners (ADDD), 247 contemporary radio, 6, 251–6 Deleuze on reform, 247 desistance, 252 Group for Information for Prisoners (GIP), 247 prison activism, 247 prisoner‐centered rehabilitation programs, 252 reoffending rates, 252 see also Artaud, Antonin; Beyond Judgement (critical community engagement project); “To be Done with the Judgement of God” (1947 radio play by A. Artaud) Private Eye, 153, 154 proairetic code (Barthes), 127 production audience interaction, 205–6 conditions of, 198

365

contextual and materialist conditions, 203–4 costume, 206–7 cultural amount of, 198 historical moment of, 198 multiculturalism, 204–5 practical analyses, 203–8 space, use of, 205 technology, 205 values underpinning, 195–211 prose, 14, 28, 105, 115, 137, 152, 280, 303, 336–9, 343, 344 and evaluation, 160, 162, 163 and horsemanship, 181, 186 and Modernism, 333 poetical sense of, 306 storytelling in, 305 in Ulysses, 310 and verse, 163 psychoanalysis, 14 Puritans, 32 Quinn, Anthony, 152 Rabkin, Norman, 260 radicalism, 200, 209, 256, 323, 325, 329 radio Artaud and the radio play, 244–5 prison radio, contemporary, 6, 251–6 reasons for radio play art form, 250–1 see also “To be Done with the Judgement of God” (1947 radio play by A. Artaud) Raine, Kathleen, 3–4, 92–109 and Auden, 96 bird theme, 99, 103 Blake, study of, 4, 92, 98 at Cambridge (1920s), 59, 93, 95–6 Collected Poems, 100, 107, 108 “Air,” 101 “Angelus,” 104 “In the Beck,” 105 “Childhood,” 92 “Ex Nihilo,” 103 ”Invocation,” 102 “Master,” 97–8 “New Year 1943,” 98 “Ninfa Revisited,” 99 “The Poet Answers the Accuser,” 108

366 Index Raine, Kathleen (cont’d) “Short Poems,” 103 “The Speech of Birds,” 94, 99 “In Time,” 102 “Triad,” 92 “Two Invocations of Death,” 107 “The World,” 107 death of (2003), 100 distinguished from contemporary poets, 94 and Eliot’s The Waste Land, 94–6, 100 and Empson, 95–6 exile in work, feeling of, 101–2 lack of analysis of poetry, 99 language of, 105 Larkin on, 4, 103–8 on Marxism, 97 and Muir, 93 Platonist, as, 104 spiritual quest in work of, 104 tree theme, 95, 99 works of Autobiographies, 95, 96, 97, 101–2 Blake and Tradition, 98 Collected Poems see above India Seen Afar, 94, 95 That Wondrous Pattern, 99, 103 These Bright Shadows, 103 “The Unloved,” 106–7 William Blake, 98 Wynn on, 100–1 see also Larkin, Philip Raleigh, Sir Walter, 271 Rancière, Jacques, 229, 237 Rankin, Peter, 159 Ransom, John Crowe, 233 Read, Herbert, 59 Read, Piers Paul, 151 reading, 9, 69, 70, 116, 126, 127, 136, 138, 139, 146, 147, 160, 161, 219, 290, 292, 297, 309, 315 acquiring skills of, 71 active, 222 appreciative, 16, 323 associated conventions, 21 authentic, 69 autonomous, 67 of canonical works, 26, 60

close see close reading cognitive gain, 137 counter‐readings, 201 creative, 69 critical modes of, 14 defining “worth reading,” 152, 158 distorted, 64, 305 “easy reading,” 14 effects of, 15, 16, 31, 137 ethical, 32 “general reader,” 303, 305 group, 254, 255 historicist, 64, 294, 295 ideal reader, 34 of literary works, 21 of literature as literature, 32 as literature vs as something else, 15 market‐orientated, 316 and Modernism, 168 modes of, 27 moment of, 220 of novels, 306 performance, 5, 6, 197, 201, 209, 243 “persistent contentiousness” of readings, 74 of plays, 162 pleasure of active and creative, 221 canonical works, 37–8 novels, 29 shared response, 201 of poetry, 23, 57, 213, 215, 295, 331 politically correct, 66 practice of, 10, 28 preparatory, 73 primary school, 157, 158 private, 212, 215, 219, 220 problematic, 244 procedures, 19 process of, 32, 74, 220 of prose, 162 public, of a work, 214, 217 by pupils/students, 61, 62, 65, 74 queer readings, 204 radio, 256 reader‐response approach, 221 reading aloud, 217 responses of reader, 220

Index semiotic, 198 silent, 215, 216, 256 subjective, 73 technical, 127 tradition of “readings,” 12 and translation, 117 travel, 159 realism, 136, 161, 168, 306, 325, 328 classical, 300 commercial, 138 magical, 163, 164 photographic, 305 social, 3, 94, 104 reality, 35, 44, 84, 86, 94, 125, 126, 144, 166, 305, 311 absolute, 79, 80, 81 and applied theater, 231 disregarding, 146 empirical, 89, 90 empirical–historical, 87 everyday, 82 and fiction, 49, 53, 204 fictive models in realist novels, 168 and idealism, 79 imitating, 77, 78 just and sustainable (in works of Butler), 166, 174–6 lived, 89 perceived, 90, 333 and poetry, 81–3, 85, 88–9 political, 163 quotidian, 229 and the senses, 122 social, 45 as a system, 81–2 and transformation, 62, 87 universal laws of, 82 works of art as models, 77, 81 reception, 217 and complexity, 42 conditions, 198, 201 history of, 23 of literary texts, 3 of poetry embodied experience in, 219 lyric poetry, 5 and physical voice, 216

367

reception theory, 5, 158, 195, 337 and audiences, 201–2, 209 recognition, 43 reflection act of, 81 aesthetic, 3 artistic, 80 collective, 253 on creativity, 82 critical, 111 on language, 88 literary value, 2, 3, 11 on the literary work, 77, 80, 83, 84, 89 philosophical, 84, 90 on poetic character, 76, 79, 84, 85 self‐reflection, 3, 54, 76, 77, 88–90, 146 technical, 78 and translation, 111, 114 Re‐imagining Futures: Exploring Arts Interventions and the Process of Desistance (Arts Alliance report), 252 Reiß, Katharina, 114, 115 relativism, 22, 23 Renaissance drama, 48, 261 Renaissance poets, 308 representation, 81, 83, 86, 231, 303 anthropomorphic, 187 artificiality as, 168 authentic, 237 of civilizational collapse, 174 and communication, 299 of community life, 237 and conceptual art, 321, 322 and cross‐gender performance, 207 of dreams, 142 extra‐representational capacity, 174, 175 fair, 313 melodrama, 64 modern poetry, 80 narrative, 45, 49 poetry and philosophy, 85 of Puck in Midsomer Night’s Dream see Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare) reductive, 97 replacement of a representation of a text in one language by representation of an equivalent text in a second language, 114

368 Index revenge tragedies, 47 The Revenger’s Tragedy (Middleton), 3, 46, 47–9, 51, 53–4 characters Lussurioso, 47, 48, 49 Vindice, 47–9, 53 complexity of, 47 oscillating between tragedy and comedy, 48–9 plot, 48 rhetoric, 1, 28, 200, 272, 280, 314 rhyme, 126 Rice, Emma, 5, 195, 203–4, 205, 207, 209 Rich, Adrienne, 94 Richards, I.A., Principles of Practical Criticism, 66 Ricks, Christopher, Dylan’s Visions of Sin, 340–2 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 3, 77, 144–5 Duino’s Elegies, 84 The Sonnets to Orpheus, 84 Rimbaud, Arthur, 82 Rivers, William, 296 Robson, Bryan, 285 rock music, 340, 341 Roe, Sue, Estella’s Expectations, 151 Romanticism, 9, 23, 160, 234 American Romanticists, 293 German Early Romantic poets, 3, 76, 78 ‘New Romanticism,’ 293, 294 and Raine, 97, 99, 103 and techne in artistic production, 129 and transcendental poetry, 78–83 rote‐learning, 59 Rousseau, Jean‐Jacques, 73 Rowley, William, 259, 267 Rowling, J.K., 304 Harry Potter, 14 Royal Shirley Company, 6 Rózewicz, Tadeusz, 343 Ruffo, Giordano, 183 Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children, 163 Ryan, Marie‐Laure, 44, 47, 55n10 Salviati, house of, 187, 189 Sanchez, Melissa, 204 Sartre, Jean‐Paul, 72, 138 What Is Literature? 71 Sassoon, Siegfried, 295, 296 on ‘good place,’ 289–91

The Old Century & seven more years of 1938, 7, 287–93, 297 Henley House, 289, 290 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 121, 124, 197 Savona, George, 195, 198 Scandinavia, prisoner‐centered rehabilitation programs, 252 Schechner, Richard, 236 Schiller, Friedrick, 1–2 Demetrius, 167 Wallenstein, 14 Schlegel, Friedrich, 78, 79–80, 82, 83, 88, 89, 136 Scholes, Robert, 147 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 138, 148n1, 148n2, 148n3 The Art of Literature, 135 science fiction, 158, 160, 161, 168, 172 Scott, Paul “Five Senses,” 223 “Tree,” 223 secondary education, 57–75 coursework, 68 drama, teaching of, 65 examination board requirements, 58 flipped learning, 72 impact of theory in, 61 inspirational teacher, 3 late twentieth‐century discrediting of “learning by heart,” 68 New Criticism, 66–9 “open‐book” examination, 67 pedagogical method, 72–3 performance and the classroom, 64–6 poetic spirit, nurturing, 58–61, 72 questioning and evaluative subjectivity, 69–72 school literature curriculum, 159–60 theory, 61–4 The Secret Agent (Conrad), 3, 46, 49–51 characters Stevie (Winnie’s mentally handicapped brother), 50, 52, 53, 54 Winnie Verloc, 50, 51, 52, 54 London depicted in, 50 narrative self‐reflection, 54 as a spy novel, 51 see also The Revenger’s Tragedy (Middleton) self‐consciousness, 79, 80, 292, 343

Index self‐reflection, 3, 54, 76, 77, 88–90, 146 semic code (Barthes), 127 semiology, 123 semiotics, 5, 46 and reading performance, 195, 197–8, 200, 201, 203, 209 sentiment, 20, 35, 71, 105, 305 aesthetic, 22 moral, 15, 45 natural, 21 Sexton, David, 152 sexuality, 27, 95, 137, 138, 255, 264, 309, 313, 337, 342 in The Lady of Pleasure (Shirley), 275–8, 280–4 see also The Lady of Pleasure (Shirley) and production analysis, 203 in Shakespeare’s plays, 63, 64, 204, 207, 208 and stereotypical feminine traits, 186 Shaftsbury, Lord (Antony Ashley‐Cooper), 1 Shakespeare, William, 259 androgyny in performance, 207–8 Cambridge School Shakespeare series, 65 difficult to understand, 307 dramatic corpus, 267, 268 enduring popularity of, 203 evaluating, 82 feminist criticism, 63 Globe Theatre, 199, 201–2, 203, 205, 206, 209 National Theatre, 199 Royal Shakespeare Company, 199 secular canon, as, 26 specific plays All’s Well That Ends Well, 254 Hamlet, 14, 60, 126 The History of Cardenio, 272 Julius Caesar, 272 King Lear, 26, 73 Macbeth, 73–4, 160, 272 Mark Antony and Cleopatra, 272 Measure for Measure, 65, 254 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A see Midsummer Night’s Dream, A (Shakespeare) Othello, 32, 62, 63–4, 261 Romeo and Juliet, 27, 266 Simon of Athens, 272 The Taming of the Shrew, 202

369

The Tempest, 61, 66, 157 Troilus and Cressida, 32 Twelfth Day, 272 works of, 59, 65, 160, 202, 204, 254, 272 androgyny in performance, 207–8 characters, 60 contemporary productions, 199 language, 27, 73, 234 loss of some plays, 272 non‐traditional directors of performance, 199 performance analysis, 198 “reading” versus “listening” to, 160 Shaw, George Bernard, 162 Sheen, Michael, 236 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein, 64 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 24, 64, 96, 99, 102 “Adonais,” 218 Shepherd, J., Music as Social Text, 340 Sheppard, Richard, 317 Shiban, Theresa, Soho Streets, 230 Shirley, James, 6, 259–86 animals, perceptions of, 274 and Charles I, 271–3, 285 and Charles III, 285–6 dramatic corpus, 267 dramatic skill, 268 dramaturgy, 260 on gambling, 273, 282 “The Glories of our Blood and State” (poem), 6 on hope for salvation, 284 importance in alternative literary history of Kingdom of Britain and Ireland, 6 The Lady of Pleasure, 6–7 Act One, 273–5 Act Two, 275–7 Act Three, 277–9 Act Four, 279–82 Act Five, 282–4 “last” professional dramatist, 269 perceived as a “fourth” best of genre, 268, 269 perceived as a second‐rate poet, 6, 267 plays of, 260, 261, 266, 269, 272, 286 The Cardinal, 259 The Constant Maid, 261 The Court Secret, 6, 260, 261–6

370 Index Shirley, James (cont’d) The Doubtful Heir, 261 The Lady of Pleasure see above Six New Plays, 260 reputation, 260 on sexuality, 275–8, 280–4 see also The Lady of Pleasure (Shirley) Shklovsky, Viktor, 76, 88, 121, 124 Showalter, Elaine, Teaching Literature, 64 Sibley, Frank, 28 sign‐language, 222, 223, 224 silence, performative notion of, 212–13 Siliceo, Ottaviano, 184 Simecek, Karen, 5 Sinfield, Alan, 198 Sitwell, Edith, 314 Skopos theory, 115 Smith, Patricia, Skinhead, 214 Snyder, Susan, 55n9 social realism, 3 Sofo, Giuseppe, 4 Solga, Kim, 199, 202 Solomon R. Guggenheim museum, New York, 250–1 Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr Isayevich, Cancer Ward, 161–2 Somers‐Willett, Somers, 214 Sontag, Susan, 136 space, 62, 206, 228 audience, 204 balanced use of, 223 confined, 163 educational, 253 for experimentation, 205 of incarceration, 243, 246 making, 209 meaning‐making, 223 narratives, 311 performance, 200, 201, 202, 216 and production analysis, 205 reading, 212 sacred, 99 and technology, 203 and time, 111, 139, 147, 195, 198, 201, 217, 290, 313, 321

white, 212 see also time Spectator, 152, 154 Spenser, Edmund, The Faerie Queen, 166 Squire, J.C., 317, 318, 319, 322 “The Man Who Wrote Free Verse,” 316 Stalin, Josef, 162 Stapleton, Frank, 285 Staten, Henry, 123 “The Origin of the Work of Art in Material Practice,” 129–30 “The Wrong Turn of Aesthetics,” 129 Stauffer, Donald, 307 Stein, Gertrude, 329 The Makings of Americans, 321 Steinbeck, John, The Grapes of Wrath, 300 Steiner, George, 135, 137 Stenning, Penelope, 5 Sterne, Laurence, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, 124, 174 Stewart, Susan, 218, 219 Stoppard, Tom, Arcadia, 49, 55n10 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 32 Structuralism, 121, 123–4, 125 style, as an evaluative focus, 331–9 iambic, octosyllabic lines, 334 malapropisms, 336 meshing of poetic devices and ordinary language, 334 rhymes and syntax, 333, 334 subjectivism, 4, 136 extreme, 20, 148 radical, 23 subjectivity, 2, 20, 72, 117, 122, 128, 129 of the critic, 150 evaluative, 69–72 of the reader, 72 reasoned, 3 see also intersubjectivity sublime, concept of, 1 substance monism, neo‐Spinozist, 245 Sullivan, H.W., The Beatles with Lacan, 340 “supermarket” fiction, 138, 147 Sutton‐Spence, Rachel, 223 Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels, 162

Index symbolic code (Barthes), 127 syntax, 126 taste, 94, 159, 309, 310, 339, 341 delicacy of, 21, 71 index for, 304, 305 judgments of, 19, 20 for language, 57 literary, 59, 303 middle‐class, 325 natural, 207 naturalizing of, 21, 22 personal, 21 poetry reading, 23 for realism, 306 shifts in, 24 standard of, 21, 71 and tact, 121 see also value judgments, literary Tate Modern, London, 250 Taylor, D.J., 4–5 Taylor, Gabriele, 142–3 Taylor, Joelle, C+NTO, 217 Taylor, Phillip, 227 Taylor, Thomas, 98 Teaching Matters, 60, 61, 62 technology, 205 Tegla, Emanuela, 4 Tegmark, Max, Life 3.0, 128, 131 Tempest, Kae, 212 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 340 theatrical performance, 200, 204, 206 audiences and reception theory, 201–2 and the classroom, 64–6 as a communal process, 196 cross‐gender, 207 deviation from original text, 202 and fiction, 231, 233, 238 fundamental function, 195 and intentions of writer, 196 as a live event that takes place in time and space, 198 mainstream versus applied theater, 227 marketing, 200 materialist conditions, 198–201

371

perception of English drama, 268–9 and political unconscious of texts, 197 politics, form and style, 202–3 processes for evaluating, 197–203 prohibition (1642–1660), 268, 269 proscenium arch theaters, 200 queer counterintimacies, 208 reasons for evaluating, 5, 195–6 reopening of theaters (1660), 268 selection process, 199 semiotics, 5, 46, 195, 197–8, 200, 201, 203, 209 theater architecture, 200 values and ideology, 196–7 working‐class versus middle‐class theaters, 202–3, 205, 234 works designed to be seen as well as read, 195 see also applied theater (AT); community theater; performance; performance poetry theory, 2, 7, 59, 61–4, 249, 340 anti‐theory, 165 assemblage, 250 cultural, 250 Epicurean, 15 fall of, 295 of four elements, 183, 184, 185 French, 121 of horsemanship, 179, 181, 183 immanentist theory of value, 61 impact in secondary education, 61 literary, 43, 76, 78, 136, 171, 293 neo‐Spinozist substance monism, 245 philosophical, 78 poetic, 80 of poetry, 223 and practice, 60 psychoanalytical, 15 queer, 62 reception, 5, 195 semiotic, 197 Skopos, 115 translation, 4, 110, 111, 113, 114 university, 65 Thomas, Dylan, 100, 101 Thomas, Edward, 70

372 Index Thomas, M. Wynn, 100 Thomas, Mickey, 285 Thomas‐Corr, Johanna, 153 Thompson, James, 234, 236 Thorpe, Michael, 288 Thribb, E.J., 319, 336, 337, 339 “Changing,” 319 time abstract topic of, 49–50 “the cavernous belly” of, 321 complex notions of, 49 historical, 137 and place, 162, 209, 286 real, 293 and space, 111, 139, 147, 195, 198, 201, 217, 290, 313, 321 suspension of, 50 test of, 20, 25 time frames, 199 uniformity across, 22 see also space Times Literary Supplement (TLS), 154 “To be Done with the Judgement of God” (1947 radio play by A. Artaud), 6, 243–56 Radiodiffusion Française (RDF), recorded on, 244–5 shelving a day before release, 244 see also Artaud, Antonin; Beyond Judgement (critical community engagement project); prison settings Tolkien, John Ronald Reuel, 173 The Hobbit, 161 The Lord of the Rings, 161 Tolstoy, Leo, 32, 59 The Living Corpse, 167 What is Art? 73 Tomaiuolo,Saverio, 166, 167–8, 174 Tonkin, Boyd, 153 tradition, and canonicity, 24 tragedy, 78, 157, 159, 283 classical, 33 collective, 126 the comic and the tragic, 48–9, 55n9 Doctor Faustus, 284 enjoyment of, 77 failure of, 37

Greek, 247 human condition, 311 personal, 126 private, 309 and recognition, 43 revenge tragedies, 47 tragicomedies, 260, 261, 264, 336 transcendental poetry, 78–83 translation, evaluating, 110–19 acceptability standards, 115 aesthetics, 116 appreciation of, 117 criticism, 112 equivalence concept, 114, 116, 117 “good” or “bad” translation, 113 history of translation, 113, 116 post‐translation analysis, 116 process of evaluation, 110 quality, 110–16 concept of, 114 real‐world criteria, 115 and reflection, 111, 114 role of evaluation in translation, 117 seen only as “copy” of the original, 112 Skopos theory, 115 studies and cultural studies, 115, 116 cultural turn, 116 descriptive, 115 linguistics‐oriented form, 114 and postcolonial studies, 115–16 theories and practices, 116 theory, 4, 110, 111, 113, 114 “untranslatability,” 112 value of translation, 111–12 travel reading, 159 Trotsky, Leon, 61–2 Literature and Revolution, 61 truth, 45, 59, 98 in applied theater, 237, 238 and defining of literature, 83–8 literary works, 84, 85, 87 denial, 148n3 and literary value, 8, 25, 30 humanly relevant matters, 136, 138, 144, 146, 147

Index and Modernism, 302, 314, 319, 320, 327 rewriting, 160 spiritual, 99 as “unconcealedness,” 85 see also knowledge; reality Turgenev, Ivan, 147 Turing, Alan, “Intelligent machinery, A Heretical Theory,” 132 Turner, William, 236, 237 From Ritual to Theatre, 231 Tzara, Tristan, "To Make a Dadaist Poem,” 317 Ulysses (Joyce), 300–6, 314, 320 abandoning coherence in, 302 alleged indecency, 310 characterization of Leopold Bloom, 309–10, 311 Dublin life, depiction of, 310 prose, 310 puzzles in, 309 transformation into a classic, 323 unconscious, 60, 240 Freud on, 14 political unconscious of texts, 197 unfinished works, 166–78 novels, 5, 167–8 Parable of the Trickster (Butler) see Parable of the Trickster (Butler’s unfinished work) poetics of process, concept, 173–6 unique biographical significance, 171–3 “Unlocking the Value” report (2011), 252 Updike, John, 151 Valéry, Paul, 85 value aesthetic, 37 and ethical criticism, 31–8 and interests, 13–14 and interpretation, 29–30 literary see literary value(s) social and cultural, 236–7 value judgments, literary, 8–10, 20, 22 see also taste values artistic, 16 ethical, 3

373

and ideology, 196–7 intrinsic and instrumental, 15–17, 19 literary see literary value(s) production, underpinning, 195–211 Van Claster, Patrick, 250 Van Doren, Mark, 306–7, 308 Van Hulle, Dirk, 174 Van Peer, Willie, 27, 138–9 Vanderschelden, Isabelle, 113 Venuti, Lawrence, The Translator’s Invisibility, 115 Verkenntniseffekt (recognition), 238 Vermeer, 254 Vernon, John, 184 The Young Horse‐man, 182 verse, 69, 320 ambiguous, 275 avant‐garde, 307 blank, 159, 274 complex, of Yeats, 314 Dadaist, 316 elegance of, 343 exploring unique capacities of the mind through, 344 formal structures of, 339 free see free verse Imagist‐style, 307, 318 mastery of, 274 Modernist, 317 new forms, 116 Polish, 343 and prose, 163 syllables, 280 writing in French, 278 see also poetry Von Hallberg, Robert, 215 von Hofmannsthal, Hugo, Letter of Lord Chandos, 84 Waiting for Godot (Beckett), 163, 323–4 Wallace, David Foster, The Pale King, 166, 168, 171, 176 Wallen, James, 167, 168 Walsh, Richard, 45, 46, 55n11 War on Terror, 175 Warhol, Andy, 337 Wark, John, 285

374 Index Warner, Michael, 208 Warren, Robert Penn, Understanding Poetry, 66 The Waste Land (Eliot), 24, 94–6, 100 allusion‐laded obscurities in, 307 “The Fire Sermon” passage, 312–13 Tiresias, portrayal of, 312–14 Watkins, Vernon, 100, 101 Waugh, Auberon, 152 Decline and Fall, 151 Webster, John, 259, 267 Wells, H.G. The Time Machine, 160 The War of the Worlds, 160 Werth, Paul, “Roman Jakobson’s Verbal Analysis of Poetry,” 332 Westminister bomb attack (1605), 271 Wheeler, Lesley, Voicing American Poetry, 216 White, Gareth, 229, 230 Whitman, Walter, 307, 308, 333 Wilde, Oscar, 1, 3, 84, 90, 151, 154, 162 Wilder, Ken, 220, 221 Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Goethe), 82–3 Williams, Raymond, 229 Williams, William Carlos, 319 “To A Poor Old Woman,” 338–9 “This Is Just To Say,” 337 Wimsatt, W.K., 216 “The Intentional Fallacy,” 163 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 88, 89, 345 Wójick‐Leese, Elżbieta, 115 Wolfe, Thomas, 323 Wolff, Janet, 240 Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 163 Wood, James, 138, 152 The Fun Stuff and Other Essays, 342 Woolf, Virginia, 9, 300, 310 Mrs Dalloway, 311 The Waves, 311

Wordsworth, William, 58, 60, 94, 97, 341, 342 The Lyrical Ballads, 72 works of art, 30 aesthetic defects in, 37 assessing as good or bad, 163 collecting, preserving and exhibiting, 250 creativity and criticism, 76 everyday life, depicting, 78 existence of, 16 Hellenistic approach to, 78 imitation, 77 and intentionality, 70 judging, 254 knowledge provided by, 78 literary, 15 merited response, 36 mythology as, 79 quality, 77 reading as literature, 15 recognition of, 37–8 and reflection, 83 and teaching, 59, 158 in their own right, 164 types, 73 value of, 11, 15, 133 as literature or as art, 13 particular interests, 13–14 see also art; literary works Wynn, Thomas M., 100–1 Yeats, William Butler, 314 “Easter 1916,” 162, 335 Young Farmers’ Clubs of Ulster (YFCU), Tyrone, Rose Bowl (drama competition final), 226–7, 240, 241 Zen, Anania, 185 Zukofsky, Louis, 215

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