Literature and Truth : Imaginative Writing As a Medium for Ideas [1 ed.] 9789004356856, 9789004356849

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Literature and Truth

Costerus New Series Editors C.C. Barfoot (Leiden University, The Netherlands) Michael Boyden (Uppsala University, Sweden) Theo D’haen (Leuven University, Belgium)

VOLUME 222

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/cos

Literature and Truth Imaginative Writing as a Medium for Ideas By

Richard Lansdown

LEIDEN | BOSTON

Cover illustration: Ian Fairweather, (Snake charmer) c.1949, Gouache, ink and watercolour, 21.5 x 17.5cm (sight), Purchased 2007. Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery. © Ian Fairweather/DACS. Licensed by Viscopy. The Library of Congress control number is LCCN: 2017043603

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 0165-9618 isbn 978-90-04-35684-9 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-35685-6 (e-book) Copyright 2018 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

He who cannot get rid of a thought is so far only man, is a thrall of language, this human institution, this treasury of human thoughts. Language or ‘the word’ tyrannizes hardest over us, because it brings up against us a whole army of fixed ideas. Just observe yourself in the act of reflection, at this moment, and you will find how you make progress only by becoming thoughtless and speechless every moment. You are not thoughtless and speechless merely in sleep, but even in the deepest reflection; yes, precisely, then most so. And only by this thoughtlessness, this un-recognized ‘freedom of thought’ or freedom from the thought, are you your own. Only from it do you arrive at putting language to use as your property. max stirner, The Ego and its Own

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for Angela

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Contents Preface and Acknowledgements ix

Part 1 1 “Nothing Affirms and Therefore Never Lieth”: Cognitive and Non-cognitive Accounts of Imaginative Literature 3 2 “The Birthplace of Truth”: Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis 38

Part 2 3 The Printed Medium: Wordsworth and Books 53 4 Stoicism and Christianity: Byron’s Don Juan 74 5 Evangelicalism and Evolution: James Montgomery’s Pelican Island 96 6 Tragedy and Evolution: Hardy’s The Woodlanders 117 7 Humanism and After: Ibsen’s Little Eyolf 137 8 Politics and Art: James Kelman’s Not Not While the Giro 158 9 From the Other Shore: Bronislaw Malinowski’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term 181 Conclusion 201 Bibliography 211 Index 221

Preface and Acknowledgements “If the essays which follow do not compose a book, collecting resonance from one another,” Stanley Cavell wrote in the foreword to Must We Mean What We Say?, “nothing I can say in introducing them will alter that fact.” “Publishing a volume of essays is an exercise with narcissistic overtones”, E.A. Wrigley confessed in the introduction to People, Cities, and Wealth: “It is difficult not to feel that some justification for such a venture is required.” If doyens of contemporary philosophy and demographic history experience misgivings of this kind, how should I presume to draw this set of studies to the reader’s attention? But let me overcome my bashfulness, complete Wrigley’s opening paragraph, and say as he did that “In this introduction I shall suggest that, despite their apparent diversity, the essays in this volume are all related to a common theme which gives them intellectual coherence.”

…

This book is a collection of studies into the presence and activity of discursive ideas or bodies of thought (religious, philosophical, scientific, political, even literary-critical in so far as tragedy is subject of discourse as well as a dramatic form) in works of imaginative literature. But they have a history that must be recounted if they are to collect resonance and illuminate a common theme. In 2001 I published a book called The Autonomy of Literature. It was a mildly polemical account of the attitudes to imaginative literature to be found in three groups of scholars: some North American philosophers (Richard Rorty, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Martha Nussbaum), some psychoanalysts (Freud himself, but also the Object Relations school, specifically the Kleinian analyst Hanna Segal), and some theorists of history (on the one hand students of historiography such as Hayden White and Paul Ricoeur, and on the other some members of the New Historicist literary-critical school). In seeking to coopt imaginative literature to projects of their own each group in some way or another misunderstood its autonomy in my view. The philosophers sought to reduce literary works to moral-philosophical meditations (which is one of the things they are, certainly); the psychoanalysts sought to reduce them to the expression of psychological impulses such as wish-fulfilment (which is one of the things they may be, ditto); and the two historical groups collapsed the distinction between literature and history either by arguing that both forms of writing were inherently fictional, or by arguing that the most significant element

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in literature was its relation to its original historical context (that is to say that both groups occupied extreme positions each containing a grain of truth).1 The study also devoted space to Jacques Derrida’s general idea and sense of literature. By no means could Derrida be accused of fairly transparent intellectual stratagems of the kind I have just described. On the contrary, I concluded that he possessed a lively sense of literature as a distinct form of human communication; only that at the theoretical level he tended to overplay the power of institutional “contamination” over literature (opposed, binary-opposition style, to some notional “purity” that Platonic and quasi-Platonic thinkers— including the twentieth-century American New Critics, for example—might wish to accord it or be said to have done), and that at the practical level his sense of individual works of imaginative literature was accordingly often enough a un-responsive and over-determinative one: a lecture on Joyce’s Ulysses being a case in point. Rather than deconstruct the purity/contamination dialectic he had discovered, Derrida preferred to occupy one side of it, ramping up (and up, and up) the contaminatory influences that made literature a matter institutional influence, and failing to see how books like Ulysses can in fact meet, controvert, and convert such influences in the name of dramatic truth. The study attempted to defend literature from such approaches absolutely not by locking it up like Rapunzel or the Lady of Shalott in a tower high above the plains of Deconstruction, moral thinking, psychological impulse, and historical event. It was never its intention either to stop or prevent philosophers, psychologists, and historians from thinking about literature: heaven forbid. Demonstrably works of imaginative literature are part of moral discourse, are the product of psychological impulse, and are historical artifacts. Rather it argued that autonomy is best seen, in poems as in persons, in terms of the activity of an agent, and that the activity of imaginative literature like Ulysses lay precisely in going out to explore the moral, the psychological, and the historical, and to transform them in the process, within itself, by virtue of the inseparably aesthetic and intellectual forces and developments it unleashed—on the author, first and foremost, and on the reader in due course. “It is this capacity to 1 A mistake in the book, I now realize, was to assume that New Historicism was interested in history, as its name would suggest. But in fact it shows little interest either in historians’ work, as such (with the exception of Michel Foucault), or in the trends across time that historians invariably analyze in doing what they do. In fact New Historicism is an anthropological grouping, not a neo-historical one: it draws its inspiration from Clifford Geertz and his version of Gilbert Ryle’s “thick description”, as Stephen Greenblatt has made clear on numerous occasions. The texts it studies are “historical”, generally speaking, in the sense of being old; but they are regarded as non-historical cultural isolates.

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hatch and generate unexpected patterns of meaning”, I suggested, “that allows works of literature to transform institutional or ‘contaminatory’ pressure and influence.”2 Like any other work of art worth embarking upon and bringing to a conclusion, a work of imaginative literature will always unleash developments of this kind, as if it had a will of its own, by realizing, embodying, and reflecting that which the author brings to it and sees there for the first time. Take a great Victorian novel, for example: Jane Eyre may have existed in near relation to the actual seedbed of intellectual discussion in mid nineteenth-century England; it may be a form of “moral commentary”, comparable to Diderot or Kierkegaard; it may even be a continuation of and substitute for the play of childhood…. It may be true that the dangerous supplement means that nothing said in the novel can be in identical relation to anything outside it and that as a direct result it can never achieve moral, ontological, or epistemological closure, that it uses strategies of linguistic figuration which other storytelling animals (like historians) also employ, that in it Brontë faced and expressed her depression, that it is an Aristotelian enquiry into the richness and diversity of the positive commitments of a good person living in a world of uncontrolled happening, and so on. But the most important thing about the book—for Charlotte Brontë even more than for us her readers—is that it constitutes an experience in itself: shattering, confusing, exasperating, enthralling, humiliating, building up and laying waste to the innumerable influences converging on it, undoing and enforcing the categories and hierarchies of everyday understanding that underpin it only when and if it does become an experience in itself, and only by doing so becoming one. When a critic, or a school, or a mode or mood of criticism goes further than merely presenting and pursuing a special interest, but in doing so denies such processes … they have arrested the interest of literature at its source. That having been done the critic discovers a kind of terra nullius. Anything can be done there, and any line of enquiry can swell to dominate the horizon, but the context which gives such things real meaning and substance is absent. Anything can be said about the body in front of you, but nothing you can say will bring it back to life. (214–15)

2 Richard Lansdown, The Autonomy of Literature (Houndmills: Macmillan, 2001), 211; cited in parenthesis below.

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I also suggested that it was practically impossible to theorize this process of imaginative supposal and transformation, since every instance of it is inherently specific precisely because of the multifarious and competing moral, psychological, and historical forces that converge on it to be transfigured. “Starting with the kinds of institutional claims made by Jacques Derrida”, I wrote, the ideas of literature offered by some philosophers, psychoanalysts, and theorists of history have been criticized, whereas nothing has been offered in the place of such ideas but an inherent propensity to evasion without which literature would hardly exist: what might otherwise be called intractability, lability, “mobility”, or inexhaustiveness. (202) “We cannot say”, I went on, how literature “generally”, or “theoretically”, or “normally”, or even “typically” makes the transformations it does to the claims made upon it by other areas of human research or activity, because literature can only make such transformations uniquely, occasionally, and individually. (203) “Opportunistically”, I might have added, such is imaginative literature’s zest for such collisions. Literature does not shy away from institutional contamination, or from history, psychology, and ideas, generally speaking—as we shall see in the chapters that follow. It positively seizes upon such things, often enough in a scandalously heedless and voracious way (as philosophers often see the process, anyway). Such “contaminations” are meat and drink to it, as an activity; digesting them is what literature does.

…

The Autonomy of Literature incubated for nearly ten years. During that period and since, I have published standard research articles, generally on nineteenthcentury literature, specifically on Romanticism: on Frankenstein, The Pickwick Papers, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Don Juan, The Prelude, The Voyage of the Beagle, Disraeli, Byron in Russia, and Romanticism in Australia and the Pacific, for example. But even before The Autonomy of Literature was published, and increasingly in the last five years, I have published essays with broader perspectives, relating always to the central theme of that book: the capacity of imaginative literature to hatch and generate unexpected patterns of meaning that allow works of literature to transform institutional or “contaminatory” pressure and influence. An article on Wordsworth’s attitude to books was one

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such; then a string of essays about “contaminatory” ideas in conflict: in Byron’s Don Juan, in the obscure early nineteenth-century Evangelical poet James Montgomery, in Thomas Hardy and his fascination with roads, in Ibsen’s attitude to humanism in Little Eyolf, and in James Kelman’s magnificent collection of short stories from 1983, Not Not While the Giro. There was also one more essay in which, as it were, the process was reversed: in which, rather than discursive ideas infesting imaginative literature, imaginative literature infested the private diary of a great social scientist, Bronislaw Malinowski, with some positive implications for his anthropological thinking. Hopefully these essays were of use to specialists in such fields, just as my common-or-garden literarycritical or literary-historical essays were intended to be. But in my mind they were always connected to the arguments carried out in the book on literary autonomy and so, encountered together, I hope they constitute something more than a set of merely discrete discussions. Hopefully in this guise and arrangement they do “resonate” and do amount to a holistic study into how—in practice rather than in theory—imaginative literature can serve as a unique and inter-actional medium for discursive ideas, paradigms, and bodies of thought. I see now that the chapters below are necessarily related to a larger issue: as to whether imaginative literature is a truth-bearing medium in the way that philosophy, history, and the sciences are intended or understood to be. If imaginative literature plays host to discursive ideas, and if those ideas are truthbearing (albeit in differing degrees: the demonstrable, controvertible, and translatable truths of evolution are different to the truths of, say, Christianity or socialism), does this bear on the question of truth in imaginative literature, per se? This is an oceanic debate, and I have no intention of rehearsing it in its totality, even if I could. But the first chapter of the book will constitute a raid on the philosophical discussion of this concern—literary-critical discussion of it being in fairly short supply, for reasons that will become clear. The second will use the work of another philosopher to contextualize that discussion and open it up, because philosophy often and understandably takes certain things for granted in its approach.

…

“‘See the Shell of the Flown Bird!’: Wordsworth and Books” and “Byron’s Relativism” were published under my editorship in the Critical Review in 1996 and 1997, respectively. “James Montgomery’s Pelican Island: Imagination, Religion, Evolution” was published in the Wordsworth Circle in 2014; “Opening The Woodlanders: The Road in Thomas Hardy, as Tragic and Evolutionary Convergence” was published in the Thomas Hardy Journal in 2013; “A ‘Nødvendighetens

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Skinn’?: The Conclusion of Ibsen’s Lille Eyolf and Its Meaning” was published in Scandinavica in 2016; “Politics and Art: James Kelman’s Not Not While the Giro” was published in the Scottish Literary Review in 2014; and “Crucible or Centrifuge?: Bronislaw Malinowski’s Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term” was published in Configurations in 2014. They have all been substantially revised for collection here, but I have not gone out of my way to revisit the scholarship surrounding the now somewhat aged Wordsworth and Byron chapters, for the reason given above, that the essays concerned have transited out of the local scholarship to which they once were intended to contribute into a more theoretical zone. I am grateful to Marilyn Gaull (at the Wordsworth Circle), Phillip Mallett (at the Thomas Hardy Review), Christine Alexander (at Scandinavica), Gerry Caruthers (at the Scottish Literary Review), and Melissa Littlefield and Rajani Sudan (at Configurations) for permission to reprint—even though sometimes, strictly speaking, no permission was required. Thanks for their blessings, then! Thanks also to Roger Scruton, who sent me two unpublished essays— “Imagination and Truth” and “Poetry and Truth”—referred to below. The anonymous reader at Brill gave me perhaps the most searching as well as most constructive such review of my career: I hope I have been able to make proper use of it. I thank the editors of the Costerus series for their continued support. Masja Horn has been a wonderful commissioning editor, as always, and I thank her and the rest of the team at Brill. Finally—and staying in The ­Netherlands— special thanks to John Flood, Corey Gibson, Ann Hoag, Hans Jansen, Tekla ­Mecsnober, ­Sebastian Sobecki, Irene Visser, Kees de Vries, and Gerry ­Wakker, who have made me feel so welcome in my new roost at the ­Moderne ­Letterkunde at Groningen. Appelscha, Friesland, September 2017

Part 1

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chapter 1

“Nothing Affirms and Therefore Never Lieth”: Cognitive and Non-cognitive Accounts of Imaginative Literature We shall chant, therefore, that this poetry is not to be taken seriously, as though it were a solemn performance that had to do with truth, but that who hears it is to keep watch on it, fearful for the city in his soul…. plato, The Republic, Book x

Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information. ludwig wittgenstein, Zettel, ¶ 160

What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the Camelion poet. john keats, 27 October 1818

“It is notoriously difficult”, Joseph Margolis wrote forty years ago, “to define the boundaries of such large and lively interests as the scientific, the moral, and the aesthetic.” Indeed “one may very well question the notion of discovering the difference between the scientific, the moral, and the aesthetic. What would such a discovery be like? It seems fairly clear that the distinctions would prove to be some philosopher’s proposal, not a discovery at all.”1 The highest value we can employ in defining the boundaries between these intellectual realms— though not the only one—is truth. Because this book involves the presence of truth-bearing ideas or paradigms in the aesthetic area of imaginative literature, and because philosophy—witness Margolis’s title: “philosophy looks at the arts”—has a central role in defining what truth may be, I must consider some “philosophers’ proposals” on the matter before setting out the case studies that are its core. The baldest thing a philosopher can propose about art is to say that it is a “no-truth” activity: that art bears either no relation or an antithetical one to

1 Joseph Margolis (ed.), Philosophy Looks at the Arts: Contemporary Readings in Aesthetics, rev. edn (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1978), 1.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004356856_002

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the truths of science, history, and philosophy itself. This is a debatable position and philosophers in aesthetics and epistemology have accordingly debated it. Indeed as Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen remark “the topic of ‘truth in art’ is … one which has acquired a certain staleness after so many centuries of wearisome to-ing and fro-ing.”2 If philosophers have plodded on regardless, literary theorists have as often as not solved the issue and cut the Gordian knot by asserting that there is no truth in anything, so the question hardly arises. “Current support among literary theorists for ‘no-truth’ theories of literature”, Lamarque and Olsen go on (3), “derives far more from a fashionable scepticism about truth and reality (there is no such thing as truth, the world, objectivity, self-expression, etc.) than from a clear conception of literature itself.” Some post-structuralist thinkers have leant intellectual credibility to literary theory on this score: there is that most modish of philosophers, Richard Rorty, for example, and his view that “there is nothing beyond vocabularies which serves as a criterion of choice between them”.3 But literary theorists have certainly been capable of building mountains out of molehills such as these. Under the intellectual auspices of structuralism, according to Terry Eagleton, It was impossible any longer to see reality simply as something “out there”, a fixed order of things which language merely reflected. On that assumption, there was a natural bond between word and thing, a given set of correspondences between the two realms. Our language laid bare for us how the world was, and this could not be questioned. This rationalist or empiricist view of language suffered severely at the hands of structuralism: for if, as Saussure had argued, the relation between sign and referent was an arbitrary one, how could any “correspondence” theory of knowledge stand? Reality was not reflected by language but produced by it: it was a particular way of carving up the world which was deeply dependent on the sign-systems we had at our command, or more precisely which had us at theirs.4 Lamarque and Olsen’s summary of this passage (and the miscomprehension of Saussure on which it depends) is withering:

2 Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature: A Philosophical Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), vi–vii; cited in parenthesis below. 3 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 80. 4 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), 107–08.

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The world (reality) is organized through human linguistic systems: there is therefore no independently existing reality to which language refers (non sequitur). Since there is no real independently existing world to which language can refer, all uses of language are identical with fictional language (non sequitur). Literature being a type of discourse or language use is therefore fiction (false conclusion). (277) “All writing involves some degree of rhetorical contrivance”, certainly. “There is no pure unmediated representation of extra-linguistic fact; there are other purposes served by words than merely describing how things are in the world” and therefore “it is no wonder that anti-realist tendencies in philosophy have struck a chord with many literary theorists.” (171.) But Theory went much further than that in making hay of assumptions hardly anyone assumed (a “natural bond between word and thing”, for example, which is philosophically a nondescript and impossibility), by adding semantic anti-realism to epistemological scepticism in order to claim that there is no difference between truth and fiction. So it was that some traditionalist literary critics, in Lamarque and Olsen’s view, mistakenly sought to defend “truth in literature” arguments when they should instead have concentrated their fire on Theory’s anti-realist sophistries (321–22). The tyro-days of Theory are long gone. But anti-realist views persist in literary studies—albeit in a mostly unexamined way—and so it is partly for historical reasons that literary theory continues to take so small a part in the debates philosophers continue to have about truth and cognition in art in general and in imaginative literature in particular.5 This is a shame. Truth is our highest intellectual value as beauty is our highest sensuous one, and literary scholars certainly should be involved in discussing both. Critics and philosophers are notoriously antagonistic. Philosophers quickly lose patience with critics’ woeful skills in argument and demonstration just as critics quickly lose interest in philosophers’ vile passion for abstraction. But critics and philosophers have come together successfully in the last thirty years or so on questions related to moral philosophy and literature, and literary scholars certainly should be able 5 If literary theorists suppress the question of artistic truth on the basis of anti-realist scepticism, philosophers can get scared off it on the other side of the net. “In the present state of this aesthetics,” T.J. Diffey wrote, in the Götterdämmerung of the Theory boom, “philosophers are nervous about claiming anything distinctive for art for fear of incurring the charge of essentialist thinking.” (“What Can We Learn from Art?” 26, in Stephen Davies (ed.), Art and Its Messages: Meaning, Morality, and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1997), 26–33.) “Essentialism” was a hanging offence in those days.

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to provide some finer grain to issues in aesthetics in a similar spirit—as I hope the discussions to come may demonstrate. If we can overcome wholesale and sometimes unreflective philosophical anti-realism we may find ourselves reopening a venerable and central issue in the nature of literature, going back to its source, in the West at least; and if we can re-open that tradition this time in concert with colleagues in philosophy, our discussion will be better informed. i

Literature Amidst the Arts: Plato to the Romantics

The fount and origin of “no-truth” arguments about art, needless to say (and rightly or wrongly, it should be stressed: his views are open to interpretation), is Plato, whose objections have been comprehensively summarized by Iris Murdoch. Art “apes the spiritual and subtly disguises and trivializes it”; artists “play irresponsibly with religious imagery which … should be critically controlled by the internal, or external, authority of reason”, and “obscure the enlightening power of thought and skill by aiming at plausibility rather than truth”. Art “delights in unsavoury trivia” and “through buffoonery and mockery weakens moral discrimination”. The artist represents “only what is daemonic and fantastic and extreme; whereas truth is quiet and sober and confined”. Art is sophistry, “whose fake ‘truthfulness’ is a subtle enemy of virtue”; the irony it habitually employs is necessarily also “the enemy of dialectic”. It “makes us content with appearances” and “steals the educational wonder of the world away from philosophy”; thus it “confuses our sense of direction toward reality and our motives for discerning it”. It “localizes the intelligence which should be bent upon righting the proportions of the whole of life”. Art objects are “pseudo-objects completed by a fantasizing mind in its escape from reality”, and art therefore “prevents the salvation of the whole man by offering a pseudospirituality and plausible imitation of direct intuitive knowledge (vision, presence), a defeat of the discursive intelligence at the bottom of the scale of being, not at the top.” It is “a false presence and a false present”; “its pleasures are impure and indefinite and secretly in league with egoism.” The autonomy of art “is a sham, a false transcendence, a false imitation of another world” and “a magical substitute for philosophy, an impure mediator professing to classify and explain reality”. In sum: Art practises a false degenerate anamnesis where the veiled something which is sought and found is no more than a shadow out of the private store-room of the personal unconscious. The work of art may even be thought of as a pernicious caricature of the Form, as the Form was

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originally conceived, the pure daemonic particular, timeless, radiant, reality-bestowing, separate, directly knowable, and unique.6 Well: it is hard to imagine many human activities picking themselves back up after a thrashing like this. No wonder a person holding such views regarded “arguments about poetry” as the intellectual equivalent of “provincial drinking parties” (Protagoras, 347 c). But before turning to what Dorothy Walsh calls “briefs for the defense”7 there is one act of ground-clearing we can undertake, which is that imaginative literature has a special status among the arts, not because it is some sort of “senior service” by grace and favour, like the Royal Navy, but for genuinely intelligible reasons. First and foremost, “in literature we are not confronted directly with a sensuous percept” as we are in art and music.8 Every Mona Lisa we look at except the one in the Louvre is a copy, but Shakespeare’s fifty-fifth sonnet really does “dwell in lovers’ eyes” in paperbacks the world over as exactly the same artifact that he originally produced. Even a manuscript, were one to emerge, would be no more “original”—would have no higher status as a work of literature, regardless of its financial value—than the poem I can photocopy down the corridor. And literature’s medium is language, which is infinitely reproducible as an original, can produce a sensuous impression only at second hand, imaginatively, and which is, furthermore, the medium of logical and rational thought as well the expression of emotion. “Since its normal material is language, and language is … the medium of discourse,” Susanne Langer writes, “it is always possible to look at a literary work as an assertion of facts and opinions, that is, as a piece of discursive symbolism functioning in the usual communicative way.”9 No one would say such a thing of Lohengrin or Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. Wagner and Picasso communicate any number of things but not in the “usual communicative way”, which is linguistic. Music has a language, it is true, but every time a piece of music is conveyed to its listeners it is conveyed uniquely in terms of the instruments used and interpretation offered: it cannot be otherwise. Just as there is only one original Mona Lisa there is no original Choral Symphony and no final one either, whereas Sonnet 55 is infinitely archetypal 6 Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 65–67. 7 Dorothy Walsh, Literature and Knowledge (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 17. 8 John Hospers, Meaning and Truth in the Arts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1946), 119. 9 Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 208.

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and (give or take the odd editorial emendation) infinitely definitive, too.10 “It is not easy to make the case”, Peter Lamarque writes, “that the value of a Schubert string quartet, a Brancusi sculpture, a Zen rock garden, a Frank Lloyd Wright house, a Merce Cunningham dance, or a Bridget Riley painting, lies even partially in what truths these works can teach.”11 This is a somewhat tendentious list, as the reader can discover by substituting Rodin for Brancusi or Delacroix for Bridget Riley, but the point remains that in literature the case for “truths in art” will be more persuasive, prima facie, and harder to dislodge than such cases might be in the sister-arts—though “truths these works can teach” is perhaps an unfortunate way of putting it. Indeed, “novels, unlike sculptures and symphonies, seem as if they must yield truths”.12 Going along with this it has seemed to many philosophers (and literary critics) that literature is more tied to historical reality than the other arts are. “It will seem at least initially more plausible”, T.J. Diffey argues, “to suppose that we can learn more about history, society, life, from literature rather than from music, say.”13 John Hospers spoke of the “life-values”, “life-meanings”, and “lifecomponent” (as opposed to “form-component”) in literature and suggested that “the author … must know of persons, things, ideas, feelings, facts, to a degree unparalleled by the artists in the other media.”14 This is a strong claim— perhaps too strong. Related to it is Dorothy Walsh’s view that literature can do it all, as it were, because “language can evoke the sensuous, the emotional, and the intellectual, with equal facility”, and that “even a relatively simple work of literature embraces a greater diversity of different kinds of things—of elements derived from different levels or domains of experience—than could be accommodated in a work of nonlinguistic art.”15 Clearly we could drift off into un-quantifiables here, but the general point about literature sharing a medium with discursive thought is surely sound. Nor should the other arts necessarily feel snubbed or short-changed in this regard. It was a poet who wrote, about his Grecian urn:

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Of course there are cases where significantly different versions of imaginative works exist: the Quarto and Folio versions of King Lear, for example. But such cases remain rare. 11 Peter Lamarque, “Cognitive Values in the Arts: Marking the Boundaries”, 127–28, in ­Matthew Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art ­(Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 127–39. 12 Lamarque and Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature, vii. 13 Diffey, “What Can We Learn from Art?” 27. 14 Hospers, Meaning and Truth in the Arts, 117, 120, 122–23. 15 Walsh, Literature and Knowledge, 36.

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Thou still unravished bride of quietness, Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, Sylvan historian, who canst thus express A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme! As Keats does here literature often envies the other arts’ plasticity and immediacy: being able to hit one sense to the exclusion of others—through the organs of sight, sound, and touch—often seems a far greater gift than to be able to hit them all but hit them only indirectly, and the only-begotten uniqueness of works of fine art compared to works of literature piled high in bookshops (including second-hand ones) and libraries is a vital part of their impact and their value. So my “briefs for the defense” involve literature rather than art at large—and of course Plato himself was greatly exercised by Homer and those who offered to interpret him. The greatest such brief was based in literature, so that it could well be said that in the Poetics Aristotle—“a grandsire of cognitivism”16 as he has been called—inaugurated literary criticism just as Plato inaugurated literary theory. Aristotle’s defence turned to art in action and to drama in the theatre to describe a fundamentally reasonable activity in which audience members spent their time ultimately making psychological and moral comparisons between their personal experience (real or imaginative) and what they witnessed on the stage, with broadly educational understandings of thought and character being the result. If that was the day-to-day outcome of exposure to the arts Plato’s objections could perhaps be headed off as at least somewhat exaggerated. The historian describes what has happened, the poet what might happen; but as the entire process was governed by the principles of plausibility (which could descend into matters of detail like the three unities) nothing was likely to get out of hand. (Horace Walpole defined history as “a species of romance that is believed” and romance as “a species of history that is not believed”; but such ideas were clearly mischievous.) Besides which, poetry might yield universal truths by such means whereas historians were bound to particular facts. The Aristotelian principle of observing the linguistic arts in practice and being pragmatic about their intellectual effects on people has spawned any number of related defences, from the humdrum to the high-faluting: from Horace combining the giving of pleasure with some useful precepts for life, through Pope’s what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed, to Shelley’s 16

Jerome Stolnitz, “On the Cognitive Triviality of Art”, 194, British Journal of Aesthetics, 32:3 (July 1992), 191–200.

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unacknowledged legislators of mankind. After Aristotle, too, much continued to be made of the stage in particular and whether theatrical presentation (which elides the written or printed text and takes the high road to palpable realism in doing so) could ever be taken by its audience to be true. In the English critical tradition at least, the results of such enquiries might generally have reassured Plato. “What child is there that, coming to a play, and seeing ‘Thebes’ written in great letters upon an old door,” Sir Philip Sidney asked, “doth believe that it is Thebes?”17 Samuel Johnson followed suit in his preface to Shakespeare: “if the spectator can be once persuaded, that his old acquaintance are Alexander and Caesar, that a room illuminated with candles is the plain of Pharsalia, or the bank of Granicus, he is in a state of elevation above the reach of reason, or of truth”—and evidently the spectator is in no such state. “It is false, that any representation is mistaken for reality; than any dramatick fable in its materiality was ever credible, or, for a single moment, was ever credited.”18 Plato is to be placated by pointing out the obvious: that no one for one instant believes any of this is true, and therefore art poses no threat to the intellectual status quo. But sometimes such discussions open up channels with different implications. We may not mistake the Globe for the plain of Pharsalia but the situation is more complicated than Sidney and Johnson between them suggest, and it is Sidney’s “Defence of Poesy” that is accordingly the most interesting in the language—and in certain respects a more imaginative document than the rest of his output, Astrophil and Stella included. Just when Sidney seems to have dotted his is and crossed his ts on the matter of poetic truth something unexpected rears its cognitive head. The poet “nothing affirms, and therefore never lieth” for “to lie is to affirm that to be true which is false” and the poet is not in the market for truth. “The poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to believe for true what he writes … and therefore, though he recount things not true, yet because he telleth them not for true, he lieth not” (34). So far so good; but if Plato had read the entire piece we must imagine he would not have been reassured at all. The philosopher is a source of precepts, the historian a source of examples. “But both, not having both, do both halt.” (15.) Poetry can perfectly combine precepts and examples and so in fact “of all sciences is our poet the monarch” (22), much as Shelley would go on to suggest in his defence of poetry in 1820. Sidney takes the Horatian idea of buttering up some useful precepts with pleasure into the moral and intellectual 17 18

Gavin Alexander (ed.), Sidney’s “The Defence of Poesy” and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (London: Penguin, 2004), 34; cited in parenthesis below. Arthur Sherbo (ed.), Johnson on Shakespeare (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 77, 76.

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equivalent of cyberspace, for the poet “doth not only show the way, but giveth so sweet a prospect into the way as will entice any man to enter into it”; “as if your journey should lie through a fair vineyard” he gives you a cluster of grapes “that you may long to pass further.” He tells “a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner”—drags them, that is to say, from where children and old folk ought to be (23). But there is much worse elsewhere: “Only the poet … lifted up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow into effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature”: Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely: her world is brazen, the poets only [i.e. alone] deliver a golden. But let those things alone and go to man … and know whether she have brought forth so true a lover as Theagenes, so constant a friend as Pylades, so valiant a man as Orlando, so right a prince as Xenophon’s Cyrus, so excellent a man in every way as Virgil’s Aeneas. “Which delivering forth”, Sidney goes on, “also is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air, but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency, as nature might have done, but bestow a Cyrus upon the world, to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and how that maker made him.” (8–9.) Not wholly imaginative? Substantially it worketh? Clearly something locked out at the door has come back through the window here when it comes to poetry and cognition. When a stagehand crosses the auditorium with “Thebes” written on a board only a child believes that he or she is truly in the legendary Greek city; but this other piece of argumentation lays claim to the exact set of magnetic, contagious illusions and delusions that Plato associated with the poetic imagination in the first place. As Iris Murdoch puts it, “the artist begins indeed to look like a special sort of sophist; and not the least of his crimes is that he directs our attention to particulars which he presents as intuitively knowable, whereas concerning their knowability philosophy has grave and weighty doubts. Art undoes the work of philosophy by deliberately fusing knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description.”19 The world we know, are acquainted with, and live in is made of brass; the poets invent a golden one 19 Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun, 32; my italics.

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and substitute it for the original via description. They bestow upon the real world ideal types of all kinds (Cyrus and company but also Don Quixote, Faust, Hamlet, Falstaff, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, Don Juan, Milton’s Satan, Robinson Crusoe, Candide, Clarissa Harlowe, la nouvelle Héloïse, Young Werther, Childe Harold, “the superfluous man”, Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn and Nigger Jim, Marcel, Stephen Dedalus, J. Alfred Prufrock, the Outsider, the Angry Young Man, the beatnik, the Sylvia Plath, and so on) that serve only to distract us from life as it is by fusing and confusing knowledge by acquaintance with knowledge by description. They generate kinds of people, substantially, by magnetic moral influence: mostly people with ideas of the world wholly out of sympathy with the way the world is. (“I tired of the routine of eight years in one afternoon”, Jane Eyre says on leaving Lowood. “I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus: that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space: ‘Then,’ I cried, half desperate, ‘grant me at least a new servitude!’”) As if that was not enough, on the basis of such acts of bestowal poets announce themselves the monarchs of the sciences. Such dangerous egomaniacs should be evicted from the Republic post haste. Talking of dangerous egomaniacs: “Beware, Beware,/His flashing eyes, his floating hair!/Weave a circle round him thrice,/And close your eyes with holy dread:/For he on honey-dew hath fed,/And drunk the milk of Paradise.” Romanticism’s response to Samuel Johnson and the conservative element in Sir Philip Sidney was essentially to describe what Larmarque and Olsen call “the fictive stance”: “that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment,” as Coleridge famously defined it, “which constitutes poetic faith”.20 (A very acceptable form of words provided “willing” is seen as something like “acquiescent” or “undisposed to object”, as opposed to more conscious states of volition. The audience does not will itself to take part in King Lear: the “fictive stance” is something we drop into habitually and without thinking as we take our seats in the theatre and the house-lights dim.) Manifestly the suspension of disbelief is a more complex notion than Samuel Johnson’s refusal to acknowledge that a spectator might be hoodwinked. It assumes that a degree of suggestivity in the audience has them alter their verificatory compass and take for true at one level in the mind that which they can only remind themselves is false by moving to another such level—or which betrays itself as false if the illusion is shattered. And Romantic poets spoke about themselves in complementary terms. 20

Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and Walter Jackson Bate, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983), ii. 6.

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When Keats asked himself “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously”, he famously answered, “Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason”21—to all intents and purposes a kind of suspension of belief, rather than its intellectual antithesis. Keats had Coleridge in mind as well as Shakespeare in writing this, and the older Romantic in fact came to strikingly similar conclusions, speaking in Biographia Literaria of “that illusion, contradistinguished from delusion, that negative faith which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgment”,22 and in his lecture notes on Shakespeare referring also to the “temporary Half-Faith, which the Spectator encourages in himself & supports by a voluntary contribution on his own part, because he knows that it is at all times in his power to see the thing as it really is”—“this sort of negative Belief”.23 (In fact, surely, the spectator knows no such thing. The “power to see the thing as it really is” is exactly what spectators forgo when they look at a Cezanne still-life or The Winter’s Tale. Mostly they hand themselves over to Cezanne’s and Shakespeare’s vision of how things really are.) The terminology employed reaches back to Philip Sidney (“without either denial or affirmation … by the judgment”) but adds the reader on the other side of the net, voluntarily lending a fictive stance to events while all the time knowing (at least presumably) that it can be rescinded at any stage. So it is that the critical tradition, especially since the Romantic era, has acknowledged—even celebrated—those powers of surreptitious intellectual persuasion that Plato strove against and that Sidney found himself evoking despite himself. ii

Truth in Literature

Sidney, Johnson, Keats, and Coleridge leave us with a rich set of dilemmas about art and truth, in particular as to what it is that takes places in that strange and part-blind negotiation between artist and spectator, writer and reader. From negative capability at one end of the production line to negative belief at the other the science of aesthetics has inherited a good deal of ground to explore 21

Hyder Edward Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John Keats 1814–1821, 2 vols (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1958), i. 193. 22 Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ii. 134. 23 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lectures 1808–1819 on Literature, ed. R.A. Foakes, 2 vols (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), i. 134, 135.

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between the antipodes of purely cognitive and purely non-cognitive accounts of literature. “The question of whether art gives us knowledge”, Berys Gaut writes in a review essay without the benefit of which this chapter could not have taken the form that it does, “is as old as the philosophy of art itself”—as we have seen even from the tiny review of historical opinion offered in the previous section. And that question is itself two-fold, as to whether “art can give us (non-trivial) knowledge” and as to whether “the capacity of art to give us (non-trivial) knowledge (partly) determines its value qua art, i.e. its aesthetic value.”24 If aesthetics did not offer us a fair amount of to-ing and fro-ing on matters of that degree of centrality we should probably start to wonder what it imagined its role to be. That to-ing and fro-ing can sometimes be wearisome as Lamarque and Olsen suggest; like literary-critical ones philosophical arguments can degenerate into discussions that are “philosophical” in the derogatory sense, where points of view are mounted because they can be rather than with any overall end in view. No complete review of the debate can be offered in the confines of this chapter, but various forms of thought can be addressed and assessed with a view to focusing on the place of knowledge in imaginative literature. Gaut proposes seven possible forms of knowledge in art. First, “that literature in particular can give us a kind of philosophical knowledge, knowledge of the nature of our concepts, particularly moral concepts”; second, that art “can give us knowledge of possibilities … of how a situation might feel to someone, and so on”; third, that it “can give us knowledge about not just what is possible, but what is actual”, to wit, “insights into human nature”. Moving on from this “conceptual and propositional” triad he adds four more elastic categories. Fourth, that art “can give us practical knowledge”, such as “how to feel appropriately”, how to “improve our practical reasoning”, how to “enhance our imaginative capacities”, or “how to look at the world, discovering aspects of it which we had previously overlooked.” Fifth, “that art can teach us the significance of events” or “help someone to make sense of … events that had previously been meaningless to him”. Sixth, “that art gives us experiential (phenomenal) knowledge, knowledge of what it is like to be in love, or suffer the loss of a child, and so on”. Seventh and last, “that art can teach us about values, particularly moral values” (“indeed, probably the major part of the debate about the cognitive value of art in recent years has turned around the question of moral knowledge through art”). Claims such as these, in whole or in part, in combination or in isolation, might at least begin to explain “the value we place on art over mere 24

Berys Gaut, “Art and Knowledge”, 436–37, in Jerrold Levinson (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 436–50.

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entertainment” in education and in research—indeed, one might suggest, if art is a form of enquiry into values, that is itself a reasoning for valuing it.25 Perhaps the first thing to say is that elements in Gaut’s “conceptual and propositional” trivium and his more touchy-feely quadrivium substantially overlap. The nature of our concepts is much involved with the nature of our values. How a situation might feel to someone is much involved with who that someone is (a lover, a bereaved parent, and so on). A knowledge of what is actual (like “discovering aspects of the world”) is likely to involve a sense of what is possible; and enhancing our imaginative capacity will surely involve the whole kit and caboodle where knowledge is concerned. It is in the nature of art that this should be so: dragging it into the sphere of philosophical (and critical) discussion is already to impose a set of rationalist grids on an experience that is originally a blended one for artist and audience alike. To consider art in such a light is not to denature it or to “murder to dissect” as Wordsworth luridly put it; Gaut’s list is a very useful one and aesthetics and criticism exist to make distinctions where few exist in phenomenal experience. But in what follows I shall occasionally have to return to some sense or another of a primitive or unreflective experience of art, if only because that idea in part governs so many of the other ideas we hold about this supremely complex form of communication. The second thing to say—and following on from it—is that Gaut’s list cannot help but betray the intellectual tradition from which it comes: a tradition made up of strengths and weaknesses, like any other. And this is especially true of his “quadrivium”, where the philosopher must stray outside the conceptual and the propositional realms that are his home ground. The idea that literature might teach us how to behave (more) appropriately or improve our practical wisdom is not impossible. It just seems unlikely seen in those terms or even in more complex ones deriving from them.26 And number six, in which art offers 25 26

Ibid. 437–39. An ambitious attempt to put flesh on these particular cognitivist bones is David Novitz’s Knowledge, Fiction and Imagination (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), which makes large claims for literature’s ability to help us notice and become sensitive to “­ aspects of our environment to which we were previously blind” (11); for the role of “the fanciful imagination” in “empirical knowledge” (21); for the “practical and empathic knowledge” it confers, rather than its “propositional” counterpart (133); and for the “pot-pourri of ways” and “veritable medley of methods” it affords us “for acquiring beliefs, knowledge, skills, and values of one sort or another” (142). Readers should certainly consult the book to see if they find the concrete examples Novitz provides convincing, but again the philosopher’s take on literature produces some limitations. This is nowhere more true than where his remarks on interpretation are concerned, a field which will perhaps always be

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us knowledge of what it is like to be someone is vulnerable, too. Does reading Oliver Twist give us “experiential knowledge” of what it is like to be an abused orphan? Why is it that that expression seems so inappropriate a term and its connotations so remote from that novel’s dramatic concerns? I doubt anyone would really want to testify to knowledge after reading Dickens’ book, but it is hard to imagine a reader forgetting the eighteenth chapter and Oliver’s brainwashing when he is left entirely alone in a London house for days after being recaptured by Sikes and Nancy, so rendering him dependent on the criminal gang he has fallen into—and hard not sometimes to remember that dreadful scene when one hears of similar ones being played out in reality. Does that constitute “knowledge”? Gaut’s cognitivist line of thought in another discussion elicits similar reservations. There is an significant gap, it seems to me, between the idea that “knowledge about what one should choose, self-knowledge, knowledge about others, and knowledge about what is morally right are all … achievable by imagination” and a set of illustrative examples stating that “novels can describe the lives of philosophers and doctors [so aiding one’s choice of career], scenes of torture [so indicating one’s own potential  resilience], the loneliness of the bereaved [so improving one’s understanding], and the plight of the poor and ill [so focusing one’s conscience].”27 Philosophically,

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a weakness in philosophical readers. His assumption that “the primary goal of interpreting a literary work is just to recover those meanings which could reasonably have been imputed to it by its author and contemporary audience” is dubious to say the least. So is his belief that “since interpretation is called for only when we are curious or puzzled, and since curiosity and puzzlement are always a function of what we happen either to know or not to know, one person’s interpretation may quite easily be verified by another who happens to know, or who happens to be in a position to discover, the answer to the question which occasioned the interpretation” (105; what he elsewhere calls “the relevant cultural knowledge”, 116). So is his view that “when once we know that a work is a tragedy and not a parody, an allegory and not a comedy, we are immediately able to tell how certain of its words and sentences are being used: literally or figuratively, metaphorically, ironically, and so on” (108). Simplistic attitudes of these kinds tend to undermine the reader’s faith in the rest of the presentation, at least from the literary-critical point of view. Berys Gaut, “Art and Cognition”, 116, in Matthew Kieran (ed.), Contemporary Debates in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 115–26. Gaut does not help his case by summarizing the first scene of King Lear as he goes on to do: something involving a man who regards his daughters “as mere subjects”, and “love as a kind of tribute”; whose “subsequent actions make sense in the light of his personality as revealed” there; and who suffers from a variety of infantilism that makes sense “given his great age, and the fact that he has spent his life being treated like a pampered child by his subjects and children” (118–19). The play offers no evidence for any of these conclusions; indeed its first scene shows them all to be untenable. “He hath ever but slenderly known himself”, Regan

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potentially, these imaginative experiences might bear existential fruit, but it seems equally likely they would do no such thing. Literature cannot bear too much conceptual thinking. There are some elements in the cognitive/non-cognitive spectrum that surely can be passed by. It is easy to agree that “Van Gogh’s Starry Night is most certainly a poor reproduction of the heavens; for the purposes of conduct it is useless, and scientifically it is inaccurate beyond belief. However, van Gogh was not concerned to produce a useful piece of information or an accurate representation of the night sky.” But that agreement breaks down when the author goes on to say that, “appreciated as a poetic image, Starry Night is not even an attempt to convey a pre-extant emotion; it is simply an image to be contemplated and delighted in. There is no reference, no starry night, outside the frame of van Gogh’s image.”28 This is a kind of inverse and equivalent of Clive Bell’s airy suggestion that “to appreciate a work of art we need to bring with us nothing from life”.29 What is simple contemplation and delight, after all? What are we contemplating if not what Starry Night means to us? And where would that meaning lie if not outside the frame, or in the relation between what is inside and outside it? (Is a picture frame a wall or a bridge? How can a spectator “bring nothing from life”? Art is an aspect of life, surely?)30 On the other hand and at the other extreme “there is truth—literal truth—in fiction, since most fictional stories [or at least many of them; above all the

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says of her father at the end of the scene; and that is perhaps true, though it is a remark made by an amoralist and a monster. But then it is true of all of us and not just King Lear. Glenn Worthington, “The Voice of Poetry in Oakeshott’s Moral Philosophy”, 289, The Review of Politics, 64:2 (Spring 2002), 285–310. Diffey, “What Can We Learn from Art?” 29. “History is a narrative discourse with different rules than those that govern fiction”, Robert Scholes writes. “The producer of a historical text affirms that the events entextualized did indeed occur prior to the entextualization. Thus it is quite proper to bring extra-textual information to bear on those events when interpreting and evaluating a historical narrative. Any important event which is ignored or slighted by a historical narrative may properly be offered as a weakness in that narrative. It is certainly otherwise with fiction, for in fiction the events may be said to be created by and with the text. They have no prior temporal existence, even though they are presented as if they did.” (“Language, Narrative, and Anti-Narrative”, 211, Critical Inquiry, 17:1 (Autumn 1980), 204–12.) Scholes’ transition from “certainly” to “may be said to be” gives us a sense of the uncertainty haunting this confident “framing” distinction, which will only hold water if you regard history and fiction as each being made up of “events” cut free from what we know of humanity—a knowledge that surely has a degree of “prior temporal existence” to the works of fiction that seek to illuminate it. “Events may be said to be created by and with the text” in imaginative literature, but events are only half the story.

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historical novel from Walter Scott to Hilary Mantel] play out against a background of fact …. But this sort of information is not what we think of as distinctive about fiction’s capacity for teaching, and it would not be a good strategy to argue for the importance of fiction by citing it alone.”31 Such views on the reference art or literature makes to the world take us back to Sidney, Johnson, and the Romantics. Whatever literal, historical truth may haunt the pages of A Place of Greater Safety it is not in pursuit of it that we read that novel; but then manifestly Mantel’s book points to a moral and intellectual starry night outside the frame, about revolution and revolutionaries. So “reference” is an epistemological problem in art rather than a solution. John Hospers’ view that truth might take three particular forms in literature is more constructive than either/or notions of direct reference. For him imaginative literature (by no means confined to fiction and the novel) might make truth claims by means of explicit statement, implicit statement, or more generally by being “true to human nature” or “true to history” (which last may take us back to arguments about reference, certainly).32 Surely it is the case that explicit statements in imaginative literature—irrespective of whatever constructions their authors may ostensibly put upon them—have a status that is different from similar statements in science, history, or philosophy, and John Koethe provides two relevant examples from modern verse. The first is from Wallace Stevens’ “Sunday Morning”; Death is the mother of beauty; hence from her, Alone, shall come fulfillment to our dreams And our desires. the second from T.S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding”: There are three conditions which often look alike Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow: Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference Which resembles the others as death resembles life, Being between two lives … 31

32

Gregory Currie, “The Moral Psychology of Fiction”, 49, in Stephen Davies (ed.), Art and its Messages: Meaning, Morality, and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1997), 49–58. John Hospers, “Literature and Human Nature”, 45, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 17:1 (Sept. 1958), 45–57.

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And the reader could provide any number of similar instances, from Macbeth on life as a tale told by an idiot to the opening lines of Pride and Prejudice.33 Asking himself whether “it is important to the success of a poem, or to what’s going on in a poem” that statements such as these be true, Koethe concludes that his answer, “subject to considerable qualification, is no”.34 That seems a reasonable conclusion—more reasonable than dying in a ditch to defend the absolute, immediate, and philosophical veracity of such statements, anyway. But truth clings to them all the same. “Death is the mother of beauty” is only a paradoxical and metaphorical way of saying that the beauty we respond to in animate objects, from flowers to children and mushrooms to songbirds, is bound up with their time-bound vulnerability to change and ultimately to mortality—which statement is true. Granted, such statements do not take place in a logical argument made of premise and inference, but then neither are they merely blurted out randomly and ex cathedra. Eliot’s meditation on time past, time present, and time future at the beginning of “Burnt Norton” is part of an imaginative (and intellectually dramatic) sequence reaching across Four Quartets in its entirety, as any reader will quickly see even if he or she finds that sequence powerfully elusive and allusive. So even Gordon Graham’s mild suggestion that “however novelists or other artists might direct our thoughts, they cannot direct them from truth to truth since at the base their activity lies not in fact but in imagination”35 may not be water-tight—though “direct our 33

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On “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” Gordon Graham takes the same view as Glenn Worthington takes on Starry Night: “it is irrelevant to assessing the merits of Shakespeare to ask whether life is a walking shadow”; “What matters is whether despair of the kind Macbeth is imagined as undergoing is or is not fittingly expressed in the line.” (“Learning from Art”, 33, British Journal of Aesthetics, 35:1 (Jan. 1995), 26–37.) But cannot we pursue both lines of enquiry? What sense could we make of Macbeth’s despair if we did not potentially share it or regard it as potentially well founded?. John Koethe, “Poetry and Truth”, 54, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 22 (2009), 53–60. Graham, “Learning from Art”, 29. “Works of art are wholly imaginary”, Graham argues; but we should not understand that claim “to imply that the artist’s imagination works without constraint”, and “intellectual enquiry, too, employs imagination, in forming hypotheses, rooting out the facts in the first place and interpreting them”. Still, “an important difference remains between a work of art and a work of enquiry, namely that the latter has a structure of reasoning by which it moves from premiss to conclusion, whereas the former does not.” (30–31.) Enquiry directs the mind “through a progression of thought”, “whereas the best art can do is present a point of view” (32). I do not agree about active progression versus static presentation; manifestly a play of Shakespeare’s (for example) presents numerous points of view, locked in both intellectual incompatibility and a concomitant dramatic progression. But I am happy to acknowledge that science, history, and philosophy generally direct our thoughts logically, via premise and inference, whereas imaginative literature directs our thoughts in any number of ways not all or any of which need

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thoughts” is a lucid expression for what poems like Stevens’ and Eliot’s can do, intellectually speaking. Neither are Koethe’s examples entirely representative, coming from the sources that they do. From two philosophically minded American modern poets let us turn to a philosophically minded English Victorian novelist—George Eliot in Adam Bede: It is our habit to say that while the lower nature can never understand the higher, the higher nature commands a complete view of the lower. But I think the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience, often with bruises and gashes incurred in taking things up by the wrong end, and fancying our space wider than it is.36 This time instead of gnomic and abstract assertion we have the genuine syntax of argument (“It is our habit to say … but I think”). Here we have analogy (“as we learn the art of vision”) and we have concrete instances of “hard experience”, though they are referred to metaphorically as bruises and gashes. And the whole of Eliot’s novel is gathering, so to speak, around summary statements of this kind, offering intellectual and moral support (or not, it may be) to them, inevitably played out in the reader’s mind and judgment. The status of interpolations like these is different, I think, given the circumstances in which they appear. All these statements, furthermore—from Stevens and the two Eliots alike— emanate from the poet-cum-narrator. But in Adam Bede and countless novels and plays and poems like it statements are made by dramatic personages out of contexts that are not omniscient or “philosophical” (as “Death is the mother of beauty” is) but personal, which is why I think the dramatic, in its many forms, is so crucial to the status of literature as an intellectual medium and so under-estimated by philosophical readers. (R.K. Elliott reminds us of the

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be logical. F.R. Leavis wrote some classic essays on how poetry directs thought, or fails to do so, at both semantic and physical levels: how a poem of Tennyson’s, for example, “moves simply forward with a sweetly plangent flow, without check, cross tension or any qualifying element” whereas one of Emily Brontë’s involves a “tough prose rationality” and a “stating matter-0f-factness of good sense, that seems to play against the dangerous running swell”. Wordsworth’s “Surprised by Joy”, accordingly, “demands a constant and most sensitive vigilance in the reader … such and so many are the shifts of tone, emphasis, modulation, tempo, and so on, that the voice [and thus the mind] is required to register.” (The Living Principle: “English” as a Discipline of Thought (London: Chatto and Windus, 1975), 78, 126, 114.) George Eliot, Adam Bede, ed. Carol Martin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 146.

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distinction to be made between works of literature that constitute “deliberate acts of self-revelation” and those which involve “the creation of an imaginary world”:37 the function and effect of explicit statements will be different in the two forms. But there are imaginary worlds, such as Elsinore, that contain and are constituted by acts of self-revelation, too.) Here is George Eliot’s local rector lecturing Arthur Donnithorne, a complacently kindhearted young squire who will later ruin the infatuated country girl, Hetty Sorrel: A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.38 Sententious, certainly, and of no practical use whatever to Arthur as he starts to fall for Hetty, and as the tragedy gathers steam as he does so. Eliot’s entire point is implicitly to ask exactly from where and from whom a person of Arthur’s kind could derive moral guidance in the situation in which he finds himself. Is the local vicar, middle-aged and placidly unmarried, likely to be an appropriate source? Yes and no. So some of the philosophers’ proposals on explicit statements in literature, narratorial or dramatic, can prove leaky. Roman Ingarden lays down the law on all the above examples of explicit statement, sounding for all the world like Shakespeare’s Dogberry as he does so. “In contrast to the preponderant majority of the sentences in a scientific work,” which are genuine judgments, the declarative sentences in a literary work of art are not genuine judgments but only quasi-judgments, the function of which consists in lending the objects portrayed a mere aspect of reality without stamping them as genuine realities. Remarks made by “portrayed persons” like Reverend Irwine, “claim to be true within the framework of the portrayed world, where they themselves are merely ‘portrayed assertions’ and do not belong to the basic text of the literary work of art.”39 If arguing in circles of these kinds leads to you the conclusion that “if we want to apprehend a literary work faithfully, then knowledge of certain 37 R.K. Elliott, “Poetry and Truth”, 85, Analysis, 27:3 (Jan. 1967), 77–85. 38 Eliot, Adam Bede, 156. 39 Roman Ingarden, The Cognition of the Literary Work of Art, trans. Ruth Ann Crowley and Kenneth R. Olson (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), 12, 148.

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objects existing outside the work which are in some way similar to the objectivities portrayed in the work or which are somehow supposed to be ‘depicted’ by the work are of no help in the effort to understand fully and correctly the sentences of the work”40 then perhaps Macbeth and Adam Bede are not for you. Literature isn’t made of sentences. If non-cognitivist philosophers can be dismissive about explicit statements in imaginative literature, they can be doubly so where implicit ones are concerned: these, when trotted out by their cognitivist counterparts, they often and with some justice regard as woefully inadequate, un-demonstrable, or plain banal. A good deal of hocus-pocus has been expended on “artistic truths”—as it has on “poetic language”—as some kind of arcane rara aves, beyond the ken of mere mortals: “truths broad and deep, too acute and suggestive, perhaps too tremulous, to be caught in the grosser nets of science, history, or garden variety experience, but not worse, indeed, all the better for that.”41 (“An occult poetic or pictorial or aesthetic sort of truth: a truth that is non-propositional, non-­ deniable, non translatable.”)42 Jerome Stolnitz, in particular, goes on to have a good deal of fun with the notions and nostrums conceivably spelled out in classic fiction like Pride and Prejudice (“Stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive people apart”: “Can this be all there is? From one of the world’s great novels?”) and in Classical tragedy (“‘Pride goeth before a fall’. For such rewards, who needs great art?”). (193–95.) “The truths disclosed or suggested by art” do not even resemble religious “truths”, which at least compel belief, whereas no one believes in art or its major practitioners: “They come more and more to resemble garden variety truths”, of the kind we gather from everyday experience without the assistance of poets; “They are, indeed … even flimsier.” (196.) The coup de graçe comes soon enough: “Artistic truths are, ­preponderantly, distinctly banal” (200), indeed “there are no artistic truths. Not one” (198), and “art’s influence on social structure and historical change has been fairly inconsequential” as a result (191). We should acknowledge that the most influential novel in history, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, is hardly a masterpiece, nor is One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich Solzhenitsyn’s most profound work. When I once confessed my puzzlement at The Brothers Karamazov to an eminent scholar of Russian history he told me that “What Dostoevsky is saying is that we need to talk to each other more”—a conclusion that I surely could have arrived at without traversing a thousand pages of earnest existentialism. “In proclaiming that 40 41 42

Ibid. 162. Stolnitz, “On the Cognitive Triviality of Art”, 192; cited in parenthesis below. Douglas N. Morgan, “Must Art Tell the Truth?” 18, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 26:1 (Autumn 1967), 17–27.

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truths can be inferred from works of art we have really proclaimed very little, and nothing at all uniquely characteristic of art. For truths can be inferred from literally anything in the world.”43 So much for Buckingham. It is discomfiting to see books like Pride and Prejudice and The Oresteia being towed off to what Dorothy Walsh calls “the land of proverbs”.44 It is also futile. No one would seriously defend the truth of imaginative literature by boiling it down to a series of bromides: indeed, imaginative writers make hay of such clichés all the time. An opinionated family member in The Mill on the Floss is fond of saying that “When land is gone and money spent, then learning is most excellent.” It is as idiotic a comment on the first occasion on which he un-burthens himself of it as it is on the second—when its relevance to the situation at hand is the total opposite. Dorothy Walsh is right to remind us of a fundamental distinction between “knowing about” and “knowing by living through” (11: what she calls “knowing through imaginative participation”; 138). To know that pride goeth before a fall can mean merely acquiescing with a cliché as a sort of “known fact”, or it can mean, via personal experience or via The Mayor of Casterbridge and Coriolanus, positively seeing it and seeing its effects on persons recognizably (importantly so) like ourselves. Does this amount to fusing (or confusing) knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, as Plato feared? To what extent is it a philosophical belief that that the two can and must ultimately be separated? “Knowledge is an experience”, D.H. Lawrence wrote, “not a formula.”45 On occasion imaginative writers can seek to turn the tables on scientific, historical, and philosophical truth using the kinds of terms Lawrence employs. “Art for me is an end in itself”, Joseph Conrad wrote in 1913: Conclusions are not for it. And it is superior to science, in so far that it calls on us with authority to behold! to feel! Whereas science at best can only tell us—it seems so! And thats all it can do. It talks to us of the Laws of Nature. But thats only one of its little jokes. It has never discovered anything of the sort. It has made out with much worry and blundering a certain sequence of facts beginning in the dark and leading god only knows where.46 43 Morgan, “Must Art Tell the Truth?” 17. 44 Walsh, Literature and Knowledge, 51. 45 D.H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 59. 46 Laurence Davies (ed.), The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 311. “Not all of science’s discoveries appear to me to be equally,

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Lawrence and Conrad have some right to remind the authors of “intellectual enquiry” and “genuine judgments” that the history of art is not, as the history of science is, “strewn with the debris of unsuccessful hypotheses”.47 No one would judge science or philosophy on the basis of such debris, nor should we judge literature on the basis of platitudes we have reductively extracted from it. “Literature does its moral thinking in the particulars it imagines,” S.L. Goldberg writes, “and it has to: not, however, because literature aspires to, but cannot reach, the universals of moral codes or moral philosophy, but because literature can do something that moral codes and moral philosophy cannot. It can think morally in the widest, most inclusive sense of the term …”:48 the complete reverse, that is, of “pride goeth before a fall”. “Stubborn pride and ignorant prejudice keep attractive people apart” is one way of responding to Pride and Prejudice, but so is Hilary Putnam’s to the effect that a work of art like Austen’s constitutes “the imaginative re-creation of moral perplexities, in the widest sense” and “that if moral reasoning, at the reflective level, is the conscious criticism of ways of life, then the sensitive appreciation in the imagination of predicaments and perplexities must be essential to moral reasoning.”49 I can no more be exhaustive on the matter of literature’s being true to human nature and/or history than I can on the presence of explicit and implicit pre-eminently, and supremely valuable in human terms”, Douglas Morgan sanely remarks (“Must Art Tell the Truth?” 21). Scientists have recently discovered that infectious yawning is a genuine phenomenon, that it can be contracted by reading the word “yawn” (or writing it, presumably), and that humans are less prone to it as they grow older: truly the scientific equivalent of “pride goeth before a fall”. 47 Walsh, Literature and Knowledge, 53. 48 S.L. Goldberg, Agents and Lives: Moral Thinking in Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), xv. A philosopher like Martha Nussbaum, in Goldberg’s view, can in a book like Love’s Knowledge see that in dramatic literature knowledge is an experience (or a process) rather than a formula. But like the philosophers I am looking at here she still tends to want that experience tidied up. “To call the process an argument or, as Nussbaum sometimes does, moral ‘philosophizing’ will not do; but even to call it moral ‘thinking’—a term that still claims it to be, in a wide but legitimate sense of the word, rational—leaves the critic with the difficulty of specifying and tracing it out so as to incorporate all of the sensory, enactive, dynamic elements both of its life-moral force and its rationality, without distorting either it or the reader’s answering to it. For it is a distortion to treat it, in effect if not in theory, as a matter of recognizable ideas that the work presents to the reader’s mind in a ‘vivid’ and ‘practical’ form and thereby persuades the reader to share its own moral ‘knowledge’, its own ‘correct’ moral understanding.” (305.) 49 Hilary Putnam, Meaning and the Moral Sciences (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 87.

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s­ tatements in it. One thing to say directly is that the issue of “statements” is bound up with the issue of “truth to nature”. “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing” is a statement made by a human, and the only way we could verify it (in fact, respond to it at all) is by referring to human nature “in the widest, most inclusive sense of the term”. Furthermore the entire process is evaluative: there are things in human nature it simply is not worth while being true to in cognitive terms, and so Douglas Morgan’s claim that “turgid poems have been written on the profoundest of subject matters, and masterpieces have been composed on trivia” can hardly hold water.50 Name one, we would ask. But there are other ways in which literature asks us to make veridical checks, “outside the frame”, against the world as we know it. R.K. Elliott has a simple but compelling example, drawing on Donne’s “Love’s Growth”: As princes do in times of action get New taxes, and remit them not in peace, No winter shall abate the spring’s increase. “If as a matter of fact”, Elliott comments, “princes tended to abolish taxes in war-time and not to re-introduce them when peace was re-established, the meaning and general emotional character of the poem would be drastically reduced.”51 Everything depends here upon the reader’s sense that this is precisely how “princes” behave in the real world when it comes to taxation and their political justifications for it. (For what it is worth, income tax was introduced in Britain in 1798 to pay for the French Revolutionary War, just as it was introduced in the United States in 1861 to pay for the Civil War. As far as I know, neither has ever been repealed.) Imaginative literature lives and breathes amidst such connections with Roman Ingarden’s “genuine realities”. Without them it could not live or breathe at all. In the case of Sherlock Holmes, for example, “We are asked … to imagine that among the people we know move others we do not know, that among the streets with which we are familiar are others with which we are not familiar: we are invited to imagine in familiar places and their populations those changes, and only those changes, that the 50

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Morgan, “Must Art Tell the Truth?” 18. In the Edinburgh Review of February 1818 Francis Jeffrey described Byron’s Beppo as “a mere piece of lively and loquacious prattling … upon all kinds of frivolous subjects,—a sort of gay and desultory babbling about Italy and England, Turks, balls, literature and fish sauces.” Nowadays we understand the poem to be a profound albeit comic meditation on the varieties of human freedom. Elliott, “Poetry and Truth”, 79.

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author postulates.” (“If the author imagined his world ex nihilo, he would have to invent a species for Holmes to belong to.”)52 And the same is true of figures of speech: “Poetic irony depends very often upon our recognition that some poetic proposition is false, just as almost every simile depends upon our recognition that some poetic proposition is true.”53 Isaac Babel must be the most prodigious inventor of similes in world literature, but every one of them, no matter how far-fetched, can be brought home to human experience, real or imagined: “new boots that squeaked like piglets in a sack”; “the moon jumping into black clouds like a straying calf”; “a red watermelon with black seeds, slanting seeds like the eyes of sly Chinese girls”; and, triumphantly, “the stars scattered in front of the window like urinating soldiers”. Responding to such similes is checking them against what we know to be true; the only way of not responding to them would be not to do precisely that. Manifestly this relation to reality is something that writers mostly treasure, and occasionally deny (even in the act of employing metaphors and similes)— but in any event cannot possibly ignore as either “outside the frame” or a given. It is a relation that they have to build. Adam Bede is instructive again: “With this drop of ink at the end of my pen,” Eliot’s narrator says at the opening of her novel, “I will show you the roomy workshop of Mr Jonathan Burge, carpenter and builder in the village of Hayslope, as it appeared on the eighteenth of June, in the year of our Lord 1799.” “My strongest effort”, the narrator says at the beginning of Book Second, is to avoid any … arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind. The mirror is doubtless defective; the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused; but I feel as much bound to tell you as precisely as I can what that reflection is, as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath.54 52

F.E. Sparshott, “Truth in Fiction”, 4, 5, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 26:1 (Autumn 1967), 3–7. 53 Elliott, “Poetry and Truth”, 79. 54 Eliot, Adam Bede, 5, 159. Being the people they are, imaginative writers have sometimes preferred the real world to its fictional counterpart, as Thomas Mann does in Herr und Hund: “I rather like my own description of the place, or rather the place as presented in my description,” he writes of the riverside woods where he and his dog take their walks, “but I like it still better as a piece of nature. For there is no doubt that as a piece of living nature it is still more diversified and vivid, just as Bashan himself is in reality warmer, more lively and lovable than in this counterfeit presentment.” (Bashan and I, trans.

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There is nothing naïve about Eliot’s ambition. She knows there is no guarantee of fictional truth. Her mirror is “doubtless defective” but her aim is to be faithful to the men and things mirrored in the minds of us all. Traditionally orientated literary cognitivists have tried a variety of expressions to encapsulate what George Eliot is driving at here. For Sam Goldberg works of imaginative literature “enact a process of moral thinking” (“distinctive and irreplaceable”, “of a kind, particular, metaphorical, and enactive”).55 For F.R. Leavis they are acts of “heuristic thought”: “That Shakespeare so obviously can’t have first stated his thought explicitly, ‘clearly’ and ‘logically’ in prose, and then turned it into dramatic poetry doesn’t make it any the less thought.”56 Roger Scruton, too, argues “That there is this continuum between philosophy and literature, and an area of complexity where they meet, should not remove the force of the claim that there is also a polar distinction which defines this ambiguous, equatorial middle.” Philosophy is “abstract and argued” whereas poetry is “concrete and narrated”; but “at the same time there is an equally important sense in which poetry aims at truth and is admired for its truth, as it is condemned for its falsehood.”57 This Scruton calls “unasserted thought” or “the truth-directed use of falsehood”.58 The dramatic writer is aiming at “another kind of truth—a kind of truth beyond that contained in the philosopher’s idea of correspondence”, of a kind reminiscent of Thomas De Quincey on the literature of knowledge versus the literature of power: “truth as revelation, as the unconcealing of what is, in our instrumental and scientific ways of dealing with the world, hidden from us.”59 Importantly this moral and intellectual activity of heuristic, unasserted revelation should be distinguished from the discovery of a set of pre-fabricated, higher, or copper-bottomed “poetic” or “artistic” truths we have seen ridiculed by anti-cognitivist philosophers earlier: a set of quasi-Platonic ideas or essences in the heavens, accessed by what Whitman called the “divine literatus”, taking over the shift from the “departing priest”. In so far as poets respond to the world as it appears as opposed to what it is they do not discover laws, as such, but metaphors. ­ erman George Scheffauer (London: Collins, 1923), 155–56.) “I, John Sylvester/Slept with H your sister”, one poet told another in the Mermaid Tavern, if legend and Byron are reliable. “I, Ben Jonson/Slept with your wife.” “That is not rhyme.” “No, but it is true.” 55 Goldberg, Agents and Lives, 22, 63, 290. 56 Leavis, The Living Principle, 12, 97. 57 Roger Scruton, “The Politics of Culture” and Other Essays (Manchester: Carcanet, 1981), 83. 58 Roger Scruton, “Imagination and Truth”, unpublished paper, 2, 7. 59 Roger Scruton, “Poetry and Truth”, unpublished paper, 6.

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Truth and Literature

The previous section has amounted to a no doubt grievously un-philosophical set of meditations on Berys Gaut’s first cardinal question, as to whether art can give us non-trivial knowledge. (“A poem should not mean but be”, Archibald MacLeish sternly wrote in a poem of 1926 called “Ars Poetica”—and presumably he meant it.) It seems to me that many philosophers’ anti-cognitive arguments can be questioned and sometimes controverted, whereas imaginative writers’ repeated insistence, pace MacLeish, that truth is what they have to communicate—even going so far in George Eliot’s case as to regard herself “as if I were in the witness-box narrating my experience on oath” and thus telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—is worthy of respect. “The ‘serious’ poets almost by definition are ones who have, and know that they have, important general truths about human life to express in their work”60—though artistic truth takes many forms. Clearly, for a start, it is not akin to scientific truth about physical nature. The work of literature, in Wordsworth’s view, is “to treat of things not as they are, but as they appear; not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to the senses and to the passions”, and Ruskin said much the same thing: “Science deals exclusively with things as they are in themselves; and art exclusively with things as they affect the human sense and the human soul. Her work is to portray the appearance of things, and to deepen the natural impressions which they produce upon living creatures.”61 Demonstrably we can speak truly or falsely about how things appear to us through the senses and the passions as opposed to what they inherently are or may be said to be. We can be honest or dishonest as regards our emotions, for example. I am a card-carrying cognitivist, and the previous study of mine that I described in the Preface, The Autonomy of Literature, I now see, was the work of such a person, only with a twist: for that book argued that some philosophers, psychoanalysts, and historians had exceeded the cognitivist remit. In reducing imaginative literature to moral philosophy, psychic impulse, or historical phenomenon they had overstated the cognitive reach of literature and ignored or driven out its equally vital aesthetic, dramatic, and imaginative elements.

60 Goldberg, Agents and Lives, 150. 61 William Wordsworth, Prose Works, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), iii. 63; John Ruskin, Works, ed. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12), xi. 47–48.

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But it was also clear that the question as to whether art can provide knowledge ramifies itself no end and can be pursued down any number of intellectual corridors: seven, to start with.62 Gaut’s second cardinal question, as to whether the capacity of art to give us non-trivial knowledge (partly) determines its value as art, is at least as momentous, but by comparison it seems less elastic. The question whether art is a truth-bearing mode of communication needs discussion from many directions; the question whether the truths it may carry are part of its value is more monolithic. Without doubt the two philosophers who have recently meditated on this issue most profoundly are Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen—above all in their magnum opus, Truth, Fiction, and Literature. As it happens they are agnostic on whether literature can convey non-trivial knowledge. “Truth is undoubtedly a value”, Lamarque comments in The Philosophy of Literature, before adding that “it is what assertive discourse aspires to.”63 “‘Imaginative’ or ‘literary’ truth always turns out to be less than truth itself” and “whatever the purpose of fiction and literature may be, it is not ‘truth-telling’ in any straightforward sense”64—which perhaps begs the question of what to do with the 62

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An issue I did not examine, for example, is that of the “translatability” of philosophical truth as opposed to literary “truth”: the notion that “the hypotheses advanced and the conclusions defended [in philosophy] can always be expressed or explained in different ways” (Graham, “Learning from Art”, 29), whereas literary expression cannot. Expressing themselves in the ways that Locke and Kant frequently did their readers might be grateful for this degree of latitude in addressing their thought, but it is worth noting that scholars of those philosophers will always in fact revert to their original texts in discussing them, just as literary critics quote imaginative authors, chapter and verse, in detail. But philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida clearly express themselves in ways that are fundamentally untranslatable. On the other hand the Ibsen that Anglophone literary scholars work on in translation—sometimes humorously referred to by them as “Henry Gibson”—will not be the Norwegian original; but that does not mean that such scholarship is valueless. The issue is similar to the famous “heresy of paraphrase” in literary study. No one pretends that a paraphrase of a poem can substitute for it, but scholars habitually employ paraphrase in discussing literary texts all the same; how could they not? It is also similar to the issue of controvertability in philosophical argument. Readers can certainly take issue with literary texts, and frequently do: I do not see that their doing so is inherently different from philosophical argument. One can no more disprove utilitarianism or existentialism than one can disprove the three unities or the stream of consciousness—these are instances of things to think about, not things to think. Peter Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 255; my italics. Lamarque and Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature, 21, 440.

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truths that cannot be told straightforwardly. In the end and after some haggling, however, they are prepared to deliver that hostage to fortune. Art may convey truth, and though we generally regard that as “a property of sayings or something said”—that is, as a property of sentences in language—“we can include beliefs and thoughts as bearers of truth, and even pictures or other representations, at least in so far as they have something akin to predicative statements” (8): more kin than kind, though, certainly. “The important question regarding literature and truth is not whether any connections at all can be found between the two but whether there is anything integral to works of imaginative literature which makes the expression, embodiment, revelation, etc. of truths indispensable to their value, aesthetic or otherwise.” (5.) The answer is clear: “Both fiction and literature may contain truths, explicitly or implicitly, and even make truth-claims, but such claims are … incidental to the central purposes of either type of discourse.” (440.) “To value a work of art as a work of art is not to value it for its truth or the knowledge it imparts or its capacity to teach”, Lamarque concludes. “In short, truth is not an artistic value.” I do not deny that works of art can convey truths, impart knowledge, and be vehicles for learning. What is denied is only that these are part of the work’s value as art.… I am not even denying that works of art can be valued for their truth or conveying of knowledge; only that when they are valued in those terms it is not their artistic value that is under consideration.65 Some philosophers (and others) have taken shelter from both George Eliot in the witness box and Peter Lamarque on the warpath by reverting from truth to truthfulness, sincerity, or a similar intellectual attribute. Whereas “it may be true that any proposition can be negated,” Gordon Graham suggests, “an understanding cannot be negated, though it can be shown to be deficient”— so the cognitivist could defend “a claim about understanding rather than truth.”66 John Koethe reminds us very wisely of the occasions on which, in 65 66

Lamarque, “Cognitive Values in the Arts”, 127. Graham, “Learning from Art”, 27. Malcolm Budd’s chapter on “Truth, Sincerity and Tragedy in Poetry” (in Values of Art: Pictures, Poetry and Music (London: Allen Lane, 1995), 83–123) is a useful treatment of the truth versus truthfulness issue. It is an excellent discussion throughout, but because it mostly discusses poetry (whereas its sister chapters are on art and music more broadly speaking) it misses the stress I want to place on the dramatic in imaginative literature, concentrating instead on the author/reader relation— which is an important one, no doubt.

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reading imaginative literature, we react to it simply by saying “How true!” but he also insists that “poetry is inherently perspectival, in the sense that it’s always attached to the point of view of the poet or the speaker of the poem.”67 So one could perhaps defend a perspectival sort of truth, a truth of “outlook” or “faithfulness”. But that would be a Pyrrhic victory. “The reduction of truth to truthfulness”, Roger Scruton argues, “must surely give us an impoverished conception of truth in literature. We value Shakespeare not because he voiced his own sentiments sincerely [or shared his ‘perspective’ with us], but because he represented the reality of human nature [in ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’, for example]. That is like being true to facts.”68 Very like, I should have thought—though not the same. We value what artists tell us for its truth, not because what they say is true in the same way as that which scientists or philosophers contribute. Others have said that art and literature should not worry about such things, offering instead a vive la différence model. “The idea that to be valuable art must teach us something”, T.J. Diffey argues, “says more about the high value we put on cognition in our culture than it does about any absence of value in art.”69 Indeed, being a cognitivist can look like being a Philistine. Truth: who needs it? There is nothing outside the frame of Starry Night, after all. As we have seen, R.K. Elliott puts John Donne to memorable use to challenge that position but even he concludes that “the view that truth is invariably an aesthetic criterion … is indeed a vulgar and philistine error …. My point is that considerations of truth and falsity are sometimes involved both in the interpretation and the evaluation of poetry …”.70 The responsible cognitivist only argues that “in so far as art advances understanding, it is to be valued the more highly, not that it always does, or that this is the only reason for valuing it”71—and that last caveat surely is a sound one. As I said at the beginning of this discussion truth is our highest intellectual value: it is hardly surprising, therefore, that art should lay claim to it or come to feel that it is related to what Lamarque and Olsen call its “central purpose”. Movere, docere, delectare: these were the instructions classical rhetoricians issued to literature—to move, to teach, and to delight. It does not follow that art delivers the whole truth or nothing but the truth; nor does it follow that the truths it can deliver are unique to it, though they are delivered in a unique way—by means of moving and delighting—which is a vitally 67 Koethe, “Poetry and Truth”, 55, 58. 68 Scruton, “The Politics of Culture” and Other Essays, 84. 69 Diffey, “What Can We Learn from Art?” 32. 70 Elliott, “Poetry and Truth”, 82. 71 Graham, “Learning from Art”, 35.

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significant fact. But art is intent upon the truth for all that and by no means en passant: “If works of literary art are in some sense revelatory, the claim that this is so will be of interest only if it can be argued that their being revelatory is bound up with their nature and their success as works of literary art.”72 If artists are worthy of respect for unconcealing things normally hidden from us, it will be in part for reasons such as these. In the end I am not sure the Lamarque/Olsen position can be rebutted on philosophical grounds as such. Being unhappy with it seems to involve stepping outside or away from its presuppositions—a fact that is itself significant, as perhaps the next chapter will demonstrate. “Philosophers are intent on theories,” as Dorothy Walsh remarks, “and, since theory of knowledge plays a large role in philosophical discourse, any pronouncement by a philosopher to the effect that such and such is what we mean, or ought to mean, when we speak of knowledge, is a pronouncement associated with a theory.” “Theory must strive for lucidity,” she goes on: “but not at the price of relevance.”73 Like artists philosophers are worthy of our respect but they are not the sole guardians and guarantors of truth: in Margolis’s words they “look at” the arts as a cat can look at a queen—they must not prescribe what to see in them. Thus there are some important but ad hoc views about art that we cannot ignore. For every hour that humanity devotes to philosophy it surely devotes a thousand to imaginative literature; for every hour it devotes to science or history it devotes a hundred to literature likewise. It is inconceivable that mankind would waste so much time and ingenuity on an activity—one that evidently involves a significant intellectual training and application, compared with other similarly compelling activities, such as a sex and food—that did not carry some form of truth or meaning with it. “The belief in serious art as a medium in which human understanding may be advanced explains its place in our culture”, as Gordon Graham puts it.74 Perhaps this argument cannot sustain a reasoned exposition, but like John Koethe’s “How true!” it speaks to our experience. “Literature is the antidote to parochialism”, writes a member of the u.s. Court of Appeals. “It expands horizons of all kinds: temporal, social, economic, and gender-based. And this is vitally important not just for personal development … but also for the broader social need for just laws and

72 Walsh, Literature and Knowledge, 3. 73 Ibid. 10, 32. 74 Graham, “Learning from Art”, 28. “Unless some kinds of knowledge are to be found in art, art simply is not worth our time” (Morgan, “Must Art Tell the Truth?” 18).

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effective institutions through which those laws are enforced.”75 Could we really express such a view regarding a form of communication (in this case, the novel) in which truth was not necessarily connected with beauty? Is it likely that it would produce the effects Justice Wood describes if that separation was an intellectually defensible one? There is justice as she metes it out on the Seventh Circuit but there is also the idea of justice: if we do not maintain our interest in the latter via dramas like King Lear or Antigone we will eventually lose our appetite for the former. The idea of the family is another such. “Lear is envisaged, by Shakespeare and by ourselves,” R.G. Collingwood writes, “not simply as an old man suffering cold and hunger, but as a father suffering these things at the hands of his daughters. Apart from the idea of the family, intellectually conceived as a principle of social morality, the tragedy of Lear would not exist. The emotions expressed in these plays are thus emotions arising out of a situation which could not generate them unless it were intellectually apprehended.”76 Related to this is the entire issue of knowledge at large, even in the sciences: sometimes philosophers seem to rest on a somewhat static and monolithic notion of that, when one could argue that established knowledge is hardly knowledge at all: perhaps we are judging art by an unrealistic standard, that science and history have reconsidered if by no means abandoned. “Typically, reasoning is less a way of hitting on new ideas”, it has been suggested, “than it is a way of testing and sifting ideas critically”; and “if we always waited until absolutely rigorous arguments could be constructed before we acted with reasoned confidence, we would be overtaken by events before we had occasion to act.”77 The truth is something humanity is in pursuit of, not something it confidently establishes, and art and discourse are equal partners in that enterprise—as perhaps the next chapter will demonstrate. So I think that when Lamarque and Olsen seek to divorce the aesthetic from the cognitive or claim that the cognitive elements literature may contain are irrelevant to its aesthetic ones, or its value, they are likely to produce only an empty set when they should be able to point to a well stocked one, for all their talk of truth-claims being incidental to art’s “central purposes”. They should 75

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Diane P. Wood, “Preface”, vii, in Martha C. Nussbaum and Alison L. Lacroix (eds.), Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law, and the British Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), vii–xvi. R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), 294–95. (Collingwood also had in mind the “social and political conditions” that surround Romeo and Juliet.) Stephen Toulmin, Richard Rieke, and Allan Janik, An Introduction to Reasoning (New York: Macmillan, 1984), 10, 81.

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be able to list any number of works of imaginative literature that we could compellingly, appropriately, and adequately discuss in aesthetic terms alone, but this they do not seem able to do—and as philosophers go they are exceptionally well read, I hasten to add. Nor, I think, could we even imagine a work of literature that could compellingly, appropriately, and adequately be discussed in such terms. From the vast Pacific Sea of imaginative literature Lamarque and Olsen drag up, of all things, Ezra Pound’s haiku, “In a Station of the Metro”: The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. “Apart from attending to the two images themselves and the juxtaposition in which they are placed”, they comment, there does not seem to be much one can do with the “poem”. It does not invite construal in thematic terms. No clue is provided in the poem which may indicate that the details of the images and their juxtaposition have some significance, some function beyond that of presenting a ­juxtaposition of images.78 Well: Pound’s poem—written, as it happens, by someone with a positively propagandist interest in the image as a poetic function—is no mere act of juxtaposition. It is not a “poem” in scare-quotes. Like Paradise Lost or Bleak House it invites construal in direct proportion to its size, involving clues as to its significance accordingly. If it provided no such clues it would possess no significance. Not only is the crucial word “apparition” richly connotative (moving between “an appearance” and “a phantom”), but the visual image carries many implications, depicting as it does a stream or crowd of pale faces beautifully yet vulnerably isolated—like petals on a wet, black bough—by the monochromatic (and rain-soaked?) workaday clothes of commuting Parisians of 1913, unmistakably akin to the visions we are offered of dead souls in Dante’s Inferno, in procession or in a huddle. The poem is an aesthetic object without any doubt; it evokes an aura of Japonisme and poetic distance by virtue of its form. But the moral response it implicitly encourages accompanies it absolutely, nor could its form ever be divided from that response except by violence. We have been shown something about Metros, Subways, Undergrounds, and their passengers—and therefore something about modernity—as surely as if we had been guided through a syllogism on the subject. And we have been shown something about 78

Lamarque and Olsen, Truth, Fiction, and Literature, 414.

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the person who could or was compelled to see modernity like this—so the object is a dramatic phenomenon and not merely a tastefully descriptive one. If Pound will not do, Lamarque and Olsen could keep looking, in the radically anti-referential works of the Russian absurdist, Daniil Kharms, for example (who died of starvation under arrest in a lunatic asylum during the siege of Leningrad—clearly someone thought his work stood in measurable relation to reality). But even his utterly iconoclastic micro-fictions— PETROV: Hey, Moskitov! Let’s catch mosquitoes! MOSKITOV: No way, I’m not ready for that; Let’s better catch cats.79 —are utterly bound up with reference to (Soviet) reality even as they are vigorously in denial of it. It could not be otherwise. They would not be absurd if they did not flout something in existence and our “realistic” expectations, like one of Duchamp’s ready-mades. There are any number of objects that we do judge in purely aesthetic terms, of course, from whippets to walnuts: above all and in particular, wine. But it is also true that non-specialists often find such assessments and the languages in which they are expressed (“ripe melony fruit with hazelnut overtones” and so forth) faintly ridiculous. And Lamarque’s fictive stance can itself be a wobbly one in a similarly epicurean spirit: “To read poetry … as poetry is to adopt a certain attitude of mind,” he avers: “a receptiveness, among other things, to finegrained expression, the salience of perspective, and the play of images.”80 If that is where a purist aesthetic gets you as a reader of poetry, I doubt it will catch on. It sounds like becoming a dilettante. “The relation between moral and aesthetic judgement”, Roger Scruton argues in the closing lines of Art and Imagination, “suggests that standards for the validity of one will provide standards for the validity of the other. To show what is bad in a sentimental work of art must involve showing what is bad in sentimentality. To be certain in matters of taste is, therefore, to be certain in matters of morality: ethics and aesthetics are one.”81 This must be a kind of 79 80 81

Daniil Kharms, Today I Wrote Nothing: Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Matvei Yankelevich (New York: Overlook Duckworth, 2007), 137. Peter Lamarque, “Poetry and Abstract Thought”, 51, Midwestern Studies in Philosophy, 33 (2009), 37–52. Roger Scruton, Art and Imagination: A Study in the Philosophy of Mind (London: Methuen, 1974), 248–49. Scruton’s last remark is borrowed from Wittgenstein’s Tractatus (6.421: “Ethik und Asthetik sind Eins”), and of the modern philosophers in the Western tradition Wittgenstein certainly extends a tantalizing connection to the critical understanding of literature, quite beyond my expertise to evaluate. But it is also true that, like many other

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fallacy, or a paradox. But that ethics and aesthetics are indivisible in works of literature I am quite sure. As Berys Gaut argues: “Consider someone who said ‘This novel is a profound and insightful exploration of death without a trace of sentimentality, but this of course has nothing to do with its artistic merit.’ That is as bizarre as someone who said ‘This novel is well-written, elegant, and witty, but this of course has nothing to do with its artistic merit.’”82 Our responses to art and literature are inevitably as blended as Gaut suggests. “Writers on aesthetics have been at work so long telling us what art is not,” Ernst Gombrich

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writers in that tradition (by no means least of all, Kant), Wittgenstein’s experience of imaginative literature seems sparse, at least as reflected in his aesthetic writings. In The Blue and Brown Books (2nd edn, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972, 158–60) he ruminates, in a way that is typical of his beady-eyed fascination with language, on expressions such as “particular” and “peculiar”, to the effect that such-and-such a man has a particular way of entering a room (that is, he always puts his head around the door first), and that suchand-such a soap has a peculiar smell (associated with using it in one’s childhood). The difference between spelling out such things and not doing so he labelled “transitive” and “intransitive”, and some of his interpreters have suggested that the latter (leaving things undefined, as it were) could be associated with literary speech—though I think one could argue the reverse. Scruton, on the other hand, argues that even in that most intransitive art form, music, “it is surely one of the roles of taste or aesthetic judgement to discriminate between the expression with which we might identify, and the expression that invites us to sympathize with a state of mind which we ought to shun [Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s soapy musicals, for example]. But this discrimination would be impossible if we did not advance, in our thinking, from the intransitive to the transitive idea of expression.” (“Wittgenstein and the Understanding of Music”, 8, British Journal of Aesthetics, 44:1 (Jan. 2004), 1–9.) The distinction Wittgenstein makes between “connection” and “concomitance” in the Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966, 16–17) could be associated with the transitive/intransitive one, as could his view that “aesthetic explanation is not causal explanation” (ibid. 14, 18, 21). For me his most remarkable literary-critical comment is a comparatively incidental one on the Gospels, from Culture and Value (2nd edn Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980, 31): “God has four people recount the life of his incarnate Son, in each case differently and with inconsistencies—but might we not say: It is important that this narrative should not be more than quite averagely historically plausible just so that this should not be taken as the essential, decisive thing? So that the letter should not be believed more strongly than is proper and the spirit may receive its due. I.e. what you are supposed to see cannot be communicated even by the best and most accurate historian; and therefore a mediocre account suffices, is even to be preferred.” Ethik und Asthetik sind Eins, indeed. On that issue, Diané Collinson quotes a remark of Wittgenstein’s from his 1916 notebook: “The work of art is the object seen sub specie aeternitatis; and the good life is the world seen sub specie aeternitatis. This is the connexion between art and ethics.” (“‘Ethics and Aesthetics are One’”, 267, British Journal of Aesthetics, 25:3 (Summer 1985), 266–72.) Gaut, “Art and Cognition”, 122.

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argues, “so anxious to rid art of any heteronomous values, that they have created a rather forbidding void in the centre.” “The vexed question, whether or not aesthetic values may be said to exist ‘independently’, need not concern us here”, he goes on. “What matters is that in our lived experience they always find resonance in other areas of value”, such that “there are few people who never experience great art in terms of moral values.”83 Accordingly the language we use in evaluating art and literature inevitably mixes the aesthetic with the moral: “The very disgust we feel at the ‘cheap’, the ‘gaudy’, the ‘sloppy’, proves our strong emotional involvement” in works of art (20), as does our reactions to “sincerity”, “nobility”, “purity”, and “discipline” (26). The result is an “untranslatable experience of a plenitude of values that speaks to the whole man—as great art has always done.” (29.) “Beauty is truth, truth beauty: that is all/Ye know on earth and all ye need to know”, Keats’s urn says to his readers: in effect not solving the poem’s riddle but re-stating it. Truth and beauty coalesce in art and only in art; only in art is the truth beautiful and the beautiful true. That is why art is of perennial interest to us, and why it is ultimately inadequate for us, also.

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Ernst Gombrich, Meditations on a Hobby-Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (Oxford: Phaidon, 1971), 15.

chapter 2

“The Birthplace of Truth”: Collingwood’s Speculum Mentis The providence that’s in a watchful state, Knows almost every grain of Pluto’s gold, Finds bottom in th’ uncomprehensive depth, Keeps place with thought and almost, like the gods, Do thoughts unveil in their dumb cradles. shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, iii. iii

R.G. Collingwood’s The Idea of History played an important role in The Autonomy of Literature on two occasions. First, he clarified the intellectual relation between imaginative literature and historical writing, by arguing that both are products of the imagination, though the latter crucially is “meant to be true”— true, that is, in the way that philosophy and science are meant to be true, as asserted by Lamarque, Olsen, and non- or anti-cognitive philosophers like them in Chapter 1. Second, he argued that every work of art has not one context but two: that in which it is created and that in which it is received. Seen in this light the New-Historicist literary critics’ obsession with the original “context” as something definitive and determinative where works of literature are concerned (as opposed to something only interesting and relevant) reveals itself to be a piece of dogma—and an un-historical one at that. There is no flitting back to where the work came from to find it newborn, awaiting us: only a reconstruction that we do in and from the present, from the context that we inhabit in the present and cannot possibly escape. (All schools of criticism are inherently time-bound, and New Historicism is no exception. Like all the others it will fade away and return again in a new guise. Historicism is neither new nor old but eternal.) I want to return to Collingwood in this chapter but not, as a reader familiar with his work might expect, to The Principles of Art. It is true that in that book Collingwood did make a valuable distinction between the kinds of thought we find in art and in philosophy, of direct relevance to the discussion of truth in the preceding chapter. “We have distinguished”, he wrote, “two forms of thought: consciousness and intellect”:

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004356856_003

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Now intellect is concerned with the relations between things; therefore intellect, since its truth is a particular kind of truth, namely a relational truth, has a peculiar way of apprehending it, namely, arguing or inferring. Consciousness as such, and therefore art as such, not being intellect, does not and cannot argue. Anyone believing that intellect is “the only possible form of thought” will therefore conclude—as the anti-cognitivist tendency discussed in Chapter 1 concluded—that “art has nothing to do with truth”. But that is not so: Art is not indifferent to truth; it is essentially the pursuit of truth. But the truth it pursues is not a truth of relation, it is a truth of individual fact. The truths art discovers are those single and self-contained individualities which from the intellectual point of view become the “terms” between which it is the business of intellect to establish or apprehend relations.1 I am not entirely happy with this distinction between “relation” and “individual fact”, for reasons that might be clear by now. The individual facts of art (“the particulars it imagines”, as S.L. Goldberg described them in the previous chapter) establish all sorts of relations between each other and between themselves and the world; they are imaginative recreations of moral complexities “in the widest sense”, as Hilary Putnam said in the previous chapter. And as we saw in the previous chapter, works of literature—poetic, fictional, dramatic—guide and steer their readers’ thoughts as logic does, though not in the same way. In their way, metaphors are as compelling as syllogisms. So it may be that the “truth of relation” is not an utter stranger to imaginative writing. Still, there is an attempt in Collingwood’s distinction at least to discover the forms of truth appropriate to discourse on the one hand and art on the other. He is not philosophically “in denial” about art and truth, or stuck in a priori positions. The Principles of Art is a notoriously idealist text and as such an unfashionable one. In so far as Collingwood argues that “a work of art may be completely created when it has been created as a thing whose only place is in the artist’s mind” (130), or that the manufacture of a strain of music by a composer is “something that goes on in his head, and nowhere else” (134) then certainly his position is very different from the one I outlined in The Autonomy of Literature, which argued that artists’ creative experiences are by no means solely internal 1 R.G. Collingwood, The Principles of Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), 287, 288.

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but are vitally led and formed by what they see emerging in the artistic process and by responding to what they externalize and respond to in musical notes, paint, clay, words, or any other material. But in fact Collingwood acknowledges that process, or seems to. “A person who on one occasion fails to express himself”, if he is “a person quite accustomed to express himself successfully on other occasions, and to know that he is doing it”, will indeed respond to what he does: Through comparison of this occasion with his memory of these others … he ought to be able to see that he has failed, this time, to express himself. And this is precisely what every artist is doing when he says, “This line won’t do.” (283) And vice versa, of course: the artist is just as likely to say, “This line will do— and, furthermore, it guides me as regards the placement of the next line; it changes what I see, and it confirms what I have done and what I plan to continue doing …”, and so on and so forth. Collingwood then goes to deliver an artistic autonomy argument in noce, via an account he imagines an artist providing of his or her activity: You see something in your subject, of course, before you begin to paint it … and that, no doubt, is what induces you to begin painting; but only a person with experience of painting, and of painting well, can realize how little that is, compared with what you come to see in it as your painting progresses. If you paint badly, of course, that doesn’t happen. Your own daub comes between you and the subject, and you can only see the mess you are making. But a good painter … paints things because until he has painted them he doesn’t know what they are like. (303–04) Well and good—and the idea that a daub actually “comes between you and the subject” whereas a genuine painting illuminates and evokes it, is most useful. But Collingwood then disposes of this account in a series of arguments I find unclear and confusing—especially when he adds some sub-Lockean commentary to the effect that “every imaginative experience is a sensuous experience raised to the imaginative level by an act of consciousness” (306). For him in this mood “the artist’s psycho-physical activity of painting” (307) is just another sensuous experience entering that process, and not “an act of consciousness” in its own right. But on the other hand he concedes that “the painter puts a great deal more into his experience of the subject than a man who merely looks at it” because what he puts in is “the whole consciously performed

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a­ ctivity” of painting (308)—the activity he seemed earlier to regard as a purely sensuous one. He also seems unclear on the relation of the artist’s imaginative experience of creation as compared to the spectator’s one in front of the created object: whether that is identical or can never be, and what the real implications of the difference might be. So the Principles is something of a curate’s egg where the present discussion is concerned. For that discussion Collingwood’s first major publication, ­Speculum Mentis, is much more significant, and for a particularly important reason. The philosophical anti-cognitivists whose views were surveyed in Chapter 1—Lamarque, Olsen, Stolnitz, Morgan, Ingarden, and others—occupy the philosophical throne and survey aesthetics from the Archimedean point of vantage that throne gives them, employing a theory of knowledge they generally take for granted. Philosophy Looks at the Arts, Joseph Margolis entitled his book—as if the arts were merely one of the cells that the philosopher at the centre of the Panopticon could remotely and virtually inspect, alongside justice, say, or childhood, or blood sports. But what if a philosopher considered the place of the arts within a complete (or at least more broad-ranging) intellectual conspectus, in which the place of philosophy vis-à-vis the arts was explicitly up for consideration, and in which the intellectual bets accordingly were off as regards the truth as the sole possession of one or another sphere of knowledge? What would a philosopher’s theory of art look like if he put the intellectual role of philosophy in suspension alongside it, rather than took its nature for granted? A discussion of that kind would form a vital bridge between the previous chapter and the ones to come, asking in effect the question this study as a whole is engaged upon: to wit, were literature to have a r­ elation to philosophical, historical, or scientific truth, what would that relation be? Given that it asserts nothing itself (as Philip Sidney said in 1579), and given that the truths it presents us with (if any) are “heuristic” (according to F.R. Leavis) or “unasserted” (according to Roger Scruton) what would art make of propositions? Poets, novelists, and dramatists are men and women like ourselves, ­often with surprisingly broad interests and circles of acquaintance. As The ­Autonomy of Literature was at pains to argue, they don’t live up towers or trees but bump into or seek out intellectual stimulation hither and yon, as people have ­always done. (George Eliot and T.S. Eliot are examples that spring to mind. One translated Das Leben Jesu and the other wrote a thesis on F.H. B ­ radley.) When the doyens of politics, religion, science, and philosophy whisper or shout in their ear, how do they respond? “It would signify nothing to me if a very wise person were to stun me with proofs that Rousseau’s views of life, religion, and government are mistakenly erroneous”, George Eliot wrote to a friend in 1849:

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that he was guilty of some of the worse basenesses that have degraded civilized man. I might admit all this—and it would not be the less true that Rousseau’s genius has sent that intellectual thrill through my intellectual and moral frame which has awakened me to new perceptions, which has made man and nature a fresh world of thought and feeling to me—and this by not teaching me any new belief.2 The Principles of Art may be unfashionable; so far as I can see, Speculum Mentis (or “The Map of Knowledge”) is to all intents and purposes invisible in terms of later discussion. But it opens up the debate in just this way, and it does so in philosophical terms that I think the literary critic can generally follow. So it is that Collingwood earns his place once more. I need to crave the reader’s indulgence, however, since what follows is more an act of summary than one of analysis. I hope the summary is worthwhile, however, believing as I do that Collingwood’s position is one interested parties in aesthetics should reacquaint themselves with, and one which makes sense of the chapters which follow in Part 2.

i

As I say, Speculum Mentis is intended to provide an overall picture of human mental operations, or a map of knowledge, in a sequence from the primitive (in the sense of “originary” rather than “crude”) to the sophisticated, in each stage of which the problems left over from one form of intellectual endeavour are taken up by the next: art followed by religion, then science, then history, and finally philosophy. Each one of these fields, Collingwood is eager to stress from the outset, “is in some sense a kind of knowledge” and, furthermore, “makes for itself the unequivocal claim to be knowledge”. Poets are no more shrinking violets than philosophers are: an eminent one said, for example, that men and women of his kind are nothing less than the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, as we saw in the previous chapter. (“The ‘serious’ poets”, S.L. Goldberg remarked there, too, “are ones who have, and know that they have, important general truths about human life to express in their work.”) “At the outset, then,” Collingwood goes on, “we find no less than five types of experience, each claiming not only to give truth, but to give the absolute or ultimate truth concerning the nature of the universe, to reveal the secret of existence, 2 Gordon S. Haight (ed.), The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–1978), i. 277; my italics.

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and to tell us what the world really and fundamentally is.”3 All five fields, therefore, are competitors for the prize of truth (42), and the adjudicator must be able to stand beyond them all. Even if he is a philosopher he must not take philosophy’s claims for granted. All five fields must be judged solely on the basis of “self-consistency”, too, and not on their suitability to human nature or to “the facts of the world”—because that nature and those facts are the very issues in question and the very things each field claims to have discovered (44–5). It will hopefully be clear how Collingwood’s approach differs from Lamarque’s and Olsen’s, as outlined in the previous chapter, where “the facts of the world” and their reflection in language were taken to be understood by philosophy, and art was understood if not exactly to be locked out from the inner circle of propositional truth, then certainly not essentially related to it: for the anti-cognitivist, as we saw, truth is at best incidental to art, not fundamental to it. Nor will Collingwood accept that art, religion, science, history, and philosophy merely cover single and separate areas of reality, “each constituting a single aspect of the mind” (46), which, joined to its fellows, would present a complete and pretty picture. On the contrary, each field is emphatically holistic; each claims absolutely to explain the world, only each reveals (in sequence, from art to philosophy, via religion, science, and history) its inability to do so. In justifying his hierarchical sequence Collingwood draws on analogies of a kind that arouse intellectual suspicions nowadays, deriving as they do from human maturation and anthropological evolution. It is “a more childish type of attitude which gives rise to the artist, a more adolescent type which gives rise to the specifically religious vocation, and a more adult type which gives rise to the scientific professions”, he argues (51)—which may lead us to conclude that the historian is senile and the philosopher moribund. And he compares palaeolithic art with neolithic religion in a similar spirit (52). But we should probably not read too much into such analogies, “crude and abstract” as Collingwood calls them and “true at best in a shadowy and schematic kind of way” (51). What is “more important than the actual order is the suggestion of serial arrangement as such”: For a series of terms implies that each term is as it were built upon or derived from its predecessor and therefore does not start in vacuo, is not a wholly fresh embodiment of the universal, but is essentially a modification of the term before. (55)

3 R.G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis: or The Map of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), 39, 41; my italics; cited in parenthesis below.

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“Our five forms of experience”, it follows, “are not five abstractly self-identical types of event which, by their recurrence in a fixed or changing order, constitute human experience; but types whose recurrence perpetually modifies them, so that they shade off into one another and give rise to new determinations and therefore new types at every turn.” (56.) The contradictions that art leaves in its wake are taken up by religion, and the issues religion leaves unresolved are taken up by science, and so on: but each field derives something from the other, its intellectual predecessor, rather than start the intellectual world anew.4

ii

Speculum Mentis initially and apparently commits itself to a wholly idealist and anti-cognitivist view of art and truth. Art is humanity’s first intellectual endeavour, its “maiden chamber of thought” as Keats would say—its childhood: Art is the foundation, the soil, the womb and night of the spirit; all experience issues forth from it and rests upon it; all education begins with it; all religion, all science, are as it were specialized and peculiar modifications of it. Art is the sleep of the soul; as a baby does little but sleep, so the infant soul knows hardly any experience but art; as a grown man sleeps from his labours, so the awakened spirit returns into art to find new strength and inspiration, going down into that as into the fountain in which Hera renewed her virginity. (59) One imagines Hegel would have approved—and here perhaps is the place at which to acknowledge that I took a liberty with Troilus and Cressida in my 4 “Our dialectical series of forms of experience moves in a sense forward, in a sense backward. We do not begin with the lowest and simplest reality and make this develop into higher and more complex forms. To attempt the logical evolution of the complex out of the simple, the higher forms out of the lower, is exactly the error of the ‘synthetic philosophy’ of Herbert Spencer, which owes its being to a failure to understand the nature of a dialectical process …. The true nature of the mind does not exist ready-made somewhere in the depths of the mind, waiting to be discovered. Till it is discovered it does not exist; but yet it does exist in a confused and distorted form, since the errors made about it are only partial errors, and the dialectical task of bringing it into existence or coming to know it (the two are the same) is simply the clearing up of these confusions, which appear as inconsistencies, conflicts between what, at a given stage, the mind finds itself to be and what it feels it ought to be.” (206–07.)

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epigraph. Ulysses is talking about a watchful political state that “knows almost every grain of Pluto’s gold,/Finds bottom in th’ uncomprehensive depth”, and unveils thought in its “dumb cradles”: I am thinking of the word in terms of a state of mind. Art (especially in a form like the novel) “contains what seem to be assertions” (59) but in actual fact it is utterly indifferent to the truth or otherwise of what it conceives, because it is a totally imaginative field and the imagined as such is neither true nor false. “It is neither true nor false of set purpose: it simply ignores the distinction.” “There is no such thing as the socalled artistic illusion,” Collingwood writes, under the mantle of Philip Sidney, “for illusion means believing in the reality of that which is unreal, and art does not believe in the reality of anything at all.” (60.) Write “Thebes” on as many old doors as you like: no spectator will believe that she is there. The imagination is inherently “non-assertive” and “non-logical”, and the artist “does not judge or assert, he does not even think or conceive, he simply imagines” (60–61). The only intellectual or quasi-intellectual work the artist carries out is the distinction between beauty and ugliness. This is a “deliberate and constructive activity”, certainly, and “the law of this process, its guiding principle, is beauty” (64–5). To the artist “beauty is what God is to religion, what truth is to science; it is his ‘definition of the Absolute’.” (67.) Art is essentially and inherently monadic. The creation of works of art “is altogether the act of imagination”, and “the paper and ink, the paints and the clay that we handle are not its materials, and the written page and the painted picture are not its result.” (67.) Every imagined world is a private one occupied only by its author (68) and unrelated to any other such world; the desire to “communicate or seek an audience” is alien to the artistic experience (69); all artistic problems are ones artists set themselves (70); works of art are accordingly indifferent to “mutual consistency” and seek only “internal coherence” (71); “the artist as such cares nothing for the history of art” (72); “aesthetic consciousness” involves the “ignoring of everything factual, even of its own historical nature and situation”; and the artist makes no distinction whatever between imagination and knowledge (72). The account offered appears to be an anti-cognitive expression of faith, and a fundamentalist one at that. My copy of Speculum Mentis was once presented by the delegates at Oxford University Press to Collingwood’s idealist colleague, Harold Joachim—who, it so happens, was T.S. Eliot’s tutor at Merton College in 1914–1915. Evidently, Joachim was not given to marginalia, only occasionally running a line alongside passages or underneath expressions that interested him—though he wrote “bene!” next to Collingwood’s prefatorial comment “that a philosophy which cannot be written in plain terms, without reliance on the jargon of any school, must be a false philosophy” (11). But in the middle of the account I have

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just summarized, at page 67, he neatly wrote: “overstated & see below pp. 73 ff”. For one third of his way through the chapter, at a point when a discussion of “The Monadism of Art” gives way to one of “Meaning in Art”, Collingwood abruptly changes tack. “The reader must have seen”, he wrote of the preceding discussion, “that it was a one-sided account.” (73.) What he intended was not, in fact, an idealist account of art of the kind provided by Croce in Aesthetic, but a polemical critique of the empiricist psychology of art, “that imagination can do no more than redistribute or shuffle materials supplied to it by perception” (74). In fact “imagination never works in the pure vacuum in which, for experimental purposes, we have hitherto placed it” (“the melancholy creed of art for art’s sake”). On the contrary “some kind of continuity between an artist’s imaginings and his experience as a member of the world of facts is undeniable” (75). The empiricist opposition of artistic “supposal” and cognitive “assertion” is a false one, which philosophers of various stripes have tried to bridge in a number of ways (76) but never can, not simply because purely imaginative supposal is an impossibility but because if knowledge is a matter of question and answer (and that truly is an article of faith for Collingwood, as The Idea of History demonstrates) then supposal and assertion are joined at the hip: “two opposite and correlative activities which form as it were the systole and diastole of knowledge itself” (77). Imaginative supposal is at the origin of all thought, artistic, religious, historical, scientific, or philosophical. In the previous chapter I suggested that “established knowledge is hardly ongoing knowledge at all”, and that the arts and the sciences are equal partners in a process of discovery rather than one of collation. Collingwood says much the same thing: Knowledge as a past fact, as something dead and done with—knowledge by the time it gets into encyclopaedias and text-books—does consist of assertion, and those who treat it as an affair of encyclopaedias and text-books may be forgiven for thinking that it is assertion and nothing else …. People who are acquainted with knowledge at first hand have ­always known that assertions are only answers to questions.5

5 Speculum Mentis, 77. David Novitz puts this point well from another point of view: “It is only when there is some doubt as to whether our past experience applies in a new situation that we can actually learn from past experience. In such a case, though, we do not rely on induction for the acquisition of empirical knowledge, for we have to suppose, imagine, or hypothesize that our past experience is relevant to the present situation.” (Knowledge, Fiction and Imagination (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987), 36.)

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Better than systole and diastole, “questioning is the cutting edge of knowledge; assertion is the dead weight behind the edge that gives it driving force.” (78.) Art, then, is all question; rather than waiting for an answer in the form of an assertion “the suspending of assertion seems to be an end in itself … a question which expects no answer: that is, a supposal.” (79.) Once more, this seems to take us back: to Plato, to Philip Sidney, and to Lamarque, Olsen, and the other anti-cognitivists: “nothing affirms and therefore never lieth” and so forth. But as Collingwood goes on immediately to observe, questions cannot come from nowhere. “A pure act of imagination, just because it was completely divorced from fact, would have nowhere to start from and would therefore have no reason for determining itself in any one way rather than in any other.” (79.) “The artist must really exist in a real world, and his works of art are necessarily a kind of sublimated version of his experience as a real person, however unconscious of this fact he may be.” (79.) Though “imagination does not exist in the free state, and itself requires a basis of fact” (80) the artist necessarily overlooks that state of affairs; “all experience is aesthetic, because imagination is a factor in every single cognitive act”, but “no experience is purely aesthetic, because there is no concrete experience from which the logical act of assertion is wholly absent” (83). In fact this overlooking, this “belief in the separateness and independence of imagination” (85), is precisely the error into which art falls and that religion seeks to remedy in its belief that imagined deities, miracles, and related spiritual manifestations are real. (Elsewhere Collingwood suggests that artists are seers of ghosts and spirits, whereas religionists are believers in them; 113. So in religion “the holy is the beautiful asserted as real”; 120.) The separateness of imagination is an error or a paradox: art is “both intuitive (pure imagination) and expressive (revelatory of truth)” (87): When you know what you mean, you have achieved philosophy; but when you know you mean something, and cannot tell what, you have already achieved something: you have achieved art. (90) That is why and how “beauty is the birthplace of truth” (90). The artist herself hardly understands this (explicitly) unless, like Coleridge, Keats, or T.S. Eliot, she takes the step into criticism and therefore temporarily ceases to be an artist at all. But the origins of art in concrete experience mean that all the anti-empiricist “idealism” of Collingwood’s polemical opening can be re-visited in a spirit of correction: The concrete life of art is thus explicitly both imaginative and conceptual, and has thus overcome the one-sidedness of pure imagination. And

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because this is so, because the work of art is constructed on a framework of thought, art is not the withdrawal of the soul into a purely imaginative fairyland but a concrete fact. Hence the necessity for physical works of art and for the recognition by the artist of real minds other than his own— including among these his own future and past mind [like Stephen Dedalus or Childe Harold]—with which he desires to communicate, teaching them and learning from them. If art were pure intuition there could be no society of artists, no communication, no physical works of art. (99) In fact then, every artist is a critic by necessity not by choice, and a poet is “a person who has tried to be a dreamer and failed” (100). The artist retains implicitly what humanity will always need to render explicit, which is why artistic inspiration is fleeting and why religion is a required next step in transcending and accommodating the paradox of art: However truly the secret of the world is expressed under the form of beauty, the expression is always formally imperfect. It is of the essence of truth that the mind should be able to say what it is, to state it in explicit terms, subject it to criticism and attack, and watch it emerge strengthened from the ordeal. The secret revealed in art is a secret that no one can utter, and therefore not truly revealed …. Art fails us because it does not assert. It is pregnant with a message which it cannot deliver. (109–10)

iii

As if we were on one of Vico’s intellectual spirals, we have returned to the position of Lamarque and Olsen (and other reflective anti-cognitivists like them) only at a higher position. Ultimately art fails us as a source of truth because it does not assert; but that does not mean it fails us on the road to assertion. What Roger Scruton calls “the truth-directed use of falsehood” is not a nonsense: “Art is the cutting edge of the mind, the perpetual out-reaching of thought into the unknown, the act in which thought eternally sets itself a fresh problem.” (107.) No outreach, no assertion. Collingwood could have misunderstood many things about art and truth and still have made the essential point: that whereas they cannot be identified with each other, neither can they be dissociated from each other. The attempt to do that, Collingwood felt, could never succeed: Art is really no more than the aesthetic side of all knowledge, unintelligible in abstraction from knowledge as a whole; and therefore the only

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i­ntelligible philosophy of art is a philosophy which places the aesthetic side of knowledge in its right place, and this can only be a complete philosophy of knowledge. The act of drawing a ring-fence round the aesthetic consciousness and regarding it as a thing to itself is abstraction which gives birth at once to art, as a specific experience, and aesthetic philosophy as the study of that experience. (260–61) Surely art is never a “specific experience” (“specially or peculiarly pertaining to a certain thing or class of things” as the oed has it). It is something much more like what Ernst Gombrich described in the previous chapter: an “untranslatable experience of a plenitude of values that speaks to the whole man”. When R.K. Elliott writes that “aesthetic experience is the contemplation of an imaginary world which is the meaning of the literary work”, and that “this imaginary world is the ‘aesthetic object’, and only properties internal to it are relevant to aesthetic judgement”,6 we are right, I am sure, to have reservations even about the idiom in which he chooses to express himself, from “contemplation” to “imaginary world” and from “properties” to “judgement”. The fact is that none of these things can be separated the one from the other in the way the philosophical terminology implies. Is it possible to “contemplate” King Lear—at least while it is unrolling in front of us? Would “contemplation” do the play any sort of justice? In “On Sitting down to Read King Lear Again” Keats says that he must “burn through” what he calls “the fierce dispute/Betwixt damnation and impassioned clay” in Shakespeare’s drama: not “contemplate” it. How many people seeking to come to terms with the play would think “aesthetic object” the right kind of term with which to begin the process? To ring-fence art— and imaginative literature in particular—is necessarily to misunderstand it and misunderstand its polymorphous role in intellectual life: “When you know what you mean, you have achieved philosophy; but when you know you mean something, and cannot tell what, you have already achieved something.” King Lear and masterpieces like it—from Antigone to Proust—suggest just how profound and significant that “something” can be. “We cannot hope for intelligibility unless we have order,” Dorothy Walsh wrote: “but the order of impressive works of literature in the mode of dramatic tension is an order in which some element of the inexplicable, of the recalcitrant, of the obdurate, of the unmanageable, is preserved and makes itself felt”: The literary artist who can succeed with this must have what Keats called “negative capability”—the capacity to hold disparate elements in mind 6 R.K. Elliott, “Poetry and Truth”, 77, Analysis, 27:3 (Jan. 1967), 77–85.

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without irritable hankering after the simplicity of reduction, without hankering for dissolution in explanation. Negative capability is a certain kind of robustness of mind difficult if not impossible for those who are commonly called “thinkers.” Thinkers are intent on explanation, but the triumph of literary intelligibility in the mode of dramatic tension depends upon restraint in explanation. It depends, indeed, upon a marvelously achieved combination of boldness and restraint—boldness in inclusion and restraint in explanation.7 Walsh adds not only to Keats’s famous formulation but also to Collingwood’s sense that artists “achieve something” even when of necessity they cannot say explicitly what that something is. She stresses “dramatic tension” as opposed to syllogistic logic; she speaks of the inexplicable, the recalcitrant, the obdurate, and the unmanageable in works of literature, just as in The Autonomy of L­ iterature I pointed to their “intractability, lability, ‘mobility’, or inexhaustiveness”. Mostly importantly of all, she transforms Keats’s negative into a positive. This suspension of assertion actually requires a discipline and a strength: a ­robustness that is one of restraint rather than activity. “Knowing you mean something” feels less hapless and helpless when it is envisaged as an act of boldness in inclusion that could embody itself in a work of dramatic tension like King Lear. It is time now to turn from this theoretical opening to some further works of “dramatic tension”, by Wordsworth, Byron and their s­ uccessors, to see in detail how that dialectic of boldness and restraint operates in practice. 7 Dorothy Walsh, Literature and Knowledge (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1969), 70.

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The Printed Medium: Wordsworth and Books The chapters that follow involve the Romantic and post-Romantic literary eras. Is the autonomy argued for here, then, a feature only of those eras or common to all imaginative literature to a greater or lesser extent? I believe that the ability of imaginative literature to “hatch and generate unexpected patterns of meaning” is innate to it. But certainly what is to be looked at in this first chapter could be seen as a peculiarly Romantic idea or anxiety: that—­unexpectedly, given what imaginative authors apparently intend to do, which is to find or woo readers in a more urgent sense than discursive writers do (the interest of whose material is or should be self-evident)—the printed medium is a source of communicative obstruction rather than delivery. That anxiety, I am sure, is related to the issue on which we ended the discussion in the previous chapter, that imaginative literature is marked by “boldness in inclusion and restraint in explanation”—a feature I also believe is related to Collingwood’s basic point, that art is what takes place when we know we mean something but are not sure what we mean. “Love has not the power to speak what love indites”, John Clare wrote: “The Soul lies buried in the ink that writes.” In Blake’s “Introduction” to the Songs of Innocence, the poet, “Piping songs of pleasant glee”, is told by a child first to “Pipe a song about a lamb!”, then to “Drop thy pipe, thy happy pipe” in favour of singing “thy songs of happy chear”, and finally to “sit thee down and write/In a book that all may read”. The poet obeys: And I made a rural pen, And I stain’d the water clear, And I wrote my happy songs Every child may joy to hear.1 The power of remote communication has been gained. But something has been lost, too: the clear water must be “stain’d” before ink can work its magic. Blake’s disquiet about writing and publication—which governs his entire project, of course, and the means of reproduction that he chose—overlaps with a disquiet about language: again of a kind the discursive writer will generally not 1 William Blake, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 111.

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feel as intensely as a poetic one, reliant as the discursive writer is on the “translatability” of expression. “Words strain,/Crack and sometimes break, under the burden”, as Eliot put it in “Burnt Norton”: Under the tension, slip, slide, perish, Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place, Will not stay still. “And so each venture”, as he put it in “East Coker”, “Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate/With shabby equipment always deteriorating/In the general mess of imprecision of feeling”.2 It is hard not to imagine most imaginative writers of merit experiencing anxieties of these kinds, about the recalcitrance of language and the descent thought and emotion might be felt to take even as they are expressed. Thus their medium is their first challenge, the place in which the work upon which they are engaged will first demonstrate its stubborn refusal to behave as the author expected it to do. “When you put pen to paper”, as Isaac Babel put it, “there’s no telling where it may lead you or where the devil you may end up. You don’t always fall in with the rhythm or the with the expressions as they’ve taken shape in your mind.”3 This element in imaginative literature is directly related, as I say, to what Dorothy Walsh argued at the end of the previous chapter, about that “element of the inexplicable, of the recalcitrant, of the obdurate, [and] of the unmanageable, [that] is preserved and makes itself felt” in literature, and that “boldness in inclusion” versus “restraint in explanation” that it manifests. The recalcitrance and obduracy of verbal expression must make itself felt in every one of the forms it takes, from the court of law to the physics laboratory; but the combined boldness and restraint of imaginative literature, the writer’s “knowledge that she means something but cannot tell what” that constitutes artistic truth, can take her to the verge, not of inarticulacy but of a paradoxical reticence. Romantic poets were probably the first to treat this issue with due seriousness on a repeated number of occasions, but it is present in Shakespeare, too, with his plays-within-the-play and those dramas of his (such as Love’s Labours Lost) that are commuted versions of the marriage plot or which otherwise confound the conventions of art.

2 T.S. Eliot, Poems, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue, 2 vols (London: Faber and Faber, 2015), i. 184, 191. 3 Isaac Babel, You Must Know Everything: Stories 1915–1937, trans. Max Hayward (New York: Carroll and Graf, 1984), 211–12.

The Printed Medium: Wordsworth



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i

There must have been many apocalyptic narratives concerning the end of the sciences and the arts in general and of books and reading in particular. The interruption of that great conversation, largely carried on inaudibly in print, is something much to be feared and wondered at: an image or symbol not so much of the decline of human culture as of its annihilation. But we could imagine something more apocalyptic still: that the destruction of books and learning might be greeted with regret, certainly, but also with a sense of propriety, not by a cleric or a redneck but by a poet. “Hitherto”, Wordsworth writes in the fifth book of his autobiographical epic, The Prelude (a book itself entitled “Books”), “In progress through this Verse, my mind hath look’d/Upon the speaking face of earth and heaven/As her prime Teacher ….” “Thou also, Man, hast wrought,/For commerce of thy nature with itself,/Things worthy of unconquerable life”—“And yet we feel, we cannot choose but feel”, Wordsworth concludes, “That these must perish.” “A thought is with me sometimes,” he goes on: and I say, Should earth by inward throes be wrench’d throughout, Or fire be sent from far to wither all Her pleasant habitations, and dry up Old Ocean in his bed left sing’d and bare, Yet would the living Presence still subsist Victorious …. But all the meditations of mankind, Yea, all the adamantine holds of truth, By reason built, or passion, which itself Is highest reason in a soul sublime; The consecrated works of Bard and Sage, Sensuous or intellectual, wrought by men, Twin labourers and heirs of the same hopes, Where would they be? Oh, why hath not the mind Some element to stamp her image on In nature somewhat nearer to her own? Why, gifted with such powers to send abroad Her spirit, must it lodge in shrines so frail?4

4 William Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ed. Mark L. Reed, 2 vols (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), v. 1–48; cited by book and line below.

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This discussion of books as frail shrines is not unprecedented in Wordsworth. There is the pair of poems from Lyrical Ballads, “Expostulation and Reply” and “The Tables Turned”, for example. “Where are your books?” Matthew asks ­William in the first of these poems: .

that light bequeath’d To beings else forlorn and blind! Up! Up! and drink the spirit breath’d From dead men to their kind. “Books!”, says the speaker in the second poem, “’tis a dull and endless strife”: One impulse from a vernal wood May teach you more of man; Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.5 In “Expostulation and Reply”, though, the nature-lover gets to make a reply. In the second poem the tables really are turned: the book-lover with his “barren leaves” is not allowed to speak. An ambivalence towards reading comes out repeatedly in the preface to Lyrical Ballads: a publication surrounded by other books but very different from them: “They who have been accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers,” Wordsworth writes, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will, no doubt, frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what species of courtesy those attempts can be permitted to assume that title.6 What the reader will not get from this book are those “gross and violent stimulants”, the public’s morbid taste for which is catered for by others. “Great ­national events”, “the increasing accumulation of men in cities”, “the uniformity of their occupations”, and their “craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies” had, Wordsworth believed, 5 William Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 1797–1800, ed. James Butler and Karen Green (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 108, 109. 6 William Wordsworth, Prose Works, ed. W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), i. 123; cited in parenthesis below.

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created that taste and had almost entirely eclipsed “the invaluable works of our elder writers … driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.” (i. 129.) (This is a compelling example, as it happens, of that “contaminatory” pressure on literature that was mentioned above in the Preface, which literature embraces and converts rather than succumbs to or rejects. Wordsworth would be nothing were it not for the “deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse” against which he set out to do intellectual and moral battle.) But even poetry is a secondary, ambiguous, and derivative thing: a spirit breathed from dead men to their kind rather than an impulse from a vernal wood. “However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of a Poet, it is obvious, that while he describes and imitates passions, his employment is in some degree mechanical, compared with the freedom and power of real and substantial action and suffering.” (i. 138.) The more sensitively the poet works, “the deeper will be his faith that no words, which his fancy or imagination can suggest, will be to be compared with those which are the emanations of reality and truth.” “Poetry is the image of man and nature”—nothing more. (i. 139; my italics.) The oppositions between good and bad literature, and literature and nature were an endless theme of Wordsworth’s. In a letter of June 1802 he asked where we are to find what he called “the best measure” of human nature. “I answer, from within”: by stripping our own hearts naked, and by looking out of ourselves towards men who lead the simplest lives most according to nature men who have never known false refinements, wayward and artificial desires, false criticisms, effeminate habits of thinking and feeling, or who, having known these things, have outgrown them. … People in our rank of life are perpetually falling into one sad mistake, namely, that of supposing that human nature and the persons they associate with are one and the same thing. Whom do we generally associate with? Gentlemen, persons of fortune, professional men, ladies persons who can afford to buy or can easily procure books of half a guinea price, hot-pressed, and printed upon superfine paper. … And yet few ever consider books but with reference to their power of pleasing those persons and men of a higher rank few descend lower among cottages and fields and among children.7

7 Alan Hill (ed.), Letters of William Wordsworth: A New Selection (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 52.

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Such a passage begins to clarify that whole cluster of feelings Wordsworth had towards books, and what he believed they stood for in both moral and class terms. What he described later in the same letter as his “new compositions of feeling” would bear no resemblance to the hot-pressed and superfine productions purchased in high society. Nor was this simply a personal question. Books are instruments of education, too. Book Three of The Prelude (358–72) testifies to Wordsworth’s problems as a student at Cambridge. “Bred up in Nature’s lap”, he was, he felt, “ill tutor’d for captivity”, while his mind, “wrought upon instinctively”, had found “a winning power beyond all other power” in the lovely forms of nature. “Not that I slighted Books; that were to lack/All sense”; still, everywhere outside the walls of college nature held up “her great school” before the eye of youth. As late as 16 December 1845 he was writing in similar terms to an inspector of schools who had sent him a list of suggested children’s reading from the Committee of the Council on Education. “Is not the Knowledge inculcated by the Teacher, or derived under his management, from books, too exclusively dwelt upon”, Wordsworth wrote, “so as almost to put out of sight that which comes, without being sought for, from intercourse with nature and from experience in the actual employments and duties which a child’s situation in the Country, however unfavorable, will lead him to or impose upon him? How much of what is precious comes into our minds, in all ranks of society, not as Knowledge entering formally in the shape of Knowledge, but as infused thro’ the constitution of things and by the grace of God.”8 Thus what in Book Three of The Prelude had impressed him as the “strong book-mindedness” of the academic life (404) could also be seen in different terms: When, in forlorn and naked chambers coop’d And crowded, o’er their ponderous Books they sate, Like catterpillars eating out their way, In silence, or with keen devouring noise Not to be track’d or father’d. (iii. 463–67) Barren leaves indeed. So Wordsworth made a distinction not merely between books and nature but between the “languages” that they typically employ, and it was his aim in Lyrical Ballads somehow to get back or down to a language almost unknown to poetry, “by books/Not hitherto reflected” as The Prelude has it (xii. 364–65). “Such a language, arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings, is  a  more permanent, and a far more philosophical language,” he argued in 8 Hill, Letters of William Wordsworth, 318.

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the Lyrical Ballads preface, “than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets”.9 Very little such language was to be found in poetry entering formally in the shape of poetry since Milton’s time, but it could be found living on in epitaphs, Wordsworth felt, and for a good reason, since epitaphs embodied that language of regular feeling, simple and unelaborated, but intellectually overlooked and undervalued, which Wordsworth championed and aspired towards.

ii

Wordsworth’s three Essays upon Epitaphs are built on two premises: that “a principle of immortality” is indivisible from humanity and that without the consciousness of such a principle “man could never have awakened in him the desire to live in the remembrance of his fellows”.10 These antitheses between life and death and memory and forgetting are illustrated by two philosophers: Simonides, who found an anonymous corpse by the sea and buried it out of respect; and an unknown philosopher who, coming upon body in similar circumstances, “regarded the same with slight, if not with contempt; saying, ‘See the shell of the flown bird!’” (ii. 52.) Somewhere between these two positions we find “the Author of that s­ pecies of composition, the laws of which it is our present purpose to explain” (ii. 53). An epitaph “ought to contain some thought or feeling belonging to the ­mortal or immortal part of our nature touchingly expressed” (ii. 56), much as the ­Lyrical Ballads sought to trace “truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature” (i. 123). It should speak “the general language of h ­ umanity as connected with the subject of death” (ii. 57), just as the Lyrical Ballads arose from “the general passions and thoughts and feelings of men” (i. 142). The dead individual should be seen “as a tree through a tender haze or a luminous mist, that spiritualizes and beautifies it”, and if anyone says such an epitaph must therefore of necessity be untrue, they are wrong: “it is truth hallowed by love— the joint offspring of the worth of the dead and the affections of the living” (ii. 58). When a tender haze is thrown around a person in this way, “Any further detail, minutely and scrupulously pursued, especially if this be done with laborious and antithetical discriminations, must inevitably frustrate its own purpose … for, the understanding having been so busy in its petty occupation, how could the heart of the mourner be other than cold?” (ii. 58–9.) A “metrical wit” 9 Wordsworth, Prose Works, i. 125. 10 Ibid. ii. 50.

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like Pope, “whose sparkling and tuneful manner had bewitched the men of letters his Contemporaries, and corrupted the judgment of the Nation through all ranks of society” (ii. 75), and whose epitaphs “are little better than a tissue of false thoughts, languid and vague expression, unmeaning antithesis, and laborious attempts at discrimination” (ii. 80), could have no inkling of those truths that are “the universal intellectual property of man” or how such truths should be communicated: it is required that these truths should be instinctively ejaculated, or should rise irresistibly from circumstances; in a word that they should be uttered in such connection as shall make it felt that they are not ­adopted—not spoken by rote, but perceived in their whole compass with the freshness and clearness of an original intuition. (ii. 78) Poor Pope; but then again, poor Wordsworth! It is one thing to enact a set of laws like this about epitaphs, meaning them to stand for poetry in general, too, and to convict a poet from a long-departed culture of failing to observe them. It is quite another to observe them yourself: to speak the truths you have in you “in such connection as shall make it felt that they are not adopted”, and to have them come over, again and again, “with the freshness and clearness of an original intuition”. No wonder Wordsworth came to see that language (whether on a tombstone or in a book “hot-pressed, and printed upon superfine paper”) could be as much a source of obstruction as well as a passage; that “the anxiety of the Author to do justice to the occasion” did not infect “sepulchral inscriptions” alone (ii. 84), but inscriptions of every poetical kind; and that “the language really used by men” argued for in Lyrical Ballads needed “a certain colouring of imagination” thrown over it because no poet could ever speak it (i. 123). It is one thing to argue that “Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thoughts.” It is quite another to discover that Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve. (ii. 84–5) The “tyranny of bad taste” over “the feelings of nature”, Wordsworth goes on, “gives proof that thoughts cannot, even upon this impulse, assume an outward life without a transformation and a fall.” (ii. 85.) Epitaphs interested him because their subject matter was an important, inalienable, and familiar element

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in human life. What he perhaps did not expect to find was that language revealed an element of morbidity in itself.

iii

There is “the tendency of metre”, Wordsworth wrote in the preface to Lyrical Ballads, “to throw a sort of half-consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition” (i. 147). In Book Five of The Prelude this ambivalence comes out more emphatically: Visionary Power Attends upon the motions of the winds Embodied in the mystery of words. There darkness makes abode, and all the host Of shadowy things do work their changes there, As in a mansion like their proper home: — Even forms and substances are circumfus’d By that transparent veil with light divine; And through the turnings intricate of Verse, Present themselves as objects recognis’d, In flashes, and with a glory scarce their own. (v. 619–29) “Visionary Power” seems all right; everyday “forms and substances” being ­illuminated by “light divine” sounds poetic, in a Miltonic way. But “There ­darkness makes abode”? There “shadowy things” run amok like squatters “in a mansion like their proper home”? There objects are recognized only “In f­ lashes, and with a glory scarce their own”? The whole activity seems circumfused with an illusory, delusory light—not a real source of guidance or wisdom at all. However much books aspire to “unconquerable life” it is altogether a good thing that “they must perish”. Not only should they ultimately be enshrined and put away; they themselves are “shrines” (v. 48): caskets for relics of the dead. “One day, when, in the hearing of a Friend”, Wordsworth goes on, after the opening lines of Book Five I have already quoted, “I had given utterance to thoughts like these”, his friend confessed “That he, at sundry seasons, had himself/Yielded to kindred hauntings”. One day, for example, “upon a summer’s noon”, While he was sitting in a rocky cave By the sea-side, perusing, as it chanced,

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The famous History of the Errant Knight, Recorded by Cervantes, those same thoughts Came to him …. “Having closed/The Book” he “had turn’d his eyes towards the Sea” to ponder “Poetry and geometric Truth … And their high privilege of lasting life,/Exempt from all internal injury”. “At length,/His senses yielding to the sultry air,/Sleep seiz’d him and he passed into a dream.” And a remarkably un-Wordsworthian dream it is, in which the friend imagined himself all alone in “an Arabian Waste”: Distress of mind Was growing upon him when, behold! at once To his great joy a Man was at his side, Upon a Dromedary mounted high. He seem’d an Arab of the Bedouin Tribes, A Lance he bore, and underneath one arm A Stone, and in the opposite hand, a Shell Of a surpassing brightness. Much rejoic’d The dreaming Man that he should have a Guide To lead him through the Desart, and he thought, While questioning himself what this strange freight Which the New-comer carried through the Waste Could mean, the Arab told him that the Stone, To give it in the language of the Dream, Was Euclid’s Elements. “And this,” said he, “This other,” pointing to the Shell, “this book Is something of more worth.” The Arab tells the dreamer to put the shell to his hear: I did so; And heard that instant in an unknown Tongue, Which yet I understood, articulate sounds, A loud prophetic blast of harmony, An Ode, in passion utter’d, which foretold Destruction to the Children of the Earth By deluge now at hand. No sooner ceas’d The song, but with calm look, the Arab said

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That all was true; that it was even so As had been spoken; and that he himself Was going to bury these two Books, The one that held acquaintance with the stars, And wedded man to man by purest bond Of nature, undisturb’d by space or time; Th’other that was a God, yea many Gods, Had voices more than all the winds, and was A joy, a consolation, and a hope. Wordsworth’s friend—who is Coleridge, of course—continued: Strange as it may seem, I wonder’d not, although I plainly saw The one to be a Stone, th’other a Shell, Nor doubted once that they both were Books, Having a perfect faith in all that pass’d. The dreamer begs to accompany the Arab “and share his errand with him”, but can only follow in the steps of his dromedary, feeling that the rider is part Don Quixote, part Bedouin, “neither, and both at once”. His countenance, meanwhile, grew more disturb’d, And, looking backwards when he look’d, I saw A glittering light, and ask’d him whence it came. “It is,” said he, “the waters of the deep Gathering upon us”; quickening then his pace, He left me; I call’d after him aloud, He heeded not; but with his twofold charge Beneath his arm, before me full in view, I saw him riding o’er the Desart Sands, With the fleet waters of the drowning world In chace of him, whereat I wak’d in terror, And saw the Sea before me; and the Book, In which I had been reading, at my side. (v. 49–139) The source of the dream’s power is surely its boldness of inclusion married to an uncanny restraint in explanation. The Arab is sinister and unsympathetic yet the friend cleaves to him; his errand is both absurd and reasonable; he is

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Quixote, Arab, neither, and both; he it is who has most to fear yet it is the friend who wakes in terror, to find the book and the sea safe and sound, exactly as he left them. Exactly as he left them? The sea perhaps but not the book. A stone is dead by definition, whereas a shell is dead but was once made and inhabited by a living creature. By virtue of that fact the shell is more redolent of death than the stone, which has never known life at all and is the “purest bond/Of nature, undisturbed by space or time”. But the shell is something of more worth than the stone, for all that, filled as it is with “voices more than all the winds” of passion and life. It is “A joy, a consolation, and a hope.” The shell is a source: it is as much mouth-piece as ear-phone, whereas the stone is deaf and dumb, left before the very start of human time, untouched and untouchable by life or history. When the shell prophesies “Destruction to the children of the earth/ By deluge now at hand” its own destruction is one of the things it foretells. The stone is De Quincey’s literature of knowledge; the shell his literature of power. The two principles seem immiscible in the dream of the Arab—the present study seeks to re-open the question. Be that as it may, the Arab is going to bury these things. The “prophetic blast of harmony” has just found its last auditor. Nor is Don Quixote’s presence as the instigator of all this dream-work a straightforward one. He it is who suggests the insanity of the Arab, and he is the eccentric but loveable maniac who goes on his quest as a result of reading knightly romances (“deluges of idle and extravagant stories”, if you like). Yet Wordsworth will defend the reading of similar stories and romances in his own youth in what remains of his Book of books. The entire vision of science and art and their common fate is mys­ terious—a “work of art constructed on a framework of thought”, no doubt, but also inexplicable, recalcitrant, obdurate, and unmanageable. After recounting his friend’s dream Wordsworth goes on to say that he would leave everything behind in order to undertake the Arab’s responsibility and bury the books to protect them from an apocalyptic deluge. You only have to hold a volume by Milton or Shakespeare in your hand, he goes on, to understand that the “deep entrancement” given off by these “Poor earthly casket[s] of immortal Verse” (v. 162, 164) outweighs any earthly connection, despite the fact that immortal things do not need caskets, and do not need burying.

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At this point in Book Five of The Prelude Wordsworth abruptly changes the subject, to speak directly about books and education. He remembers his

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dead mother, but decides to say no more about the stories he heard as a child, suggesting that whatever else they have bequeathed to him is on reflection better left “hidden in its endless home/Among the depths of time” (v. 197–98)— buried, so to speak. “In memory of all books which lay/Their sure foundation in the heart of Man” (v. 199–200), he writes, I should here assert their rights, attest Their honours; and should, once for all, pronounce Their benediction; speak of them as Powers For ever to be hallow’d; only less, For what we may become, and what we need, Than Nature’s self, which is the breath of God. (v. 217–22) But after some abstract discussion of the value of uncensored, free, and imaginative reading for children Wordsworth recoils on the damage books can do as instruments of Gradgrindery. The “moral part” of a child brought up entirely under the regime of knowledge, he suggests, “is perfect, and in learning and in books/He is a prodigy.” (v. 318–20.) But “Forth bring him to the air of common sense/And, fresh and shewy as it is, the Corps/Slips from us into powder ….” The world of the imagination, beyond good and evil, has a function far deeper than “learning”: Oh! give us once again the Wishing-Cap Of Fortunatus and the invisible Coat Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood, And Sabra in the Forest with St George! The Child whose love is here, at least doth reap One precious gain, that he forgets himself. The unhappy swot, victim of men “who have the art/To manage books” (v. 373–74), is a corpse slipping into powder; the natural boy has the precious ability to forget himself. But here The Prelude and its author jostle into view: for Wordsworth, too, has the art to “manage books”, and his entire project has its root in those “days/Disown’d by memory” he mentions in Book One (643–44). “Forgetting himself” is his greatest fear in the poem, the overcoming of which by writing it is the inspiration for it. But forgetting himself is also his greatest desire and greatest source of ecstasy. One of Wordsworth’s childhood evocations follows immediately: There was a Boy, ye knew him well, ye Cliffs And Islands of Winander! many a time

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At evening, when the stars had just begun To move along the edges of the hills, Rising or setting, would he stand alone, Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering Lake, And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands Press’d closely, palm to palm, and to his mouth Uplifted, he, as through an instrument, Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls That they might answer him.—And they would shout Across the watry Vale, and shout again, Responsive to his call, with quivering peals, And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud Of mirth and jocund din! (v. 389–404) The relevance of this story to the theme of Book Five is unclear until we realize that the boy is echoing nature just as poetry and discourse do: blowing mimic hootings. Like a poet, though, the boy is not echoing nature so much as eliciting it. His calling is a fragile, imitative, instrumental, and a joyful skill, like poetry; but it is also childish, absurd, and even unkind to the hoodwinked birds. Wordsworth ascribes no significance to the mimic hooting itself. It becomes meaningful only when it stops: And when it chanced That pauses of deep silence mock’d his skill, Then sometimes, in that silence, while he hung Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprize Has carried far into his heart the voice Of mountain torrents, or the visible scene Would enter unawares into his mind With all its solemn imagery, its rocks, Its woods, and that uncertain Heaven, receiv’d Into the bosom of the steady Lake. (v. 404–13) The message is one of passive reception and of “deep silence” entering the child’s mind “unawares”, as the scene is “receiv’d into” the surface of the lake. (“Come forth,” said the poet in “The Tables Turned”, “and bring with you a heart/That watches and receives.”) Then quite suddenly we are told that the boy from Winander “died/In childhood ere he was full ten years old” (v. 415) and that the narrator has often stood “Mute—looking at the Grave in which

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he lies” (v. 422). Death, deep silence, and muteness seal off and circumfuse the attempt to copy nature. The memories go on, with an apparently arbitrary quality. A drowned man—the young Wordsworth’s schoolmaster at Hawkshead Grammar, in fact—is pulled out of a lake, and whereas in the two-book version of the poem from 1799, the incident is left just as it is— At length the dead man, ’mid that beauteous scene Of trees, and hills, and water, bolt upright Rose with his ghastly face.11 —by 1805 Wordsworth had added a disturbing tag to the incident. “And yet no vulgar fear,/Young as I was, a Child not nine years old/Possess’d me”, he noted: for my inner eye had seen Such sights before, among the shining streams Of Fairy Land, the Forests of Romance: Thence came a spirit, hallowing what I saw With decoration and ideal grace; A dignity, a smoothness, like the works Of Grecian Art and purest Poesy. (v. 473–81) “The landscape of fairy story and romance,” Geoffrey Hartman comments, had anticipated such terrors; that ghastly face was, therefore, a poetic rather than a soul-debasing spectacle. This interpretation of the episode harmonizes with the argument that imaginative literature continues the child’s “normal” maturation by keeping it from being plunged too quickly into the adult world.12 Hartman’s is an interpretation contrary to what I am trying to suggest and contrary to a feeling of Wordsworth’s own which I have been trying to sketch, which he did not wish to have admitted but which he could never entirely reject: that a poetic spectacle might on occasion be indeed a soul-debasing one; 11 12

William Wordsworth, The Prelude, 1798–1799, ed. Stephen Parrish (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), i. 277–79). Geoffrey Hartman, Wordsworth’s Poetry 1787–1814 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 232.

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that there is no moral guarantee that this cannot be the case; that imaginative literature is one of those things which, by its very nature, might prevent us ever getting immersed as we should in the adult world; and that “the shining streams/Of Fairy Land” have the power to anaesthetize, even aestheticize, fear and death. Wordsworth remembers saving up for a book, but never getting the required amount. He looks back now at books that, having been replaced by new enthusiasms, are not what they used to be: I am sad At thought of raptures, now for ever flown; Even unto tears I sometimes could be sad To think of, to read over, many a page, Poems withal of name, which at the time Did never fail to entrance me, and are now Dead in my eyes as is a theatre Fresh emptied of spectators. (v. 568–75) So much for caskets of immortal verse, and the joy, consolation, and hope they offer. This really is sadness finding its fuel in a pile of old paperbacks.

v

Implicitly and explicitly, Wordsworth relates the whole business of writing, reading, and books to death. Books are dead, or acts of burial, or caskets, whereas nature is living. Given that in The Prelude he is trying to revive and revivify his own life in verse, the implications are paradoxical to say the least. There is a boldness of inclusion concerning books, their “high privilege of lasting life” and their containing “voices more than all the winds”; but there is also a restraint on explanation, given that books are also “shrines so frail”, built from language: potentially “a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve.” Wordworth could only “explain” such bold inclusions in heuristic and unasserted ways through allegories and parables, such as the Arab dream. London was a phenomenon he was always likely to regard ambivalently. Book Seven of The Prelude is a record of disenchantment and horrified fascination second only to The Waste Land. The commercial abuse of language and art hit Wordsworth particularly hard. He saw “fronts of houses, like a title-page, /With letters huge inscribed from top to toe” (vii. 176–77), and more:

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Here files of ballads dangle from dead walls; Advertisements, of giant-size! from high Press forward in all colours on the sight … (vii. 209–11) The “mimic sights that ape/The absolute presence of reality” were everywhere (vii. 248–49), whether under the artist’s pencil or in the modeller’s clay. ­Nowhere, however, did “crude nature work in untaught minds” (vii. 298) more effectively than in the theatres: To have, for instance, brought upon the scene The champion, Jack the Giant-Killer, Lo! He dons his Coat of Darkness; on the Stage Walks, and atchieves his wonders, from the eye Of living mortal safe as is the moon “Hid in her vacant interlunar Cave,” Delusion bold! and faith must needs be coy; How is it wrought? His garb is black, the word Invisible flames forth upon his Chest! (vii. 302–10) As if to say, is it as easy as that? Does the wondrous power of words really present so much evidence of the credulity of men and women, not to mention the blatancy of art? Is the word “INVISIBLE”, like the name “THEBES”, all that is required to drag men and women away from everyday life? The moronic inferno was most fully in evidence in the chaos of an institution like St Bartholomew’s fair, where, among the “moveables of wonder” on offer (“Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs”, etc.; vii. 680–81) we find “The Horse of Knowledge and the learned Pig” (vii. 682), all touted on “staring pictures, and huge scrolls,/Dumb proclamations of the prodigies” on show (vii. 666–67). But it was not the monstrosities paraded at the fair that upset Wordsworth most profoundly. The law of epitaphs operated on London streets as in country churchyards, and the common or universal feeling needed sensations excited by a distinct and clear conception if it was to make its maximum impact. And such a combination of factors was bound to take you by surprise: How often in the overflowing Streets Have I gone forwards with the Crowd, and said Unto myself, the face of every one That passes by me is a mystery! Thus have I look’d, nor ceas’d to look, oppress’d By thoughts of what, and whither, when and how,

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Until the shapes before my eyes became A second-sight procession, such as glides Over still mountains, or appears in dreams; And all the ballast of familiar life, The present, and the past; hope, fear; all stays, All laws, of acting, thinking, speaking man Went from me, neither knowing me nor known. And once, far travell’d in such mood, beyond The reach of common indications, lost Amid the moving pageant, ’twas my chance Abruptly to be smitten with the view Of a blind Beggar, who, with upright face, Stood propp’d against a wall; upon his Chest Wearing a written paper, to explain The Story of the Man and who he was; My mind did at this spectacle turn round As with the might of waters, and it seem’d To me that in this Label was a type, Or emblem, of the utmost that we know Both of ourselves and of the universe; And, on the shape of this unmoving Man, His fixed face and sightless eyes, I look’d As if admonish’d from another world. (vii. 595–623) Such people are invariably tokens of authenticity for Wordsworth: much more important, he felt, than people like himself or his genteel readers; figures “who have never known false refinements, wayward and artificial desires, false criticisms, effeminate habits of thinking and feeling”. Back at home, “The face of every neighbour whom I met/Was as a volume to me” (iv. 59–60); in London, “The whole of what was written to our view/Is but a lable [sic] on a blind Man’s chest”, as one of Wordsworth’s drafts unceremoniously puts it.13 No wonder the poet felt admonished. If the utmost that we can know of ourselves is a mere label, doggedly presented to the careless world, what does that say about The Prelude? Is it only a dumb proclamation to be gawped at alongside “The Stoneeater, the Man that swallows fire” and “the Invisible Girl” (vii. 683–84)—and to be forgotten like them, too? Of course that is not the case, and Wordsworth was not so feeble a person as to believe that it was. The poet’s “shapeless eagerness” (ix. 11) has to find a form. 13

Wordsworth, The Thirteen-Book Prelude, ii. 348.

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If that form is ultimately something “exposed and lifeless as a written book” (viii. 727), so be it. But having raised the stakes as he had Wordsworth would have been less than honest if he had not confronted the contradictions latent in the “adulterate Power” at his command (viii. 592). And sometimes he could see that those contradictions lay close to the core of his genius: But when that first poetic Faculty Of plain imagination and severe, No longer a mute Influence of the soul, An Element of the nature’s inner self, Began to have some promptings to put on A visible shape, and to the works of art, The notions and images of books Did knowingly conform itself, by these Enflamed, and proud of that her new delight, There came among these shapes of human life A wilfulness of fancy and conceit Which gave them new importance to the mind, And Nature and her objects beautified These fictions, as in some sort in their turn They burnish’d her. From touch of this new power Nothing was safe: the Elder Tree that grew Beside the well-known Charnel house had then A dismal look; the Yew-tree had its Ghost That took its station there for ornament: Then common death was none, common mishap, But matter for this humour everywhere, The tragic super-tragic, else left short. Then, if a Widow, staggering with the blow Of her distress was known to have made her way To the cold grave in which her Husband slept, One night, or haply more than one, through pain Or half insensate impotence of mind, The fact was caught at greedily, and there She was a Visitant the whole year through Wetting the turf with never-ending tears, And all the storms of Heaven must beat on her. (viii. 511–41) Once notions and images of books inflame the mind of the young poet, common death and common mishap, as recorded in the un-ostentatious

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churchyard epitaph, go out the window. From the touch of this new power— knowing, I am tempted to say, that you mean something but not knowing what you mean—nothing is safe: the yew grows a fictional alter ego, placed only for ornament. Are we to understand that “Michael”, “The Ruined Cottage”, “The Thorn”, “Simon Lee”, “Resolution and Independence”, and the “Poems on the Naming of Places” emerged from a process similar to the one described here: the tragic caught at greedily and made super-tragic? Can it be true that the authenticity of such poems is marked by a “counter-spirit” not of poetic language or imaginative distortion but of gross exaggeration? Do they belong, therefore, with the deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse that had pushed out the pure line in English poetry? Is this what a “new composition of feeling” amounts to: rendering human feelings “more sane pure and permanent … more consonant to nature … to eternal nature, and the great moving spirit of things”? What great moving spirit is that? This passage comments on Wordsworth’s early poetry. The last passage I want to quote comes from Book Twelve and from the 1850 version of the poem. It looks back much further, then, across Wordsworth’s entire life and work. It needs no comment from me for the reader to see the connection with what I have been trying to say about a poet knowing he means something but not knowing what he means, and feeling that the shell’s power is a fugitive one, bound up with its mortality, whereas the stone of truth is eternal “counterspirit” of verbal expression may only weaken his capacity to “explain”: The days gone by Return upon me almost from the dawn Of life: the hiding-places of Man’s power Open; I would approach them, but they close. I see by glimpses now; when age comes on May scarcely see at all, and I would give, While yet we may, as far as words can give, Substance and life to what I feel, enshrining, Such is my hope, the spirit of the Past For future restoration.—Yet another Of these memorials…14 He goes on to tell a story related to his father’s death. Memories come back— the days gone by return—in all their power and significance and intensity; the 14

William Wordsworth The Fourteen-Book Prelude, ed. W.J.B. Owen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), xii. 277–87.

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hiding places of man’s power open. But in the very act of writing, of turning them into fixed, static forms of words like books, the counter-spirit awakens: the hidden places close as they are approached. Wordsworth wants to give substance and life to what he feels. It was a persistent anxiety of his that in fact he did the opposite: that he enshrined his feelings, not for future restoration but for good, and turned the live memory into a memorial (whether a stone or a shell) even as it became poetry. Artists are prone to such anxieties in a way that is fundamental to the truths they have to offer, as opposed to the truths with which they engage, which is one reason perhaps that art appears to be “pregnant with a message which it cannot deliver”, as Collingwood said.

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Stoicism and Christianity: Byron’s Don Juan

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“Dear Murray—I intended to have written to you at some length by this post,— but as the Military Commandant is now lying dead in my house … I have other things to think of”: He was shot at 8 o Clock this evening about two hundred paces from our door. —I was putting on my great Coat to pay a visit to the Countess G[uiccioli]—when I heard a shot—and on going into the hall—found all my servants on the balcony—exclaiming that “a Man was murdered”. —As it is the custom here to let people fight it through—they wanted to hinder me from going out—but I ran down into the Street—Tita the bravest of them followed me—and we made our way to the Commandant who was lying on his back with five wounds—of which three in the body—one in the heart. —There were about him—Diego his Adjutant— crying like a Child—a priest howling—a Surgeon who dared not touch him—two or three confused & frightened Soldiers—one or two of the boldest of the mob—and the Street dark as pitch—with people flying in all directions. —As Diego could only cry and wring his hands—and the Priest could only pray—and nobody seemed willing to do anything except exclaim shake and stare—I made my Servant & one of the mob take up the body—sent off Diego crying to the Cardinal—the Soldiers for the Guard—& had the Commandant carried up Stairs to my own quarters. —But he was quite gone. —I made the Surgeon examine him & examined him myself. —He had bled inwardly, & very little external blood was apparent. —One of the Slugs had gone quite through—all but the Skin, I felt it myself. —Two more shots in the body—one in a finger—and another in the arm. —His face not at all disfigured—he seems asleep— but is growing livid. —The Assassin has not been taken—but the gun was found—a gun filed down to half the barrel. He said nothing—but “O Dio!” and “O Gesu” two or three times. The house was filled at last with Soldiers—officers—police—and military— but they are clearing away—all but the Sentinels—and the [body] is to be removed tomorrow. —It seems [that] if I had not had him taken into my house he might have lain in the Street till morning—for here nobody

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004356856_005

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meddles with such things—for fear of the consequences—either of public suspicion, or private revenge on the part of the Slayers. —They may do as they please—I shall never be deterred from a duty of humanity by all the assassins of Italy—and that is a wide word. —He was a brave ­officer—but an unpopular man. —The whole town is in confusion. — You may better judge of things here by this detail than by anything which I could add on the Subject—communicate this letter to Hobhouse & Douglas K[innair]d—and believe me yrs. truly B P.S.—The poor Man’s wife is not yet aware of his death—they are to break it to her in the morning. —The Lieutenant who is watching the body is smoking with the greatest Sangfroid—a strange people.1 This is Lord Byron writing to his London publisher from the ancient Italian city of Ravenna during a tense period of incipient nationalism as the peninsula awaited the repression by Austrian forces of a coup in the Kingdom of Sicily. The letter does not concern an artistic matter or impulse as such; there is no question here of Byron “knowing he means something but not knowing what he means”, or an act of communication being “pregnant with a message that it cannot deliver”, or of a boldness of inclusion coming up against a restraint in explanation. On the contrary, the letter is a tissue of cognitive assertions: “He was shot at 8 o clock this evening … they wanted to hinder me from going out … I made my Servant & one of the mob take up the body … I made the Surgeon examine him … The Assassin has not been taken … I shall never be deterred from a duty of humanity … The whole town is in confusion”, and, finally, “You may better judge of things here by this detail than by anything which I could add on the Subject”. The whole presentation concerns something manifestly “outside the frame” of art, something “translatable” or “paraphraseable” into other terms, something “controvertible”, something open to “extra-textual information”, something the result of acquaintance, not description: that is, something making a claim for philosophical, scientific, or historical truth. One of the paradoxes out of which art is born is that the greatest imaginative ­writers—and Byron is certainly one of those—are also the most open to ­manifest, empirical, physical experience that philosophers, scientists, and historians seek to explain. Poets are shells, but they respond to stones, too.

1 Leslie Alexis Marchand (ed.), Byron’s Letters and Journals, 12 vols (London: John Murray, 1973–1982), vii. 247–8; referred to below as lj.

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The assassination of Captain del Pinto took place on 9 December 1820, when Byron had just completed the fifth canto of Don Juan. Two days later—and now we certainly can talk about “boldness of inclusion”, and must, because the soldier’s death is now part of a work of art—he had added the assassination as an incident to his poem. I must quote at some length: I think with Alexander, that the act Of eating, with another act or two, Makes us feel our mortality in fact Redoubled; when a roast and a ragout, And fish, and soup, by some side dishes back’d, Can give us either pain or pleasure, who Would pique himself on intellects, whose use Depends so much upon the gastric juice? The other evening (’twas on Friday last) — This is a fact and no poetic fable — Just as my great coat was about me cast, My hat and gloves still lying on the table, I heard a shot—’twas eight o’clock scarce past — And running out as fast as I was able, I found the military commandant Stretch’d in the street, and able scarce to pant. Poor fellow! for some reason, surely bad, They had slain him with five slugs; and left him there To perish on the pavement: so I had Him borne into the house and up the stair, And stripp’d, and look’d to,—But why should I add More circumstances? vain was every care; The man was gone: in some Italian quarrel Kill’d by five bullets from an old gun-barrel. I gazed upon him, for I knew him well; And though I have seen many corpses, never Saw one, whom such an accident befell, So calm; though pierced through stomach, heart, and liver, He seem’d to sleep, for you could scarcely tell (As he bled inwardly, no hideous river Of gore divulged the cause) that he was dead: So as I gazed upon him, I thought or said —

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“Can this be death? then what is life or death? ‘Speak!’ but he spoke not: ‘wake!’ but still he slept: — But yesterday and who had mightier breath? A thousand warriors by his word were kept In awe: he said, as the centurion saith, ‘Go,’ and he goeth; ‘come,’ and forth he stepp’d. The trump and bugle till he spake were dumb — And now naught left him but the muffled drum.” And they who waited once and worshipp’d—they With their rough faces throng’d about the bed To gaze once more on the commanding clay Which for the last though not the first time bled: And such an end! that he who many a day Had faced Napoleon’s foes until they fled, — The foremost in the charge or in the sally, Should now be butcher’d in a civic alley. The scars of his old wounds were near his new, Those honourable scars which brought him fame; And horrid was the contrast to the view — But let me quit the theme; as such things claim Perhaps even more attention than is due From me: I gazed (as oft I have gazed the same) To try if I could wrench aught out of death Which should confirm, or shake, or make a faith; But it was all a mystery. Here we are, And there we go: —but where? five bits of lead, Or three, or two, or one, send very far! And is this blood, then, form’d but to be shed? Can every element our elements mar? And air—earth—water—fire live—and we dead? We, whose minds comprehend all things? No more; But let us to the story as before. (v. 32–9)2

2 All quotations are from Byron, Complete Poetical Works, ed. Jerome J. McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980–1992); referred to below as cpw. Quotations from Don Juan are by canto and stanza.

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What has happened between a discursive, epistolary statement, concerning an empirical experience, and riddled with common-or-garden assertion, and the same event encrypted within a work of art? To answer this question we need to go back, since an inclusion requires understanding not just of what is included but of what it is included within, morally and intellectually. Every work of art is necessarily the shell of a flown bird; every work of discourse aspires to the status of the stone in the dream of the Arab: “undisturb’d by space and time”.

ii

We begin Canto Five a long way away from Ravenna, with the narrator standing on the inlet between the Aegean and the Black Sea, looking down on Istanbul. “’Tis a grand sight”, he says, To watch the progress of these rolling seas Between the Bosphorus, as they lash and lave Europe and Asia, you being quite at ease. (v. 5) The narrator has established a neutral position for himself, up above it all, seeing the Sancta Sophia and Mount Olympus, Muslim and Christian, Turk and Greek, black and white, have and have-not. He and his readers measure up with equanimity the two cultures on the opposite shores; seeing all but uninvolved; seeing what is funny and what is gruesome with the benefit of a point of view that reduces everybody to the size and status of ants, or pieces on a backgammon board—like Harry Lime looking down on the citizens of postwar Vienna from his Ferris wheel. “A crowd of shivering slaves of every nation” is waiting to be sold off at the slave market, but nothing disturbs the narrator’s and our own sang-froid, even though the hero of the poem paraded there, too: Like a backgammon board the place was dotted With whites and blacks, in groups on show for sale, Though rather more irregularly spotted: Some bought the jet, while others chose the pale. (v. 10) We now meet an Englishman of Byron’s age (thirty to Byron’s thirty-two) and of Byron’s appearance (“a complexion white and ruddy”, “with curling rather dark brown hair”, and “an open brow a little marked with care”), who is a unique character in Don Juan, indeed in Byron’s entire body of work. His name is John Johnson (though we do not learn that until Canto Seven), and not only does

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he share Byron’s looks, age, and nationality: he talks exactly like the narrator of the poem, and reveals the same set of attitudes. We find that set of attitudes struck consistently from the poem’s start, when (for example) the narrator comments on the young Juan, on the verge of his first affair: He thought about himself, and the whole earth, Of man the wonderful, and of the stars, And how the deuce they ever could have birth; And then he thought of earthquakes, and of wars, How many miles the moon might have in girth, Of air-balloons, and of the many bars To perfect knowledge of the boundless skies; And then he thought of Donna Julia’s eyes. (i. 91) “If you think ’twas philosophy that this did,” the narrator comments crisply, “I can’t help thinking puberty assisted.” (i. 93.) The romantic elevation is brought materially crashing to the ground. “All, when Life is new,” Johnson says to Juan, “Commence with feelings warm and prospects high”, But Time strips our illusions of their hue, And one by one in turn, some grand mistake Casts off its bright skin yearly like the snake. (v. 21) And Byron’s narrator sees the human world in just the same way: “’Tis pleasant purchasing our fellow creatures;” he says, And all are to be sold, if you consider Their passions, and are dext’rous; some by features Are bought up, others by a warlike leader, Some by a place—as tend their years or natures: The most by ready cash—but all have prices, From crowns to kicks, according to their vices. (v. 27) It is the representative attitude of the poem so far and of the poem as a whole— but it is hard to say exactly what it is. Cynical, sceptical, un-idealistic? “But after all, what is our present state?” Johnson asks: ’Tis bad, and may be better—all men’s lot: Most men are slaves, none more so than the great,

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To their own whims and passions, and what not; Society itself, which should create Kindness, destroys what little we had got: To feel for none is the true social art Of the world’s stoics—men without a heart. (v. 25) Though Byron uses a French word (sang-froid) to characterize Johnson’s frame of mind the poem suggests that it is a peculiarly English one: disenchanted, phlegmatic, self-deprecating, mordant, un-spiritual, drily witty. To this point in his poem Byron via his narrator appears wholeheartedly to have underwritten this view of the world, ruthlessly suppressing any form of idealism, altruism, or emotionalism, and Juan’s career to date is an illustration of that tendency. A heart-wrenching farewell letter from his first mistress ends up being used in a cannibalistic lottery on board the longboat of a shipwrecked vessel, and when we join the fifth canto of the poem Juan himself has just been dragged to the slave market from the arms of a wealthy pirate’s gorgeous daughter, whose father came home unexpectedly and found them hosting a wild party on his Aegean island. This view of the world is more or less a culmination and apogee of Byron’s moral thinking, and accordingly it has deep roots, both within his own work and outside it. (It is manifestly a moral and aesthetic response, to some extent, to his earlier output, such as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and his melodramatic “Turkish Tales”: turning as he himself put it in Don Juan (iv. 3) “what was once romantic to burlesque”.) Though critics recently have sought to ascribe a systematic philosophical interest to Byron,3 it is notoriously difficult to do so— though he is clearly an intermittent and mercurial philosophical sceptic from one end of his career to the other. As Anthony Howe says, “The poet’s mistrust of direct argumentation and his corresponding faith in poetic form renders problematic any notion that his ‘philosophical’ importance can be understood with primary or exclusive reference to his attempts to articulate philosophical positions.”4 In what sense then, if any at all, can we say that Don Juan is, as Collingwood says, a “work of art constructed on a framework of thought”? Is it not what William Hazlitt called it in The Spirit of the Age: “a poem written about itself”? 3 See Terence Allan Hoagwood, Byron’s Dialectic: Skepticism and the Critique of Culture (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 1993), Emily Bernhard Jackson, The Development of Byron’s Philosophy of Knowledge: Certain in Uncertainty (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), and Anthony Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013). 4 Howe, Byron and the Forms of Thought, 6.

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As I said in Chapter 1, “imaginative writers are men and women like ourselves; they don’t live up towers or trees but bump into or seek out intellectual stimulation hither and yon, as people have always done.” And Byron was that peculiar intellectual object: the product of an English public school and Oxbridge education. Perhaps only someone not a product of that system—like Hazlitt, for example—can see what it implies. “The Greek and Roman classics” on which Byron was fed from Harrow to Cambridge were, he wrote, “a sort of privileged text-books, the standing order of the day, in a University education”.5 “There is certainly this advantage to a classical education,” he wrote: “that it gives men long views”: it accustoms the mind to take an interest in things foreign to itself, to love virtue for its own sake, to prefer fame to life, and glory to riches, and to fix our thoughts on the great and permanent instead of narrow and selfish objects. It teaches us to believe that there is something really great and excellent in the world, surviving all the shocks of accident and fluctuations of opinion, and to feel respect for that which is made venerable by its nature and antiquity instead of that low and servile dread which bows only to present power and upstart authority.6 This is an idealistic view of the English aristocratic curriculum. The “long views” Hazlitt speaks of might have a very different effect as regards the “great and excellent in the world”, and suggest perhaps that such things inevitably fade away over time rather than survive its depredations triumphantly. Long views might be a source of Byronic scepticism (“fair Greece, sad relic”) rather than Arnoldian idealism (“the best that has been thought and said in the world”). Be that as it may, Byron’s classical education is the first instance I want to discuss in this book of an idea or set of ideas making its presence felt within a creative endeavour—as they can never fail to do, creativity being what it is. “Some kind of continuity between an artist’s imaginings and his experience as a member of the world of facts is undeniable”, Collingwood suggested, and as I have argued, the autonomy of literature consists fundamentally of responding to such eventualities. The ideas Byron absorbed at school and university never went away; they were a “standing order” in his intellectual life thereafter. Specifically we can see in John Johnson’s frame of mind and in the view of the world sustained by Don Juan at large a blending of three philosophical views from the “privileged text-books”, themselves so ancient as to be almost 5 William Hazlitt, Collected Works, ed. P.P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J.M. Dent, 1934), vi. 179–80. 6 Ibid. i. 115.

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immemorial: views, indeed, which had lives of their own, ex post facto, within “the Classics”, quite free of the philosophical schools and individuals who once articulated and identified with them. The first such view is one mentioned by Byron and Johnson themselves: ­Stoicism. Juan’s ups and downs, the narrator says, “were things to shake a stoic’”(v. 9) and Johnson argues in corollary fashion that “to feel for none is the true social art/Of the world’s stoics—men without a heart.” It is not so much the Greek school of Zeno and Chrysippus that Byron has in mind here as the moral code associated with Roman thinkers like Epictetus, Seneca, and Marcus Aurelius: a moral code which placed its emphasis on Stoic ethics, and which did so much to infuse the Roman ethical code in general, rooted in a vision of the physical universe in which God was not so much an active agent in everyday life as a divine clockmaker, whose ineffable and inscrutable design was Nature. (The ethic grew out of the physics, therefore: it is a response to a vision of nature.) All that men and women should do, or indeed could do, was align themselves as closely as possible with this unchanging order by recognizing its ineluctability, pursuing virtue as a good, and fostering in themselves a resolute indifference to both pleasure and pain. As Marcus Aurelius put it: In the life of man, his time is but a moment, his being an incessant flux, his senses a dim rushlight, his body a prey of worms, his soul an unquiet eddy, his fortune dark, and his fame doubtful. In short, all that is of the body is as coursing waters, all that is of the soul as dreams and vapours; life a warfare, a brief sojourning in an alien land; and after repute, oblivion. Where, then, can man find the power to guide and guard his steps? In one thing and one alone: Philosophy. To be a philosopher is to keep unsullied and unscathed the divine spirit within him, so that it may transcend all pleasure and all pain, take nothing in hand without purpose and nothing falsely or with dissimulation, depend not on another’s actions or inactions, accept each and every dispensation as coming from the same Source as itself—and last and chief, wait with a good grace for death, as no more than a simple dissolving of the elements whereof each living thing is composed. If those elements themselves take no harm from their ceaseless forming and re-forming, why look with mistrust upon the change and dissolution of the whole? It is but Nature’s way; and in the ways of Nature there is no evil to be found.7

7 Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, trans. Maxwell Stanniforth (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1964), ii. 17; cited by book and paragraph below.

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The Stoic idea and ideal was a philosopher in the loose sense of the word: a man, as Marcus goes on to say, “unsullied by pleasures, proof against pain, untouched by insult, and impervious to evil” (iii. 4); a man who “will strike no poses, utter no complaints, and crave neither for solitude nor yet for a crowd” (iii. 7)—that is, the man that Johnson demonstrates himself to be. The second ingredient of the Byronic attitude I am trying to describe is hinted at by Marcus Aurelius when he speaks of death as a simple dissolving of elements forming and re-forming according to a natural cycle. What I have in mind is Epicurean materialism: again, where Byron is concerned, not so much that of Epicurus but of his Roman disciple Lucretius. Epicureanism took Stoic physics to a logical extreme: theirs was so clockwork a universe that it did not require a clockmaker. Life begins and ends in random collisions of atoms (or primordia, as Lucretius has it). In such a universe, as Epicurus put it in his “Principal Doctrines”, “Death is nothing to us; for the body, when it has been resolved into its elements, has no feeling, and that which has no feeling is nothing to us.”8 Such a view is the origin of Philodemus’s “Fourfold Remedy”: Nothing to fear in God. Nothing to feel in Death. Good can be attained. Evil can be endured.9 The greatest fruit of self-sufficiency therefore is freedom: freedom from the fear of death, and freedom from reliance upon the Gods—freedom to cultivate as much pleasure and as little pain as possible before you give up the ghost and return to the primordia. (A freedom of the “long view” in that sense, though not the one that Hazlitt had in mind.) In Lucretius this freedom produces a view of existence in which life and death are nothing less than the systole and diastole of a materialist universe: “Not utterly then perish all things that are seen, since nature renews one thing from out another, nor suffers anything to be begotten, unless she be requited by another’s death.”10 As with the Stoics, the philosophy of nature underwrites a philosophy of conduct. The last element in the tripartite frame of mind and discursive idea that underpins Don Juan and its spokesmen is less easy to summarize. It is, for example, less distinctly associated with a particular classical school as such, though Protagoras is credited with it as often as anyone else. Once more, when 8 9 10

John Gaskin (ed.), The Epicurean Philosophers (London: Dent, 1995), 5. Ibid. 77. Ibid. 93.

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Protagoras says that “man is the measure of all things” there is a connnection with the Epicurean attitude: things are as man sees them not as the Gods ordain. So it is that Protagoras is a progenitor of relativism. If you say it is warm today, and I say it is cool, there is not much more we can do than agree to disagree. Man is the measure of all things, after all: there is no other, higher, authority we can turn to. However, to say that that which is right or wrong depends on the person who thinks it or the society in which it takes place is manifestly absurd as well as manifestly reasonable—which made Protagoras a foremost and formidable sophist and target of Plato in the Theaetetus. Such an argument might be deployed in defence of female circumcision in the Horn of Africa or slavery in the ante-bellum American South. Many philosophers have accordingly made hay of the relativist position, in particular when it seeks to draw support from anthropology. Cultural relativism, Mary Midgley writes, consists in simply denying that we can ever understand any culture ­except our own well enough to make judgements about it. Those who recommend this hold that the world is sharply divided up into separate societies, sealed units, each with its own system of thought. They feel that the respect and tolerance due from one system to another forbids us ever to take up a critical position to any other culture.11 As Midgley points out, this is less an epistemic problem of knowledge than a moral fear about judgement. The chances are we don’t know enough about anything in our own society, never mind other people’s, to make water-tight judgements about it; yet we make them all the time. Bernard Williams, too, points out that the position is also inconsistent: you cannnot say it is right for such-and-such a people to practise human sacrifice and then say it is wrong for the rest of humanity to comment unfavourably on their doing so.12 Given all this, it is hard to see what relativism can usefully say, caught as it is between a platitude (different strokes for different folks) and an absurdity (contradictory attitudes can both be true because “truth” is vested in the individual). But for all its shortcomings relativism has a value in everyday terms: it inhibits ethnocentrism—which is what it did in Byron’s case. “All countries are

11 12

Mary Midgley, Heart and Mind: The Varieties of Moral Experience (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), 69. Bernard Williams, Morality: An Introduction to Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 34–35.

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much the same in my eyes,” he wrote from Europe in May 1810: “I smoke and stare at mountains, and twirl my mustachios very independently.” “I omitted Ephesus in my Catalogue”, he went on, which I visited during my sojourn at Smyrna, —but the temple has almost perished, and St. Paul need not trouble himself to epistolize the present brood of Ephesians who have converted a large church built entirely of marble into a Mosque, and I dont know that the edifice looks the worse for it. (lj i. 220) The cultural matrix in Ephesus has changed for the third or fourth time in human history, St Paul’s values do not cut ice any more, and Byron takes a morbid pleasure in the fact. “I see not much difference between ourselves & the Turks”, he wrote at the same period, save that we have foreskins and they none, that they have long dresses and we short, and that we talk much and they little. —In England the vices in fashion are whoring & drinking, in Turkey, Sodomy & smoking, we prefer a girl and a bottle, they a pipe and a pathic. (lj i. 238) That Byron relativized the British sense of cultural superiority is clear in his poetry as well as his prose: in the epigraph to Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, for example, he quoted Le Cosmopolite, ou le Citoyen du Monde (1753), by Louis Charles Fougeret de Monbron: L’univers est un espèce de livre, dont on n’a lu que le première page quand on n’a vu que son pays. J’en ai feuilleté un assez grand nombre, que j’ai trouvé également mauvaises. (cpw ii. 3) It is an unusual form of relativism though. One must read more than one page, de Monbron suggests, if only to discover that all the pages are equally bad. If Byron’s relativism is inconsistent his materialism and Stoicism are, too. He can speak casually to his half-sister in 1816 about Mary Shelley’s stepsister Claire Clairmont’s sexual pursuit of him: “I could not exactly play the Stoic with a woman—who had scrambled eight hundred miles to unphilosophize me” (lj v. 92). But he could also see the Stoic attitude as a pose. (“Strike no poses”, Marcus said in the Meditations; but that injunction is itself something of a pose, built up as it may be from a habit of self-conscious moral deliberation.) The element of the poseur was what Byron felt he might have in common with Napoleon, in Childe Harold:

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Oh, more or less than man—in high or low, Battling with nations, flying from the field; Now making monarchs’ necks thy footstool, now More than thy meanest soldier taught to yield; An empire thou couldst crush, command, rebuild, But govern not thy pettiest passion, nor, However deeply in men’s spirits skill’d, Look through thine own, nor curb the lust of war, Nor learn that tempted Fate will leave the loftiest star. Here is Aurelian man, “his being an incessant flux … his soul an unquiet eddy” and so forth; “his fame doubtful”: Yet well thy soul hath brook’d the turning tide With that untaught innate philosophy, Which, be it wisdom, coldness, or deep pride, Is gall and wormwood to an enemy. When the whole host of hatred stood hard by, To watch and mock thee shrinking, thou hast smiled With a sedate and all enduring eye; — When Fortune fled her spoil’d and favourite child, He stood unbowed beneath the ills upon him piled. (cpw ii. 90–91) A note nearby, however, puts the “innate philosophy” in a different light. “The great error of Napoleon”, Byron wrote, “was a continued obtrusion on mankind of his want of all community of feeling for or with them; perhaps more offensive to human vanity than the active cruelty of more trembling and suspicious tyranny.” (cpw ii. 304.) This, too, is what we find in Marcus Aurelius. For while Stoicism “can keep a man unsullied by pleasures, proof against pain, untouched by insult, and impervious to evil”, it can keep him impervious to other things as well. “Let no emotions of the flesh, be they of pain or ­pleasure”, Marcus goes on, “affect the supreme and sovereign portion of the soul. See that it never becomes involved with them: it must limit itself to its own domain, and keep the feelings confined to their proper sphere.” (Meditations, v. 26; my italics.) Stoical courage and self-denial depend as often as not just on denial: a kind of denial and isolation that leads to that kind of relativism we have already seen, in which all the pages of humanity are également mauvaises. “In the universe”, Marcus says, “Asia and Europe are but two small corners, all ocean’s waters a drop, Athos a puny lump of earth, the vastness of time a pin’s point in eternity. All is petty, inconstant, and perishable.” (vi. 36.) “­ Everything

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is banal in experience, fleeting in duration, sordid in content; in all respects the same today as generations now dead and buried have found it to be” (ix. 14)—so why bother? Like Stoicism relativism can be a form of attitudinizing: as Byron’s passage about twirling his mustachios in Asia Minor shows he knew himself. No attitude, in sum, is immune from its own form of bogusness—even that one which detects bogusness and futility everywhere else. Materialism ends up cultivating an aristocratic or “philosophical” aloofness of a similar kind: a danger in it that even a philosophical naturalist like George Santayana could see readily enough. Materialism may not be relativistic in itself but it provides the occasion for relativism—“a philosophy of negation and of flight from the world”.13 “Is there anything beyond?” Byron asked in his journal of 1814: who knows? He that can’t tell. Who tells that there is? He who don’t know. And when shall he know? Perhaps, when he don’t expect, and, generally, when he don’t wish it. In this last respect, however, all are not alike: it depends a good deal upon education,—something upon nerves and habits—but most upon digestion. (lj iii. 244) In relativist terms it depends, on who you are and where you are coming from. This being the case there seems no point in developing any particular ethic. “In the midst of myriads of the living & the dead worlds—stars—systems—infinity”, Byron asks, “why should I be anxious about an atom?” (lj iv. 78.) The ethical attitudes Byron strikes in his poetry are, it follows, as a rule the attitudes of an observer rather than a participant—someone who knows he means something but does not know what he means. This accords with Santayana’s discussion of Epicureanism as a mode of thought: The materialist is primarily an observer; and he will probably be such in ethics also; that is, he will have no ethics, except the emotion produced upon him by the march of the world. If he is an esprit fort and really disinterested, he will love life; as we all love perfect vitality, or what strikes us as such, in gulls and porpoises. This, I think, is the ethical sentiment psychologically consonant with a vigorous materialism: sympathy with the movement of things, interest in the rising wave, delight at the foam it bursts into, before it sinks again.14 13 14

George Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets: Lucretius, Dante, Goethe (New York: Doubleday, 1953), 35. Ibid. 36–37.

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If he is an esprit fort he will love life; and if he is a true materialist any lingering doubts he may have about death are less to do with death itself than with the loss of life: For what is most dreaded is not the agony of dying, nor yet the strange impossibility that when we do not exist we should suffer for not existing. What is dreaded is the defeat of a present will directed upon life and its various undertakings. Such a present will cannot be argued away, but it may be weakened by contradictions arising within it, by the irony of experience, or by ascetic discipline. To introduce ascetic discipline, to bring out the irony of experience, to expose the self-contradictons of the will, would be the true means of mitigating the love of life; and if the love of life were extinguished, the fear of death, like smoke rising from that fire, would have vanished also.15 So it is that the great Classical amalgam—the long view, the privileged textbook, the order of the day that was at the heart of Byron’s education as an English gentleman—is like any other ethic open to critique, particularly as it tends to an “aristocratic” or “philosophic” aloofness from life rather than a means of coming to terms with it. (“Feeling for none” as the true social art, and so on.) But the Stoical-cum-materialist-cum-relativist “pagan attitude” remains powerfully attractive nonetheless. More than attractive: in fact it appears to be an almost natural or default ethical position in humanity. Life is a place where bad things happen to good people; being virtuous is a good way to respond to that fact, and so is the cultivation of an attitude of hardy indifference to what life throws at us in terms of pleasure and pain. Many of the problems we face are material ones, and even more abstract issues like human flourishing (Aristotle’s eudaimonia) may have material issues at their root, at the base of Maslow’s pyramid. “Biology may not be destiny,” as Norman Mailer once remarked, “but it is half of it”, and it is no use lecturing a hungry child about the value of gratitude, as Jane Eyre demonstrates. Ethnocentric recalcitrance and repudiation is a human folly within and between societies: if a degree of relativist flexibility acts as a solvent upon such things, that cannot be a bad thing. Put these things together as Byron and Don Juan do—and as millions have done before and after them for two thousand years and more—and you have a pragmatic, responsible, and humane way of dealing with the “world of

15

Ibid. 53.

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uncontrolled happening”16 that we inhabit and that Don Juan presents so brilliantly: a way of life as appropriate to the Emperor Aurelius in the second century as to everyday mortals in the twenty-first. That in large measure is what Byron’s poem says to us, and says with imperishable beauty and authority, even if it does not assert it as a philosophic truth. Look at all the philosophical systems of the world, he tells us: they are relative; they eat each other up “Much as old Saturn ate his progeny”—only in this case everything happens the other way, as the new feeds on the old: But System doth reverse the Titan’s breakfast, And eats her parents, albeit the digestion Is difficult. Pray tell me, can you make fast, After due search, your faith to any question? Look back o’er ages, ere unto the stake fast You bind yourself, and call some mode the best one. Nothing more true than not to trust your senses; And yet what are your other evidences?” (xiv. 2.) Here the connection between stoical, materialist, and relativist “long views” and scepticism is thoroughly spelled out—indeed dramatized as Byron turns on his reader as a kind of “hypocrite lecteur”. (His final couplet is heavily drawn from Book Four of De Rerum Natura.) If humanity cannot “after due search” make fast its faith to any question—and as a general rule it finds it cannot—it might as well go back centripetally to a Stoical ethical base that at least provides material satisfaction: And when upon a silent, sullen day, With a Sirocco, for example, blowing, When even the sea looks dim with all its spray, And sulkily the river’s ripple’s flowing, And the sky shows that very ancient gray, The sober, sad antithesis to glowing, — ’Tis pleasant, if then any thing is pleasant, To catch a glimpse even of a pretty peasant. (xiv. 28) It does not follow, though, that Byron’s pagan attitude was necessarily a heartless one, as the casual inspection of pretty peasants might suggest, and it says 16

Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 64.

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something about Keats’s limitations as a reader of the poem that he found the shipwreck scenes in the second canto of Don Juan evidence only of “extreem obduracy of heart”.17 The stoical-relativist-materialist amalgam was capable of outward-going sympathy, self-recognition, and those “duties of humanity” ­Byron mentioned in his letter about Captain del Pinto. If the compassion Johnson shows to Juan is a little “blunt”, as the narrator says (v. 12), it is still compassion and not obduracy. Moreover, Byron was quite capable of seeing that other ethical systems shed light on the pagan one that held so many attractions for him. “The lapse of time”, after all, “changes all things” (lj viii. 19): it doesn’t restrict itself to the early Christian Church at Ephesus. Nor was his commitment to the Stoic ethic an absolute one. “A Creator”, he could comprehend, “is a more natural imagination than a fortuitous concourse of atoms” (lj ix. 47), and even if “the immortality of the soul is a ‘grand peut-etre’ … still it is a grand one. Every body still clings to it”: “the stupidest, and dullest, and wickedest of human bipeds”, he was sure, “is still persuaded that he is immortal.” (lj viii. 35.) Byron may have had something pagan in him which he couldn’t shake off (lj ii. 136), but that was by no means inconsistent with spiritual intimations of these kinds. In his personal life, too, Byron could never rely on Stoicism alone. “For some years”, he wrote to Teresa Guiccioli at a crucial point in their relationship, I have been trying systematically to avoid strong passions, having suffered too much from the tyranny of Love. Never to feel admiration—and to enjoy myself without giving too much importance to the enjoyment in itself—to feel indifference toward human affairs—contempt for many, but hatred for none, —this was the basis of my philosophy. I did not mean to love any more, nor did I hope to receive Love. You have put to flight all my resolutions—now I am all yours—I will become what you wish—perhaps happy in your love, but never at peace again. (lj vi. 118) “Peace” as Stoical acquiescence, lack of resistance, tolerance, and pragmatism: this was an attractive ideal but not a panacea—or an inspiration.

iii

Perhaps now we can return to the assassination of del Pinto told in imaginative verse as opposed to declarative prose. Affairs of the heart, affairs of the stomach: in Canto Five of Don Juan the Stoical amalgam becomes conscious 17

Hyder Edward Rollins (ed.), The Letters of John Keats 1814–1821, 2 vols (Cambridge, ma: Harvard University Press, 1958), ii. 134.

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of itself in much the same way as Byron realized he would never be at peace again once he forfeited Stoicism for love, at the very moment when the narrator begins to speculate on a slave-dealer’s appetite for food after a day’s work marketing his fellow human beings (v. 30). At last, after all the material about “being quite at ease” and looking down at the world, “conscience ask[s] a curious sort of question/About the right divine how far we should/Sell flesh and blood.” This sort of question, being “curious” and no deeper, is not enough, however, to disrupt the even tenor of Stoical response. But it is enough to remind the narrator quite suddenly of an event that really happened to him, and when that happens the sang-froid, the “long view”, and the tripartite pagan attitude are revealed to be insufficient. As with Teresa Guiccioli’s claims on him, all Byron’s resolutions are put to flight. A soldier was shot in the street outside his house and as no one else would help him the poet had the mortally wounded man brought into his house, where he died minutes later. Don Juan trains us to expect Stoicism in the face of this: “To feel for none is the true social art”. (“All that is of the body is as coursing waters,” as Marcus had written: “all that is of the soul as dreams and vapours”.) But what we get is the collapse of Stoical indifference in the face not of curiosity or conscience but of wonder and pity, explictly and unavoidably connected to kinds of moral contemplation and enquiry that materialism, relativism, and Stoicism had sought to suppress. In fact Byron went so far as to repudiate men without a heart in his description of the event and its aftermath: “The Lieutenant who is watching the body is smoking with the greatest Sangfroid—a strange people.” “No one else”, Santayana wrote of Lucretius, “has pointed out so often and so clearly as he that nothing arises in this world not helped to life by the death of some other thing; so that the destructive movement creates and the creative movement destroys.” How true! But how hopelessly beside the point where del Pinto was concerned, if you can no longer see his death as Lucretius encourages you to do. At the climax of the scene the narrator stands before the corpse, unable to believe what he sees: unable to cope by the lights of his pagan philosophical mentors. “Can this be death? Then what is life or death?” It grows upon us quite suddenly as we read, for example, that Byron is thinking of Christ—even going so far as to allude to the miracle of the good Centurion in Matthew’s gospel: But yesterday and who had mightier breath? A thousand warriors by his word were kept In awe: he said, as the Centurion saith, “Go”, and he goeth; “come”, and forth he stepped. The trump and bugle till he spake were dumb — And now nought left him but the muffled drum.

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Marcus Aurelius had written, with characteristic moral elegance, of the Stoic’s readiness to “step forth as readily as he performs any other act that can be done in self-respecting and orderly fashion” when his time is up (Meditations, iii. 7); but Matthew is talking about a entirely different kind of willingness to step forward: The centurion answered and said, Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldest come under my roof: but speak the word only, and my servant shall be healed. For I am a man under authority, having soldiers under me: and I say to this man, Go, and he goeth; and to another, Come, and he cometh; and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it. matthew 8: 8–9

If we ask why Captain del Pinto should remind Byron of Christ and through him the Good Centurion, the answer is clear: Christ’s is the most often reproduced dead body in the Western tradition; his death left a small group of people in shock, just as del Pinto’s death leaves a priest howling and his adjutant “crying like a Child”. The Gospels go into no great dramatic detail about either the Garden of Gethsemane or the Deposition, but a similar kind of scene plays itself out in del Pinto’s dying moments, in Don Juan though not in Byron’s letter. (“They who waited once and worshipp’d”, is Byron’s pointed description of the captain’s retinue, “with their rough faces throng’d about the bed”.) And while Byron had seen a few dead bodies, this one—injured in five places as Christ’s was—retains an extraordinary composure and a miraculous beauty, just as tradition says Christ’s did. Byron picks up the suffering individual in the street, and in so doing falls in with that almost Kierkegaardian and entirely unStoical ethic of the Sermon on the Mount and the Last Judgement: “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” In particular, of course, he carries out the role of the Good Samaritan: another foreigner who does for an injured wayfarer what the priest and the Levite are too fastidious or too timid to do. No wonder, then, that when Byron tries to make sense of the miraculous and horrific experience, the story of Christ is all he can think of. He tries to “quit the theme” but he cannot. He knows he means something, but he does not know what; he is pregnant with a theme he cannot deliver. “I gazed”, he writes, “To try if I could wrench aught out of Death/Which should confirm, or shake, or make a faith;/But it was all a mystery.” “Can you make fast,/After due search, your faith to any question?” the

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narrator asked in Don Juan—to which we can only reply that the “due search” never comes to the kind of end or closure that would allow us to answer the query, and that a search along Stoical lines is necessarily incomplete. Wrenching anything out of death, after all, was what the Epicureans forbade. Nothing to feel in death was the entire point so far as they were concerned. From its Stoical, materialist, and relativistic start, looking down in amused superiority at both Orthodox Christianity and Islam, the fifth canto of Don Juan makes a clear and unambiguous detour into spiritual and ethical engagement, and so radically forsakes one ethic (of the “long view”) for another. It is a moving passage—and it is clear why the incident from Byron’s Italian life had to be told here and not elsewhere; why it suggested itself at this point in the poem. The reason is that the episode exposes the moral attitude which Byron, as narrator of the poem, himself had invested in so heavily. And so it exposes not just John Johnson holding forth in the slave market, but the poet standing on the Bosphorus, looking down indifferently on Europe, Asia, the slave market, and his hero in it—and it exposes our state of “being quite at ease”, too, as readers. If we are ever tempted to look down on the slave market of the world this part of the poem admonishes that instinct or at least reminds us what we are doing. For if the relativist-materialist ethical mix forbids ethnocentrism, it can easily lapse into another form of sophistry: a kind of superciliousness about all cultures, your own or anybody else’s; and this is a danger Byron plainly sees. At one point in Canto Five Juan feebly registers a protest at Johnson’s attitude of indifference: “All this is very fine but I really don’t see how It betters present times with me or you.” “No?” quoth the other; “yet you will allow By setting things in their right point of view, Knowledge, at least, is gained; for instance, now We know what slavery is; and our disasters May teach us better to behave when masters.” (v. 23) Learning by experience sounds as plausible an account of ethical education as Stoicism is of ethical experience; but the poem actually forces us to ask what real experience is, and the extent to which people are actually touched by it. What counterbalances the philosophy of “never to feel admiration” (Horace’s nil admirari), cultural relativism, and Johnsonian sang-froid, is not knowledge

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but experience (like having a man die in your house), and not experience either, but the ability to respond to it. (“Knowledge is an experience, not a formula”, as Lawrence said in Chapter 1, in response to cognitivist confidence about what knowledge is.) Sometimes that experience will take the form of humiliation, as it does with the Sultana Gulbeyaz, who purchases Juan for sensual gratification—“and humiliation”, Byron points out, “Is sometimes good for people in her station”: It teaches them that they are flesh and blood, It also gently hints to them that others, Although of clay, are yet not quite of mud; That urns and pipkins are but fragile brothers, And works of the same pottery, bad or good, Though not all born of the same sires or mothers: It teaches—Heaven knows only what it teaches, But sometimes it may mend, and often reaches. (v. 138) John Johnson has had the experience all right, married three times as he has been, but it has failed to reach him. He would have agreed that human “urns and pipkins” are “but fragile brothers”. For him this might have been an argument for a kind of ethical levelling-down: we are all the same so why should you think you are special? But a moral thinker like Christ would interpret the observation quite differently: we are all the same so we are all special. None of us belongs to a Pharisaical elect or to a cultural “sealed unit” of the kind Mary Midgley describes, au dessus de la mêlée like the Stoics. Not knowing this makes Gulbeyaz what she is: And she would have consoled, but knew not how; Having no equals, nothing which had e’er Infected her with sympathy till now, And never having dreamt what ’twas to bear Aught of a serious sorrowing kind, although There might arise some pouting petty care To cross her brow, she wonder’d how so near Her eyes another’s eye could shed a tear. (v. 119) Later in the poem we are shown another individual who has never been reached—in the sense of “convinced”, or “won over”—by experience: the Sultan himself. “Shawl’d to the nose, and bearded to the eyes”, the Sultan “showed but little royal curiosity” (v. 147, 148):

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He saw with his own eyes the moon was round, Was also certain that the earth was square, Because he had journey’d fifty miles and found No sign that it was circular anywhere (v. 110) There is the lack of moral experience of the poor little rich girl and of the parochial stay-at-home, both of which we readily understand; but there is also the kind of indifference of the well travelled but thick-skinned cosmopolitan relativist like John Johnson or Louis Charles Fougeret de Monbron—the polar opposite of Childe Harold—for whom the world is the same all over. “In lazy Apathy let Stoics boast,/Their virtue fix’d”; Pope says in An Essay on Man: “’tis fix’d as in a frost.” By contrast Byron ultimately proved no good as a stoic when the world was always doing its best to un-philosophize him: I would not be a tortoise in his screen Of stubborn shell, which waves and weather wear not. ’Tis better on the whole to have felt and seen That which humanity may bear, or bear not: ’Twill teach discernment to the sensitive, And not to pour their ocean in a sieve. (xiv. 49) The failures of ethical imagination Canto Five discovers in the Sultan, Gulbeyaz, Johnson, the narrator, and in us, take different forms; but failures of ethical imagination are what they are. How much or how little “discernment” such a process of discovery teaches is arguable of course; and Byron is careful not to place an absolute value even on that. There is discernment; but discernment should never involve pouring the ocean of your experience through a sieve. On occasions like 9 December 1820 that is not just morally inappropriate: it’s impossible. The capacity to wonder, to admire, and to sympathize, is one Don Juan itself evokes in us and demands of us, and it does so by temporarily repudiating one body of thought and frame of mind in terms of another.

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Evangelicalism and Evolution: James Montgomery’s Pelican Island To recap. In Chapter 3, on Wordsworth, we met the case of a poet who felt so intensely the “restraint upon explanation” that Dorothy Walsh believed was the corollary of the artistic “boldness in inclusion” that, like John Clare and William Blake, he began to question the very medium in which such inclusions and explanations might take place and in which discursive ideas and imaginative creativity might came to terms. Wordsworth’s case is a Romantic one, like that of Clare and Blake, but I would suggest that something like it underlies a great deal of literary activity. When someone knows they mean something but do not know what, he or she will occasionally contemplate or otherwise respond to the implications of expressing such a state of mind. Indeed it may be that imaginative and dramatic literature presents certain moral and formal inducements to writers just as they do to readers—that “cluster of grapes” Sir Philip Sidney spoke of in the “Defence of Poesy”—which encourage them to go on regardless, and evidently Wordsworth did not conclude that the “counter-­spirit” of literary expression (“unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve”) should make him abandon his vocation. In Chapter 4 we met the case of another Romantic poet: one trained in a certain long-established paradigm of Classical thought that he evidently found attractive for intelligible reasons, given its stress on the pragmatic, the responsible, and the spiritually abstemious. In his masterpiece Byron committed himself, up to a point, to that Stoical-materialist-relativist ethical amalgam that could so winningly, even “naturally” assist reflective beings as they live in a world of what Martha Nussbaum calls “uncontrolled happening”. But he committed himself only up to a point: when it came into contact with the morality of the Good Centurion and the Good Samaritan the ethic of Marcus Aurelius—attractive and compelling as it is, especially when put into words by him—showed a fault line and a flaw. It was too given (potentially at least) to deliberative apathy and indifference of a kind quite hopeless in responding to the death of Captain del Pinto—and it was a work of art and not a personal letter that revealed that shortcoming to Byron. The question “Can this be death? then what is life or death?”—one which, as Collingwood said, “expects no answer: that is, a supposal”—is posed only in verse. It is a question of the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004356856_006

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kind art exists to ask, even if, pregnant with an answer and a message it cannot deliver it. So: on the one hand a writer who is reticent about employing the medium at all; on the other a writer who finds one set of ideas (Stoicism) brought into focus by another (the New Testament). In the four chapters to follow I shall discuss other situations in which ideas present themselves to writers and other works of art “constructed on a framework of thought”; in this chapter the case of an Evangelical Christian and Romantic poet who imaginatively envisaged a process apparently antithetical to Christianity: the natural selection of individuals by the survival of the fittest. In fact, as James Montgomery’s case demonstrates, those two visions of the primum mobile—providential design versus evolutionary instinct—are not as deeply opposed as we might expect.

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“The first branch of natural science to become genuinely historical was geology.” In the early nineteenth century biology arose to accompany geology and, as Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield went on, “the intellectual claims of the modern, extended time-scale were finally established by the resultant interweaving of geological considerations with evolutionary ones.”1 Martin Rudwick reminds us of two key features of that discovery. First: that “religious and scientific practices and knowledge interacted” during the interweaving Toulmin and Goodfield describe. “Rather than being the enemy of progress in the sciences of the earth,” Christianity “fostered the extension of historicity to the previously uncharted vastnesses of pre-human time,” as a product of its own fascination with history, origins, and accounts of the creation.2 Second: that “it was … the human imagination that needed to be stretched, even among savants, before talk of vast amounts of time could begin to seem anything more than vacuous and scientifically irresponsible hand-waving.”3 That interaction between geology, Christianity, and the imagination, and its potential implications for scientific “hand-waving” is what this chapter concerns, being another case of inclusion versus explanation, and knowing you mean something without (necessarily) knowing what, that in Collingwood’s view marks the artistic contribution in cognitive terms. Montgomery extended historicity 1 Stephen Toulmin and June Goodfield, The Discovery of Time (London: Hutchinson, 1965), 141. 2 Martin Rudwick, Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 6, 643; my italics. 3 Ibid.; my italics.

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and stretched his readers’ temporal imaginations, and so served as an intellectual medium for both religious and scientific ideas, in a peculiarly potent and unexpected way, given that his background suggests that providential rather than evolutionary arguments would have attracted his dramatic interest. As one of Europe’s pioneering geologists, James Hutton, put it: “How describe an operation which man cannot have any opportunity of perceiving? Or how imagine that, for which, perhaps, there are not proper data to be found?”4 As Rudwick also suggests, with the visual arts in mind, “Something more than outcrops of well-hammered rocks and trays of well-handled fossil specimens was needed before any pictorial sense of the world at the time of their formation became  … ­conceivable.” Writers, too, were in the business of building what he calls “human constructions”, using scientific evidence “in a representation that has many other inputs besides the fossil bones and shells themselves”.5 Montgomery’s mini-epic Pelican Island takes its origin in coral, in particular: a zoological interweaver whose biological activity has a posthumous geological result. The sea played a massive role in the imaginative confluence of geology and biology that Toulmin and Goodfield describe. Evidence for changes in sea level, after all, was writ large in the Biblical account of the deluge: an event a student of geology and a student of the Old Testament could discuss as the same person. On the other hand, the sea in the late eighteenth century was an element that empirical observation could hardly penetrate at all. Objects could be dropped into it and hauled back up again; a person could dive a few fathoms with his eyes open; creatures of all sorts came up in fishermen’s nets; but there was no way that the ocean could systematically be explored beneath its surface: so the scientific imagination had a peculiarly rich field once the greatest ocean in the world was opened up to exploration in the mid-eighteenth century. Two individuals—one a scientist and disciple of Cuvier writing at the beginning of the period, the other a missionary writing near its end—give us a sense of the obscurity of marine studies in the first half of the nineteenth century. François Péron was every inch a product of revolutionary Napoleonism: a self-made polymath from the provinces who talked his way onto the luckless Baudin expedition to Australia in 1802 and by a series of accidents and desertions became in effect its chief scientist. John Williams, martyr of the ­London Missionary Society, was Péron’s antithesis: the product of the 4 James Hutton, Theory of the Earth, 3 vols (London: William Creech, 1795), i. 164. 5 Martin Rudwick, Scenes from Deep Time: Pictorial Representations of the Prehistoric World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 227, 223.

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British religious revival that had emerged in response to the Enlightenment which the ­Frenchman served, and stolidly devout right up to his murder on a beach at Eromanga in 1839. Thirty years and an immense ideological gulf divided these two travellers in the Pacific, but they demonstrated essentially the same imaginative restrictions on their capacity to burst the limits of time. “One of the finest results of modern geological research, and also one of the most uncontestable,” Péron wrote in his scientific account of the Baudin voyage, “is the certainty that the level of the sea was once much higher than it is now.” The evidence for this was twofold: petrified seashells found on elevated pieces of ground, and “zoophytes observed at great heights above the present level of the sea; madreporic islands and archipelagoes.”6 Either the land had risen or the sea had gone down, but Péron struggled to envisage how the former process could have come to pass. “Most of those countless islands scattered through the great equatorial ocean appear to be the work of these feeble zoophytes”, he argued, but the spectator “has difficulty in conceiving how, by such apparently feeble means, Nature has been able to raise from the bed of the sea those vast mountain plateaux which stretch over the surface of the land.”7 Volcanos are the only things that make land rise, Péron was sure; but they could not possibly have raised all this coralline rock above the sea—and, besides, they always left evidence of their activity, and none was to be seen in the antipodes. So in his “General Results” Péron concluded: “We discovered living zoophytes sowing the seas with fresh dangers, multiplying reefs, increasing the size of islands and archipelagoes, cluttering roadsteads and ports and raising up new calcareous mountains everywhere.”8 For Williams “modern geological research” counted mostly as what he called “prying researches after knowledge.”9 But in a sense the English missionary was nearer to the mark than the French polymath. Coral, in Williams’ view, needed to find a suitable platform and having found it “innumerable myriads of these wonderful little animals work with incredible diligence until they reach the surface of the water, above which they cannot build.”10 Their diligence was worthy of the Victorian seal of approval, but coral could not have built the islands as Williams saw it: they did not have the time. According to current 6 7 8 9 10

François Péron, Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands, 2nd edn., trans. Christine Cornell, 4 vols (Adelaide: Friends of the State Library of South Australia, 2007), iii. 34. Ibid. 45, 40, 43. Ibid. 47. John Williams, A Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands (London: John Snow, 1840), 7. Ibid. 8.

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scientific estimates of growth “eighteen thousand years would be required to produce the island visited by Captain Beechy, thirty thousand for the rocks of Rurutu, and fifty to sixty thousand for those of Mangaia; and only that portion of them which appears above water!” (Williams alludes to Frederick William Beechey, who travelled the Pacific from 1826 to 1828.) This “amazing length of time”, since it was inconsistent with Biblical history, must be inconsistent with nature and so, “After all … that I have seen, and thought, and read upon the subject, my impression is, that the islands remain much in the same state as the deluge left them, and that every subsequent alteration has been partial in its character, and exceedingly limited in its extent.”11 So it was that Péron managed vastly to overestimate coral activity in the Pacific region and Williams managed vastly to underestimate it. The first spoke about “prodigious antiquity” but really could account for coral islands only in terms of prodigious dynamism; the second spoke about “incredible diligence” but strictly curtailed the amount of antiquity he would afford it. Be that as it may, we can see both of them striving to account, imaginatively as well as scientifically, for the manifestations they witnessed: in particular, coral rock above the surface of the water.

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The land-based geologist of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries had immense sources of information available to him: stratigraphy, above all, revealed by erosion, mines, even canal cuttings (which were shallow, but straight and level, and revelatory for those reasons), but also volcanic ­activity—not to mention the fossil record which accompanied the stratigraphic one. By comparison, sea-based geology was to all intents and purposes an imponderable: though not one geologists could ignore. The subaqueous arena was an imaginary one by definition before the snorkel and the aqualung, but one particular part of it—the newly emergent world of tropical Pacific zoophytes: shallow, clear, calm, and colourful—was empirically observable, too. “The controversy over coral reefs in the first half of the nineteenth century,” D.R. Stoddart writes, “illuminates a minor but not insignificant component of the new geology and biology.”12 In purely scientific terms no doubt this is true; in terms of that interweaving of biology and geology that involved imaginative 11 12

Ibid. 9–10. D.R. Stoddart, “Darwin, Lyell, and the Geological Significance of Coral Reefs”, 213, British Journal of the History of Science, 9:2 (1976), 199–218.

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input from secular and religious thinkers alike, coral is the marine equivalent of the volcano in bursting the limits of time. Like the volcano but in a different medium the coral reef suggested the amount of time the earth had taken writing its own history long before it demonstrated it empirically. (Vesuvius had erupted in 79 ad, and its slopes were now covered by earth to certain depths: thus the deposition of soil above volcanic lava could be a measure of time. If science discovered how fast coral grew, and could establish some sort of date from which to measure its growth in a particular locality, science could date rock in a similar way.) So it is that Katharine Anderson proposes coral “as a key to Victorian ideas (and anxieties) about marine life and earth’s history”, themselves “bound up with the view of coral polyps as a liminal form of life, a bridge between organic and inorganic worlds.” “As miniature worlds”, she goes on, coral reefs “were sometimes perceived as fragile or vulnerable, sometimes as centres of generative or transformative energy.”13 These imaginative-cum-empirical constructions of the coralline Pacific have their origin in the work of Johann Reinhold Forster, who accompanied Cook on his second voyage of 1772–1775 and who first made a cardinal distinction in the geology of the insular Pacific: “We found low isles, connected by reefs of coral rocks; we met with islands more elevated, some without a reef, and others surrounded by a reef of lithophytes.”14 Forster could not grasp the nature of the connection between coralline and volcanic islands in a cycle of subsidence and construction, or the vast amount of time required to effect that connection and to allow for the possibility that low islands were only ancient high ones. But in other respects his insight was fundamental. Navigators visiting the Pacific after Forster were convinced that coral was a long time growing. Of such reefs, Charles Claret de Fleurieu wrote in his account of the Marchand circumnavigation of 1790–1792, “they are the product of centuries”.15 Many such mariners were misled regarding the raising of coral habitations by the immense depths surrounding shallow reefs in the Pacific. Such reefs, the naturalist Jacques Labillardière recorded at Bougainville, “rise, like so many columns, from the bottom of the sea, and their progressive ­augmentation daily increases the danger of navigating those parts of 13 14

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Katharine Anderson, “Coral Jewellery”, 49, 40, Victorian Review, 34:1 (2008), 47–53. Johann Reinhold Forster, Observations Made During a Voyage Round the World, ed. Nicholas Thomas, Harriet Guest, and Michael Dettelbach (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1996), 107. Charles Pierre Claret de Fleurieu, Voyage autour du monde, pendant les années 1790, 1791, et 1792, par Étienne Marchand, 2 vols (Paris: Imprimerie de la République pour Bossange, 1798–1800), ii. 234.

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the ocean.”16 Here was the origin of those notions that coral must make its architectural way from the ocean floor and that its spread at the surface was rapid. Matthew Flinders, in 1802–1803 the first explorer to circumnavigate Australia, also imagined coral starting its work “at the bottom of the ocean”, and admired “the care taken to work perpendicularly in the early stages”, which marked “a surprising instinct in these diminutive creatures.”17 The scientists attached to the Pacific voyage commanded by Otto von Kotzebue between 1815 and 1818 were in disagreement about such phenomena. The islands, Adelbert von Chamisso argued, “are table mountains, which rise perpendicularly from the depths of the ocean, and near which the lead finds no bottom.” On the contrary, his colleague Friedrich von Eschscholtz pointed out, “Their situation with respect to each other, as they often form rows, their union in several places in large groups, and their total absence in other parts of the same seas, make us conclude, that the corals have founded their buildings on shoals in the sea; or, to speak more correctly, on the tops of mountains lying under water.”18 By the time Eschscholtz’s brilliant theoretical translation of the surface record onto a submarine one had appeared a pair of naturalists accompanying Louis de Freycinet around the world between 1817 and 1820 had, so to speak, blown it out of the water. Jean René Quoy and Joseph Paul Gaimard “demonstrated for the first time that reef-building corals could only grow in shallow water.”19 Such a report from the field should have put paid to the “up-from-theabyss” school of thought almost immediately. But there was something about myriads of little animals working with incredible diligence until they reached the surface of the water that English writers, in particular, would not willingly let die. This was not just a matter of coral insects “raising monuments to their wonderful labours”, as Flinders had put it; he also spoke about their “instinctive foresight” in releasing “their infant colonies” to their shelter of their leeward sides20—and such remarks pleased and encouraged devout authors on the subject. Thus in 1828 Granville Penn sought to explain the geological world to young readers in a set of conversations two children are imagined to have with their mother. “I think I remember seeing it remarked in some book of voyages”, the 16

Jacques Labillardiére, Voyage in Search of La Pérouse, Peformed by Order of the Constituent Assembly, During the Years 1791, 1792, 1793, and 1794 (London: John Stockdale, 1800), 152–53. 17 Matthew Flinders, Voyage to Terra Australis, 2 vols (London: G. and W. Nichol, 1814), ii. 115. 18 Otto von Kotzebue, A Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Beerings Straits, 3 vols (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), ii. 356, and iii. 331. 19 Stoddart, “Darwin, Lyell and the Significance of Coral Reefs”, 200. 20 Flinders, Voyage to Terra Australis, ii. 115.

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daughter of the house observes, “that Otaheité, and all the islands of the South Seas, have been raised from the sea by insects; now, I cannot help thinking this, if true, to be very extraordinary.” In her explanation her mother cites Cook, Forster, and Flinders, and points out, inter alia, that coral atolls are built “with their backs to the sea, as if the coral animalcules were aware of the properties of the arch.” Such a thing “cannot be explained otherwise than by the operation of intelligence and design.”21 In the same year Robert Bakewell acknowledged Quoy and Gaimard at one end of his book—to the effect that corals “construct their habitations on the summits of submarine rocks, and increase their height, but do not form them”—while at the other offering the old account of islands and reefs being “raised from the vast depths in the course of a few years”: a process which “is still going on rapidly and extensively in the Southern Ocean”.22 In the same year, too, Andrew Ure, reconciling the whole field of study “at once to modern science and sacred history”, theorized that “coral islands offer proofs of the elevation of submarine strata by expansive forces, acting at periods probably not very remote from our own times, and therefore they are well calculated to throw light on the more ancient and obscure phenomenon of the deluge.” “Not very remote” is not very precise, but the main conclusion is that the Biblical deluge is safely established as an event of far greater obscurity and antiquity than modern geological elevations, onto which only some light might be thrown by modern discoveries. “It is highly probable”, for example, “that the numerous volcanic chimnies which … rise through the vast Pacific, are remnants of the general convulsion which raged at the deluge, ending in the submersion of some primeval continent, corresponding probably in area to the surface of that ocean.”23 It is easy to smile at this but “volcanic chimnies” is by no means the worst imaginative expression to use of those tectonic vents that are the sources of all the non-continental islands of the Pacific, high and low. In 1829, Andrew Ure imagined a disappearing Pacific continent. Two years later John MacCullough imagined a rising one. By common consent, he wrote, it was understood that coral atolls and islets were “crowding the whole of the sea, under a rapid increase”. Was it not likely that they were “destined to 21 22

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Granville Penn, Conversations on Geology (London: Samuel Maunder, 1828), 147, 152, 157. Robert Bakewell, An Introduction to Geology: Comprising the Elements of the Science in is Present Advanced State, 3rd edn (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1829), 334, 86. Andrew Ure, A New System of Geology: in which the Great Revolutions of the Earth and Animated Nature, Are Reconciled at Once to Modern Science and Sacred History (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1829), 466–67.

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become the seats of vegetation, and the habitations of man, and perhaps, at length, to form a continent in the Pacific Ocean”? Like Penn’s, MacCullough’s vision was one of intelligent design: that so many reefs were roughly circular he felt to be an instance of “singular ingenuity, as it respects the form and character of the future island”. As islands rose, furthermore, the seawater trapped in their atolls would surely become diluted by rain, until it ceased to be salt at all: thus opening the way for animal life. Was this not a case of “foresight and contrivance”?24 In 1845, Philip Henry Gosse was still discussing “the Divine care” God gave “the little creatures which rear these solid structures” in that coral atolls displayed openings just sufficient to let seawater and native canoes come and go, but “of insufficient width and depth to permit the free ingress of large ships”.25 Intelligent design, indeed! Twenty years later yet, Louis Agassiz still clung to the idea of a purposeful theodicy. Like coal, coral—“who have worked so busily during the long centuries, that there are extensive countries, mountain-chains, islands, and long lines of coast consisting solely of their remains”—humiliated our sense of time. “Leaving aside … all historical chronology, how far back can we trace our own geological period, and the Species belonging to it? By what means can we determine its duration? Within what limits, by what standard, may it be measured? Shall hundreds, or thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions of years be the unit from which we start?” “In these seventy thousand years”, for example, “has there been any change in the Corals living in the Gulf of Mexico? I answer most emphatically, No.”26 So Agassiz was prepared to give corals the time John Williams denied them, but the ubiquity and stability of coral species only made a pious conclusion more inevitable: that “from whatever side we consider them, their creation and existence seem to be guided by one Mind.” From little things, big things grow, and “these little beings” had a primary role to play in Creation: “to make a masonry solid, compact, time-defying, such a masonry as was needed by the great Architect, who meant that these smallest creatures of His hand should help to build His islands and His continents.”27 This was an imaginative pattern that many found too harmonious to deny. 24

25 26 27

John MacCullough, A System of Geology, with a Theory of the Earth, and an Explanation of its Connexion, with the Sacred Records (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1831), 338, 339, 341–42. Philip Henry Gosse, The Ocean (London: Society for the Propagation of Christian Knowledge, 1845), 252. Louis Agassiz, Methods of Study of Natural History (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1863), 149, 151, 190. Ibid. 198, 200.

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But Agassiz, for all his residual piety, had begun to burst the limits of time and speculate in terms of millions of years. That was the lesson Charles Lyell, James Dana, and Charles Darwin drew from coral. “When we admit the increase of coral limestone to be slow”, Lyell pointed out, “we are merely speaking with relation to periods of human observation”. “Natural chronometers”,28 with their roots in deep time, would be needed to grasp the prodigious antiquity at which Péron had only waved his hand. (By 1837 and with the benefit of Darwin’s research Lyell could see that “Coral islands are the last efforts of drowning continents to lift their heads above water.”)29 Dana estimated coral growth at a thousand years per five feet; it was a scale of this temporal magnitude that led him to conclude: “In this direction … we find the grandest teaching of coral formations.”30 Darwin treated the antiquity and the rate of growth of coral reefs with the Olympian insouciance that marks his entire project. For him such reefs, “young” or “old” (whatever those words might mean), belonged only to “the present geological æra” (which means that as natural chronometers they themselves were only recent innovations). Accordingly, coralline growth (which varied by species and by location anyway) is never slow, “when referred either to the standard of the average oscillations of level in the earth’s crust, or to the more precise but less important one of a cycle of years.”31

iii

So it is that we have between the eras of James Cook and Charles Darwin a burgeoning framework of thought about coral as a “natural chronometer”, and it appears that the hymnist, abolitionist, newspaper editor, and poet, James Montgomery, knew a good deal about it—bar the work of Lyell, Darwin, Dana, and Agassiz, which he could not have known when Pelican Island was published in 1827. Montgomery read explorers’ accounts from the Pacific and his biographers recorded a conversation that suggests the extent of his amateur interest. “Seeing that coral islands are still constantly in progress of formation and enlargement”, he told his interlocutor, “a time might arrive when these 28 29 30 31

Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1832), ii. 287, 288. Katharine Murray Lyell (ed.), Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1881), ii. 12. James D. Dana, Corals and Coral Islands (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low, and Searle, 1872), 253, 318. Charles Darwin, The Structure and Distribution of Coral Reefs (London: Smith, Elder, 1842), 79.

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would coalesce, and a new continent appear where now only spreads a vast expanse of ocean with its insular spots.” His indestructible philanthropy as well as his poetical instinct envisaged this new southern world in evangelical terms: a continent peopled with human beings blessed with the gospel, basking beneath the meridian blaze of a sun more glorious than ours, and reflecting back to the moon, looking down in loveliness on the scene, a light thirteen degrees broader and brighter than that which the earth at present imparts.32 In 1831 he would edit a collection of travels by a pair of missionaries in which they explained to their Tahitian audience how the coral reef the Polynesians assumed to be a rib of one of their gods was in fact formed by multitudes on multitudes of the feeblest things that have life, through ages working together, and in succession, one mighty onward purpose of the eternal God; while each poor worm, among the millions which perhaps an angel could not count, is merely performing the common functions of its brief existence, and adding, perhaps, but a grain to a mass of materials which, in process of time, may fill up the bed of the Pacific Ocean, and convert it into a habitable continent.33 This was a much better informed poet than the Romantic average. Around 1818, by his own account, Montgomery read Flinders’ Voyage to Terra Australis, four years after its publication, and was struck by the circumnavigator’s account of Kangaroo Island, off present-day South Australia. Flinders’ visit was a memorable episode, reminiscent of Darwin’s encounter with the Galapagos thirty years later. Like Galapagos Kangaroo Island presented few species but immense numbers of individuals: in particular of kangaroos and seals. Like Galapagos, too, there was no sign of permanent human settlement and the animals were completely unsuspicious of man. The kangaroos, for example, “suffered themselves to be shot in the eyes with small shot, and in some cases to be knocked on the head with sticks”, and half a hundredweight 32 33

John Holland and James Everett, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of James Montgomery, 7 vols (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855), iv. 249. James Montgomery (ed.), Journal of Voyages and Travels by the Rev. Daniel Tyerman and George Bennet, Esq., Deputed from the London Missionary Society to Visit their Various Stations in the South Seas, China, India, &c. Between the Years 1821 and 1829, 3 vols (London: John Snow, 1831), i. 153.

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of k­ angaroo “heads, forequarters, and tails” were turned into soup during Flinders’ ­landfall.34 Another animal present in huge numbers was the pelican, on islets in Nepean Bay: Flocks of old birds were sitting upon the beaches of the lagoon, and it appeared that the islands were their breeding places; not only so, but from the number of skeletons and bones there scattered, it should seem that they had for ages been selected for the closing scene of their existence. Certainly none more likely to be free from disturbance of every kind could have been chosen, than these islets in a hidden lagoon of an uninhabited island, situate upon an unknown coast near the antipodes of Europe; nor can anything be more consonant to the feelings, if pelicans have any, than quietly to resign their breath, whilst surrounded by their progeny, and in the same spot where they first drew it. Alas, for the pelicans! Their golden age is past; but it has much exceeded in duration that of man.35 Generally speaking Flinders was as unpoetic as the average English sea captain, but the Voyage to Terra Australis suggests that geologists were not the only imaginists in early nineteenth-century science. In his account we can clearly see someone trying to burst the limits of time, by contrasting and thus comparing the history of a pelican rookery with the history of civilization. But there is no reef-building coral on Kangaroo Island; it is a continental island located in temperate waters between the Great Australian Bight and Bass Strait and not a coral island at all. So Flinders cannot have been Montgomery’s only inspiration. Basil Hall’s account of his voyage to the far East was published by John Murray in the year that Montgomery read Flinders, and Montgomery reprinted this passage from his book alongside the Kangaroo Island material in his preface to Pelican Island: The examination of a coral reef during the different stages of the one tide, is particularly interesting. When the tide has left it for some time it becomes dry, and appears to be compact rock, exceedingly hard and ragged; but as the tide rises, and the waves begin to wash over it, the coral worms protrude themselves from holes which were before invisible. These animals are of a great variety of shapes and sizes, and in such prodigious numbers, that, in a short time, the whole surface of the rock 34 Flinders, Voyage to Terra Australis, i. 169, 170. 35 Ibid. 183–84.

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appears to be alive and in motion…. When the coral is broken, about high water mark, it is solid hard stone, but if any part of it be detached at a spot where the tide reaches every day, it is found to be full of worms of different lengths and colours, some being as fine as a thread and several feet long, of a bright yellow, and sometimes of a blue colour: others resemble snails, and some are not unlike lobsters in shape, but soft, and not above two inches long.36 That this living stone might inspire a poet is understandable enough, but what has Basil Hall’s tropical reef to do with Matthew Flinders’ temperate island? The answer, I take it, is that Flinders’ pelicans appeared to be doing what coral does: hatch new generations of themselves on the remains of the old. For ages unknown to man the pelicans of South Australia had replicated themselves, like coral, and resigned their breath in the spot where they first drew it. Taken together, Flinders and Hall planted a seed in Montgomery’s religiously imaginative mind about stasis in a state of pure nature, as opposed to historical progress and religious enlightenment. But it took time for that seed to sprout. In March 1827 Montgomery told John Holland that the idea for Pelican Island “has been floating in my mind several years”—at least since 1818 when he came across Flinders’ pelicans, “unseen as they were unsung by man.” “Impressed as I was with the subject,” he went on, I thought it would do very well for the foundation of a missionary speech, and serve to illustrate the manner in which the heathen on the adjacent islands had been born, grown up, and perished as ignorant of God, and of all that is good, as we were ignorant of them, and of their neighbours the pelicans.37 “The heathen” like the pelicans have no point, no purpose, no telos. In ignorance of divinity all they do is self-replicate. This speech Montgomery abandoned; he tried a rhyming poem, but shortly gave that up, too. Then, travelling home to Sheffield from Scarborough in September 1826, he witnessed a flood at the Wharfedale village of Thorp Arch and had a quintessentially Romantic moment of inspiration: 36

37

Basil Hall, Account of a Voyage of Discovery to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great LooChoo Island (London: John Murray, 1818), 107–08. (“Great Loo-Choo Island” is modern-day Okinawa.). Holland and Everett, Memoirs of the Life and Writings, iv. 198. Montgomery was the son of Moravian missionaries who had died in the West Indies during his childhood.

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only a few more prominent points of ground were seen, like green islands amidst the lake. By some involuntary association of ideas, I was powerfully reminded of the Pelican Island. In a moment the radical thought of which I had been so long in quest rushed into my mind; and I saw the whole plan of my poem from beginning to end. I immediately began the subject in blank verse; and by the time we reached Ferrybridge, I had composed a number of lines, which I wrote down with my pencil in the inn there…38 The equation is evident: hill summits in a flooded plain (even in far-off Yorkshire) crystallized an imaginative vision of coral islands in a vast ocean. Montgomery meant something—he was possessed by a “radical thought”—but did not know what he meant. The resulting poem was more optimistic than the missionary speech. In Pelican Island we see the coral reef become one of those primeval Pacific continents the geo-historians had dreamt of, only the man whom Eschscholtz had called the “lord and proprietor of this new creation” is left at the end of the poem instinctively aware that a beneficent deity is supervising his existence and bowing, like an antipodal Adam, to his creator. So it was that Montgomery’s poem “established the evangelical significance of the coral island” for the early Victorians and intertwined its geology “with Christian teleology”.39 Still it did not meet with universal approval. “It is not … within the sphere of science to criticise the poet”, Dana suggested, but, more error in the same compass could scarcely be found than in the part of Montgomery’s “Pelican Island” relating to coral formations. The p ­ oetry of this excellent author is good, but the facts nearly all errors—if ­literature allows of such an incongruity. There is no “toil,” no “skill,” no “dwelling,” no “sepulchre” in the coral plantation any more than in a f­ lower garden; and as little are the coral polyps shapeless worms that “writhe and shrink their tortuous bodies to grotesque dimensions.” “The poet oversteps his license, and besides degrades his subject”, Dana concluded, “when downright false to nature.”40 Here is a classic case of the scientific paradigm coming up against the imaginative one: evidence, perhaps, for an anti-cognitive view of the arts, “­downright

38 Ibid. iv. 199. 39 Anderson, “Coral Jewellery”, 50. 40 Dana, Corals and Coral Islands, 19.

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false to nature”, and so forth. But as Martin Rudwick suggests, when it comes to bursting the limits of time, the language of metaphor can be as significant as the language of natural law. Metaphors are errors only from a particular point of view, and there are more inputs to the construction of geo-history than purely scientific ones—or purely religious ones come to that. “There is no authentic history of the world from the Creation to the Deluge, besides that which is found in the first chapters of Genesis”, Montgomery had written in his preface to The World Before the Flood in 1815 (a completely un-geological poem dealing with Old Testament personalities, like Byron’s Cain).41 But his mini-epic imbibed and prefigured the geo-historical interweavings of its era in a complex and ambivalent way. Pelican Island is told by perhaps the ultimate omniscient narrator in English literature: a radically disembodied roaming point of vision (“All eye, ear, thought”) that starts the poem saying “Methought I lived through ages, and beheld/Their generations pass so swiftly by me,/That years were moments in their flight, and hours/The scenes of crowded centuries reveal’d;/While Time, Life, Death the world’s great actors, wrought/New and amazing changes:—these I sing.”42 The poem’s first canto essentially rehearses Genesis, moving from “The sun, the stars,/The moon…/The planets seeking rest and finding none” (7), through a “war of mountains” and a “wild whirl of foaming surges”, via a rainbow and a dove to a post-diluvian world apparently without life. The first biota to announce itself is the nautilus, followed by the flying fish, the dolphin, and the whale (13–14). The origin of life is manifestly a subaqueous one. “In the free element beneath me”, the narrator says in Canto Two, swam, Flounder’d, and dived, in play, in chase, in battle, Fishes of every colour, form, and kind, (Strange forms, resplendent colours, kinds unnumber’d,) Which language cannot paint, and mariner Hath never seen; from dread Leviathan To insect-millions peopling every wave; And nameless tribes, half-plant, half-animal, Rooted and slumbering through a dream of life. 41 42

James Montgomery, The World Before the Flood (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1815), vii. James Montgomery, Pelican Island and Other Poems, 2nd edn (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1828), 1; subsequent references are by page number.

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The livelier inmates to the surface sprang, To taste the freshness of heaven’s breath, and feel That light is pleasant, and the sunbeam warm. Most in the middle region sought their prey, Safety, or pastime; solitary some, And some in pairs affectionately join’d; Others in shoals immense, like floating islands, Led by mysterious instinct through that waste And trackless region, though on every side Assaulted by voracious enemies, — Whales, sharks, and monsters, arm’d in front or jaw, With swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs. While ravening Death of slaughter ne’er grew weary, Life multiplied the immortal meal as fast. War, reckless, universal war, prevail’d; All were devourers, all in turn devour’d; Yet every unit in the uncounted sum Of victims had its share of bliss, its pang, And but a pang, of dissolution; each Was happy till its moment came, and then Its first, last suffering, unforeseen, unfear’d, Closed, with one struggle, pain and life for ever. (17–19) Here is a Darwinian intimation of the survival of the fittest and of the indefeasible adaptation to that struggle, “with swords, saws, spiral horns, or hooked fangs”. It is brutal but not cruel: the pangs here are only those of dissolution, unforeseen and unfeared, and death is only an unravelling of pain and life. And it blends the language of affect with the language of apathy: fish appreciate fresh air and sunshine; individuals are driven by instinct but also by affection; prey species are “voracious” but those predated upon enjoy their “share of bliss”. The discussion is as anthropomorphic in some respects as it is scientifically neutral in others, but its summary statement is of a marine environment bleakly unredeemed by any sense of purpose: They roam’d, they fed, they slept, they died, and left Race after race, to roam feed, sleep, then die, And leave their like through countless generations; —Incessant change of actors, none of scene, Through all that boundless theatre of strife! (20)

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“Race after race … through countless generations”, like the pelicans of Kangaroo Island and the Aboriginal “heathen” of Australia in Montgomery’s planned missionary speech, these animals appear to be teleologically moribund. But a boundless theatre of strife is not the last word on the world. The scene does change, however slowly. In “thrice a thousand years” (21)—half the age of Archbishop Ussher’s Earth—Montgomery’s narrator witnesses “ocean’s bed, as from the hand/Of its Creator, hollow’d and prepared/For his unfathomable counsels there,/To work slow miracles of power divine,/From century to century” (23). These slow miracles are worked by coral, and they are the antithesis of the “empty”, “purposeless”, and destructive marine realm Montgomery had just described—which was hardly entirely purposeless anyway. This time the deaths of trillions of individuals leave behind them not the “universal war” of the survival of the fittest and of countless individuals merely replicating themselves but a monument in stone: Enlongated like worms, they writhed and shrunk Their tortuous bodies to grotesque dimensions; Compress’d like wedges, radiated like stars, Branching like sea-weed, whirl’d in dazzling rings; Subtle and variable as flickering flames, Sight could not trace their evanescent changes, Nor comprehend their motions, till minute And curious observation caught the clew To this live labyrinth,—where every one, By instinct taught, perform’d its little task; — To build its dwelling and its sepulchre. (26) Thus Basil Hall’s prosaic Korean explorations—“full of worms of different lengths and colours”; “others resemble snails, and some are not unlike lobsters in shape”—becomes radically imaginative, in a way that Dana seems unable to recognize: “Compress’d like wedges, radiated like stars/Branching like seaweed, whirl’d in dazzling rings”. “Millions of millions thus, from age to age”, Montgomery goes on, With simplest skill, and toil unweariable, No moment and no movement unimproved, Laid line on line, on terrace terrace spread, To swell the heightening, brightening gradual mound, By marvellous structure climbing tow’rds the day. Each wrought alone, yet all together wrought,

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Unconscious, not unworthy, instruments, By which a hand invisible was rearing A new creation in the secret deep. Omnipotence wrought in them, with them, by them; Hence what Omnipotence alone could do Worms did. I saw the living pile ascend, The mausoleum of its architects, Stilly dying upwards as their labours closed: Slime the material, but the slime was turn’d To adamant, by their petrific touch; Frail were their frames, ephemeral their lives, Their masonry imperishable. All Life’s needful functions, food, exertion, rest, By nice economy of Providence Were overruled to carry on the process, Which out of water brought forth solid rock. (27–28) This is radically imaginative but it is also radically scientific: “curious observation” catches the clue to the instinctive and unconscious activity of countless numbers of individuals, “no moment and no movement unimproved”. Dana may be right about “the facts” in Pelican Island and their erroneousness, but if Montgomery has missed the letter he has captured the spirit of this new vision as his Biblical and proto-Darwinian visions interweave. He may be pregnant with a message that he cannot deliver in terms of assertion, but he has found his way to the core of Darwin’s faith in instinct and stupidity by a metaphoric route, by description rather than acquaintance, and by what in Chapter 1 we saw Roger Scruton call the truth-directed use of falsehood. The capacity of “toil unweariable” among countless individuals to wear out the rock of mortality and keep the species alive by mutation so that ultimately the individual and the variety are indivisible blends with the Biblical language of Omnipotence, Providence, and miraculous transfiguration (“Which out of water brought forth solid rock”). Like the beehive, the coral reef becomes an objective correlative for human society, where simple skill and toil are put to higher purposes, economies, and processes and where ephemeral lives leave imperishable masonry behind them. In Montgomery’s imagination the Darwinian and the Biblical accounts of origin reveal a common gene. Of course it is the lowliest of the low in countless numbers that has the greatest effect in the end, rather than the charismatic personalities nearer the top of the food chain. Of course the meek shall inherit the earth in the same way as Darwin watched humble earthworms bury a slab of granite in his garden at Down House. If worms could

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do that in twenty years, what could they not achieve, given time? What valleys might they not fill, or mountains bring low? For both Darwin and the Bible, such things were inevitable, whether they were the will of Yahweh or the “will” of the blind watchmaker that is evolution. But Montgomery would not rest satisfied with an analogy as complacent and anthropocentric as that between coral reef and human community. “Compared with this amazing edifice,/Raised by the weakest creatures in existence”, he asks, “What are the works of intellectual man?” Towers, temples, palaces, and sepulchres; Ideal images in sculptured forms, or in domes expanded, Fancies through every maze of beauty shown; Pride, gratitude, affection turn’d to marble, In honour of the living or the dead; What are they?—fine-wrought miniatures of art, Too exquisite to bear the weight of dew, Which every morn lets fall in pearls upon them, Till all their pomp sinks down in mouldering relics, Yet in their ruin lovelier than their prime! —Dust in the balance, atoms in the gale, Compared with these achievements of the deep, Were all the monuments of olden time, In days when there were giants on the earth … (30–31) Compared to them, “Great Babylon was like a wreath of sand,/Left by one tide and cancell’d by the next” and Egypt’s “pyramids would be mere pinnacles,/Her giant statues, wrought from rocks of granite,/But puny ornaments for such a pile/As this stupendous mound of catacombs/Fill’d with dry mummies of the builder-worms.” (31–32.) The perspective is enamoured with science and with providence but it is mostly enamoured with time and with what time does— and no work of Western literature is as intent on what time does as the Bible. In the Old Testament time is fate, the medium of destiny, the spinner of cycles of crime and punishment, rise and fall. All that Darwin did, in a sense, was replace divine omnipotence with blind force: the “hundred thousand wedges” he spoke of in his notebooks, which force “every kind of adapted structure into the gaps in the economy of nature”. It is John Donne’s paradox: “Therefore that he may raise the Lord throws down.” In 1841 an essay of Montgomery’s, written some years earlier, was published in the minute book of the Sheffield and Attercliffe Auxiliary of the Tract ­Society. The source may sound provincial, but there is nothing parochial about its author’s moral imagination:

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An earthquake may suddenly engulf the pyramids of Ghizza, and leave the sand of the desert where they stood as blank as the tide would have left it on the sea-shore. A hammer in the hand of an idiot may break in pieces the Apollo Belvidere, or the Venus de Medici, which are scarcely less worshipped as miracles of art in our day, than they were by idolaters of old as the representatives of deities. “Looking abroad over the whole world after the lapse of nearly six thousand years”, Montgomery concluded, “what have we of the past but the words in which its history is recorded? What besides a few mouldering and brittle ruins which time in insensibly touching down to dust?”43 In fact Montgomery’s vision of human and architectural decline and fall compared with natural and divine permanency is directly related to his subaqueous vision of the survival of the fishy fittest: “all were devourers, all in turn devour’d”. It was a Biblical perspective in the hands of Montgomery the missionary; it was a secular one in the hands of Péron the anthropologist; it was an imaginative perspective in the vision of either. “Thus, while man—who proclaims himself king of the natural world—laboriously constructs on the earth’s surface those frail buildings which the effect of time must soon bring down,” Péron wrote,44 “feeble little worms (whose existence he was but lately ignorant of and still disdains) create in the depth of the ocean more and more of these prodigious monuments, whose strength defies the ages and is such that even the imagination declines to conceive of….”

iv

James Hutton said that “time is not made to flow in vain; nor does there ever appear the exertion superfluous to power, or the manifestation of design, not calculated in wisdom to effect some general end.”45 His is a Whiggish interpretation of geo-history, one that the nineteenth century began to replace with a renovated version of something far older: a cyclical vision of contending forces, neither achieving final victory over the other, and without any possibility of a “general end”. “Whatever destroying tendencies, then, exist on earth,” William Knight wrote (in a discussion of the “formation of new land by coral worms”), “these renovating powers compensate for them…. No marks of a degradation 43

Samuel Ellis, Life, Times, and Character of James Montgomery (London: Jackson, Walford, and Hodder, 1864), 50, 51. 44 Péron, Voyage of Discovery to the Southern Lands, iii. 47. 45 Toulmin and Goodfield, Discovery of Time, 156.

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acting through a prolonged series of ages are exposed to our observation, without being met by constant renewal. The one arises out of the other.” And “one great and good Being” was the orchestrator of this algorithm.46 For Agassiz, too, “destruction and construction go hand in hand, and the materials broken or worn away from one part of the Reef help to build it up elsewhere.” Such a pattern was one of those “intellectual links in Creation, which give such coherence and consistency to the whole, and make it intelligible to man.”47 This was a vision Darwin himself was prepared to walk towards in his methodical fashion. “These coral islands stand,” he wrote, “and are victorious”: for here another power, as antagonist to the former, takes part in the contest. The organic forces separate the atoms of carbonate of lime one by one from the foaming breakers, and unite them into a symmetrical structure. Let the hurricane tear up its thousand huge fragments; yet what will this tell against the accumulated labour of myriads of architects at work night and day, month after month? Thus do we see the soft and gelatinous body of a polypus, through the agency of vital laws, conquering the great mechanical power of the waves of an ocean, which neither the art of man, nor the inanimate works of nature could successfully resist.48 James Montgomery could not see atoms of calcium carbonate being woven and unwoven by coral polyps and the action of the waves. But he could see the Pacific in a flooded Yorkshire valley, and he could balance and contrast forces of destruction and construction in much the same way, as a dramatist rather than a scientist. If Martin Rudwick is right, he was able to do this because of the interaction of religion and science in his time; Montgomery was wholly unlike his co-religionist, John Williams, with his disdain for “prying researches after knowledge”, though his is a triumph of metaphoric thinking of the kind a literalist like Dana could not fathom. It is a case of what Roger Scruton called, in Chapter 1, “truth as revelation, as the unconcealing of what is, in our instrumental and scientific ways of dealing with the world, hidden from us.” 46

William Knight, Facts and Observations towards Forming a New Theory of the Earth (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, and Green, 1818), 258; my italics. 47 Agassiz, Methods of Study of Natural History, 176, 192. 48 Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle, ed. Janet Browne and Michael Neve (London: Penguin, 1989), 338.

chapter 6

Tragedy and Evolution: Hardy’s The Woodlanders Nearly a century ago, Herbert Grimsditch made the simple but profound ­observation that “Hardy is fond of beginning his stories with a road, along which a pedestrian makes his way”—this pattern helping “to set off humanity very well against the background of the earth’”.1 “Fond” would be an understatement. The Hand of Ethelberta begins on “A Street in Anglebury” where the heroine meets her old suitor, Christopher Julian. Jude Fawley sets off on his abortive trip to Christminster along a “white road” that “seemed to ascend and diminish till it joined the sky”; he is standing on a similar bit of roadway when Arabella throws a pig’s pizzle at his ear. A Laodicean opens with George Somerset on a twilight path; he witnesses the heroine refusing baptism, becomes benighted, and ends up following a telegraph wire leading to Paula Power’s castle where it departs from the road. The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with Henchard’s dysfunctional family on the road to Weydon Priors where he will divest himself of them, and A Pair of Blue Eyes opens with Stephen Smith b­ eing driven to West Endlestow, the “moving outlines” of the two men being seen “against the sky on the summit of a wild lone hill in that district.” After an elegiac introduction to Egdon Heath, the second chapter of The Return of the Native begins with the heroine’s father, Captain Vye: “Before him stretched the long, laborious road, dry, empty, and white. It was quite open to the heath on each side, and bisected that vast dark surface like the parting-line on a head of black hair, diminishing and bending away on the furthest horizon.” Tess of the D’Urbervilles opens with John Durbeyfield “walking homeward from Shaston to the village of Marlott” when he encounters the meddling parson who changes his daughter’s destiny with a passing remark, and Two on a Tower opens with “a gleaming landau” coming to a halt “where the old Melchester Road, which the carriage had hitherto followed, was joined by a drive that led round into a park at no great distance off.” Finally, The Well-Beloved opens with “A person who differed from the local wayfarers … climbing the steep road” leading onto “The Isle of Slingers”, or Portland Bill. The reader is getting the point, and I shall not trouble him or her with the short fiction or the poetry but only enlist some scattered quotations from the novels to indicate how pervasive the theme is: “the glazed high-road which 1 Herbert B. Grimsditch, Character and Environment in the Novels of Thomas Hardy (1925; New York: Russell and Russell, 1962), 45.

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stretched, hedgeless and ditchless, past a directing-post where another road joined it … lying like a riband unrolled across the scene”;2 “green lanes, whose deep ruts were like Cañons of Colorado in miniature”;3 “the road, still adhering to its Roman foundation, stretched onward straight as a surveyor’s line till lost to sight on the most distant ridge”; “the old western highway, whose course was the channel of all such communications as passed between the busy centres of novelty and the remote Wessex boroughs”;4 “the hard, white, turnpike road … followed the level ridge in a perfectly straight line, seeming to be absorbed ultimately by the white of the sky”;5 “she followed the path towards Rainbarrow, occasionally stumbling over twisted furze-roots, tufts of rushes, or oozing lumps of fleshy fungi, which at this season lay scattered about the heath like the rotten liver and lungs of some colossal animal”;6 “the tape-like surface of the road diminished in his rear as far as he could see, and as he gazed a moving spot intruded onto the white vacuity of its perspective”;7 and, finally, “a carriage-road, nearly grown over with grass, which Anne followed as it turned and dived under dark-rinded elm and chestnut trees”.8 Tess, in particular, is an encyclopaedia of roads, with its “three-mile walk, along a dry white road, made whiter to-night by the light of moon” on the night of Tess’s seduction (80), Angel’s ride with his father when Alec D’Urberville is mentioned (212), the “long and unvaried” lane Tess walks from Port-Bredy to Flintcombe Ash (352), and the road she tramps back from the Clares, in her good shoes: “Its dry pale surface stretched severely onward, unbroken by a single figure, vehicle, or mark, save some occasional brown horse-droppings which dotted its cold aridity here and there” (391). (Only Hardy could have provided those horsedroppings.) Finally, there is that “long and regular incline of the exact length of a measured mile” which Angel and Liza-Lu climb to witness the heroine’s execution at the end of the novel (506). Why are roads so important to Hardy? And what is their significance as regards setting humanity off against the background of the earth? The answer lies, I think, in the road as a metaphor, both tragic and evolutionary, ­cultural

2 3 4 5 6 7

Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta (London: Macmillan, 1960), 30. Thomas Hardy, A Laodicean (London: Macmillan, 1961), 114. Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (London: Macmillan, 1958), 235, 368. Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (London: Macmillan, 1960), 37. Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (London: Macmillan, 1961), 420. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles (London: Macmillan, 1960), 490–1; cited by page number below. 8 Thomas Hardy, The Trumpet-Major (London: Macmillan, 1962), 43.

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and natural, demonstrating a co-presence in Hardy’s minds of ideas and ­forces—tragic and scientific—that we might imagine to be inconsistent.

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Tragedy and evolution are perennial and colossal themes in Hardy’s fiction, and I must issue some caveats and make some generalizations before turning to his imaginative and dramatic fascination with roads as objects inflected by both natural selection and by fate. It is not enough, for example, to regard tragedy as “an extremely sad and unexpected event”, or as a plot involving “the worthy encompassed by the inevitable”, as Hardy himself believed,9 and it is not enough for tragedy that an innocent should die or that the tragic victim be more “sinned against than sinning” as Lear says that he is. Tragedy must involve the extremely sad and unexpected death of someone, like Lear, finer than ourselves: someone whose experience has granted him or her an insight into human existence not to be arrived at by other means, which inspires pity and fear of a spiritual kind in those to whom it is communicated. So anagnorisis, or recognition, is not a restricted, technical, and incidental element in tragedy, but central to its effect. The tragic hero or heroine can start out in a state of egocentric folly like Dr Faustus, or self-indulgent narcissism like Antony and Cleopatra, but tragedy depends upon men and women such as these being eventually brought to a position from which they can, on the brink of death and when the knowledge is no longer of use to them, recognize the hopelessness of the human condition. Anagnorisis is not just a matter of discovering that the daughter you cast out always loved you most; it is a matter of discovering that we are to the gods as flies to wanton boys.10 It is not enough to discover that fulfilled political ambition is no guarantee of happiness; you must discover that life is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. Lear and Macbeth are themselves substantially responsible for the disasters that they respond to, but we nevertheless respect such recognitions as tragic ones. ­Without that 9

10

Jeanette King, Tragedy in the Victorian Novel: Theory and Practice in the Novels of George E­ liot, Thomas Hardy and Henry James (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 2, and Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1928 (London: Macmillan, 1962), 251. Of course it is Gloucester who makes this famous comment, not Lear. The play is riddled with various “recognitions”, many from Edgar (like father, like son): from “the worst is not/ So long as we can say ‘this is the worst’” to “ripeness is all”, and so forth. None takes precedence over the rest; but Gloucester’s is certainly a legendary manifestation of anagnorisis.

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respect for someone nobler than ourselves we have what are really only sad (albeit enlightening) stories like The Wild Duck or Ghosts—or Thomas Hardy’s novels, as a rule. Tess of the D’Urbervilles is a case in point. At its climax, after the heroine has re-encountered her husband in the dining room of a Sandbourne boardinghouse, she is followed back to her apartment by her landlady, who spies on her through the keyhole. What Mrs Brooks hears, in “a low note of moaning, as if it came from a soul bound to some Ixionian wheel” is: O—O—O! and, eventually, to her lover in the next-door room: O God—I can’t bear this!—I cannot! (486–87) But it is not enough for us to have Tess bound to an Ixionian wheel. She must be able to convey something about how that feels. Tess is “sympathetic, ­loving, loyal, honest, conscientious, hard-working, unassuming, and, most of all, ­selfless— even when the exercise of these qualities, as it often does, c­ learly works against her welfare.” This makes her “a remarkable young woman”11—but not a tragic one. In his Study of Thomas Hardy Lawrence argued that ­modern tragic ­literature confronts “the immorality of nature” “only passively, negatively”, and confines itself instead to “transgression against the social code … as though the social code worked our irrevocable fate.”12 Lear rebels against the “immorality of nature” in all its “eternal incomprehensibility”; Hardy and Ibsen, on the other hand, rebel against social and intellectual phenomena (the sexual double standard, hypocrisy, materialism, and so forth) that are profound, certainly, but subject to both time and human understanding. So all tragedy is pessimistic but not all pessimism is tragic. “Hardy’s tragedy”, a reviewer of The Return of the Native wrote in 1879, “gives us the measure of human miserableness, rather than of human grief—of the incapacity of man to be great in suffering, or anything else, rather than of his greatness in suffering.”13 By the rule of thumb I have outlined The Mayor of Casterbridge is the novel of Hardy’s that comes closest to tragedy. The hero’s capacity for anagnorisis is 11 12 13

John Glendening, The Evolutionary Imagination in Late-Victorian Novels: An Entangled Bank (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 85. D.H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 29–30. R.G. Cox (ed.), Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 58.

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not as profound as Lear’s or Macbeth’s, but there is a tragic view of existence hammered and stammered out in “Michael Henchard’s Will” at the novel’s close (384): & that no murners walk behind me at my funeral. & that no flours be planted on my grave. & that no man remember me. Henchard’s will is more than a measure of human miserableness; it is a v­ ision of desolation. The death of Giles Winterborne (from The Woodlanders) is very different: it “is pitiful and pathetic because he is a physically strong man made physically helpless; but because he never challenges—indeed never ­comprehends—the forces that destroy him, his death is not tragic.”14 So anagnorisis is a vital issue in tragedy, but it also has a special status in the context of this study as a whole. For it is a quintessentially metaphorical, poetic, and dramatic form of understanding fundamentally at odds with scientific forms of knowledge, as James Montgomery was antithetical to James Dana, and as Pelican Island is antithetical to “prying researches after knowledge”. When Macbeth tells us life is a tale told by an idiot, his statement is clearly neither verifiable nor controvertible—and certainly it is not translatable. Given his experience, we can hardly call the speech “heuristic” with Leavis, or “unasserted” with Scruton; but surely it is an example of what Scruton called in Chapter 1 “a kind of truth beyond that contained in the philosopher’s idea of correspondence”: “truth as revelation, as the unconcealing of what is, in our instrumental and scientific ways of dealing with the world, hidden from us”. Anagnorisis is a truth regarding “things not as they are, but as they appear”, as Wordsworth put it; “not as they exist in themselves, but as they seem to the senses and to the passions”; a truth arrived at by description rather than acquaintance. (Of apprehension rather than comprehension might be another way of putting it.) As such it retains what Dorothy Walsh calls “some element of the inexplicable, of the recalcitrant, of the obdurate, [and] of the ­unmanageable”, of boldness in inclusion and restraint in explanation, as every metaphorical act must be. So, inherently, anagnorisis has an unstable status compared to s­ cientific, ­philosophical, or historical truth—but it does not follow it is devoid of or ­independent from it. As for evolution: Darwin’s metaphors lent plenty of material to late nineteenth-­century tragic thought. “One may say”, I quoted him as saying in the previous chapter, that “there is a force like a hundred thousand wedges ­trying [to] force every kind of adapted structure into the gaps in the œconomy 14

Dale Kramer, Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy (London: Macmillan, 1975), 98.

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of Nature, or rather forming gaps by thrusting out weaker ones.”15 As Lear’s and Cordelia’s cases demonstrate, the finer among us are often enough the weaker, “thrust out” by the likes of Goneril and Regan. The universe “evolved itself”, Conrad wrote in 1897, out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold!—it knits.… And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart …. It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions—and nothing matters.16 Hardy shared Conrad’s fascination with metaphors like these. Having watched a group of women at a church service in Kensington, he wrote: Their real life is spinning on beneath this apparent one of calm, like the District Railway-trains underground just by—throbbing, rushing, hot, concerned with next week, last week …. Could these true scenes in which this congregation is living be brought into church bodily with the personages, there would be a churchful of jostling phantasmagorias crowded like a heap of soap bubbles, infinitely intersecting, but each seeing only his own.17 Conrad’s knitting machine and Hardy’s Underground are their equivalents of Darwin’s diabolical wedge-hammerer: mindless mechanisms bent on and living off extinction, and therefore assimilable to tragic destiny. So Hardy showed his readers what he called “the real moving forces of the great tragi-comedy of human life”,18 and those forces were destructive ones. For him as for Darwin “extinction and natural selection … go hand in hand”,19 and the teeming populousness of modern societies only made natural selection a 15

Paul H. Barrett, et al. (eds.), Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844: Geology, Transmutation of Species, Metaphysical Enquiries (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), 375. 16 Laurence Davies (ed.), The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 82. 17 Hardy, Life of Thomas Hardy, 210. 18 Lennart A. Björk (ed.), The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1985), i. 136. 19 Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species, ed. Gillian Beer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 141.

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more appropriate means to employ in contemplating them. “Let it be borne in mind”, Darwin wrote, “how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life.” The struggle for existence, accordingly, “will be most severe between the individuals of the same species, for they frequent the same districts, require the same food, and are exposed to the same dangers”—whether on an entangled bank, an island in the Malay Archipelago, or a Wessex village. The closer we co-habit, the more internecine the struggle becomes. “As all organic beings are striving to seize on each place in the economy of nature,” Darwin said, “if any one species does not become modified and improved in a corresponding degree with each of its competitors, it will soon be exterminated”—“a grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die.”20 In Darwin we apparently find Lawrence’s immorality of nature, in all its eternal incomprehensibility, brought down to earth from the heavens Lear excoriates to a new heath, like Egdon Heath, in which not the gods but natural selection plays with us like flies. The Fates and the Furies, accordingly, are a kind of euhemerist myth of the survival of the fittest, and hamartia is an anthropomorphic form of biological mal-adaptation. In “Candour in English Fiction”, written for the New Review in 1890, Hardy detected “a revival of the artistic instincts towards great dramatic motives”, of the kind “formerly worked out with such force by the Periclean and Elizabethan dramatists, to name no other.” But this was not a simple return: “not a moment of revolution but—to use the current word—evolution.” “Hence, in perceiving that taste is arriving anew at the point of high tragedy,” he went on: writers are conscious that its revived presentation demands enrichment by further truths—in other words, original treatment: treatment which seeks to show Nature’s unconsciousness not of essential laws, but of those laws framed merely as social expedients by humanity, without a basis in the heart of things; treatment which expresses the triumph of the crowd over the hero, of the commonplace majority over the exceptional few.21 So Hardy made an ambitious connection between a renewed form of “high tragedy” and a set of “essential laws” written “in the heart of things” that dictate the levelling of heroic exaltation. For him the revival of something Periclean and 20 21

Ibid. 67, 63, 84, 378. Harold Orel (ed.), Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings: Prefaces, Literary Opinions, Reminiscences (London: Macmillan, 1967), 126–27.

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Elizabethan necessarily involved the “current” intellectual interests of his time, among which Darwinism was predominant.

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“The specific ‘variety’ of tragedy that Hardy treats in The Woodlanders”, Dale Kramer argues, portrays the source of life’s misery as a quasi-transcendental condition of life, the expression of which suggests determinism, but whose operation is more accurately thought of not as pre-fated but simply as the consequence of the interaction of natural forces struggling for life and supremacy.22 Michael Millgate’s analysis of the novel is even more Darwinian in its vocabulary: Hardy presents … a small group of central characters, carefully selected and differentiated as to birth, education, wealth, and class, divided quite specifically into the two basic groups of woodlanders and ex-urbanites, and deliberately subjected to a wide range of the misfortunes which nature, society, sexual drive, human folly, and simple accident can bring. Working with the established human ecology … Hardy transplants exotic growths (Mrs Charmond and Fitzpiers) from elsewhere. He also takes one promising plant (Grace Melbury) from its natural soil, forces it in hothouse conditions, and then transplants it back to its place of origin.23 This is tragedy as a “cosmic ant farm”.24 There is a well-known passage when Giles Winterborne follows the heroine and her father into the Hintock woods: They went noiselessly over mats of starry moss, rustled through interspersed tracts of leaves, skirted trunks with spreading roots whose mossed rinds made them like hands wearing green gloves, elbowed old elms 22 Kramer, Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy, 95. 23 Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (London: Macmillan, 1994), 250. 24 Kevin Padian, “Evolution and Deep Time in Selected Works of Thomas Hardy”, 232, in Rosemarie Morgan (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 217–33.

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and ashes with great forks in which stood pools of water that overflowed on rainy days and ran down their stems in green cascades. It is a landscape saturated with life, death, and their interdependence: On older trees still than these huge lobes of fungi grew like lungs. Here, as everywhere, the Unfulfilled Intention, which makes life what it is, was as obvious as it could be among the depraved crowds of a city slum. The leaf was deformed, the curve was crippled, the taper was interrupted; the ­lichen ate the vigour of the stalk, and the ivy slowly strangled to death the promising sapling.25 The “Intention” rules the roost at Little Hintock, with its “over-crowded branches in the neighbouring wood which were rubbing each other into wounds” (17), dawns so dark “you couldn’t have told poor men from gentlemen” in the primal soup (30), the “external phenomena” in a man’s form of dress or posture which attract women to him (39), the “helpless stationariness” of the nicknacks in Grace’s old bedroom (48), the “freemasonry of education” that elevates Grace and Mrs Charmond above the other women of the neighbourhood (56), the “unfitness for modern lives” of Hintock House and the “fragility” to which those lives have themselves “declined” (58–9), Mrs Charmond’s own “adaptable, wandering, weltbürgerliche nature” (61), the antagonism between the two women’s complexions (62), the woodside pheasants roosting close to the tree trunk or along its boughs as the wind dictates (68), the “intangible Cause” which produces family irritation as well as the “old simple indigenous feeling” which Grace retains towards Winterborne (80), the breeze which makes “the point of each ivy-leaf on the trunks scratch its underlying neighbour restlessly” (84), the “curious mechanical regularity of country people in the face of hopelessness” that reminds us of Darwin’s encounters with giant tortoises in the Galapagos (118), Winterborne’s lack of what the heroine calls “perseverance” (135), the “helpless immobility” and “meditative inertness” of the village (158), Grace as the “passive cause” of Winterborne’s desolation (167), Dr Fitzpiers’ belief that he belongs “to a different species” from the labourers he sees from his hotel window (169), Grace’s combination of “modern nerves with primitive feelings” (276), and the “mutual rubbings and blows” the trees give each other in “wrestling for existence” which is like a “struggle between … n ­ eighbours” (288–9). The novel is positively awash with evolutionary language—­movement 25

Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, ed. Dale Kramer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 53; cited in parenthesis below.

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and stasis, progress and decline, adjustment and oppugnancy: so much so as to suggest that the cardinal distinctions between nature and humanity could themselves “interpenetrate” and dissolve away. Both nature and humanity are utterly intent on filling gaps in the economy of nature: occupying niches, as Darwin put it. “Grace Melbury takes advantage of her uprooting from the Hintocks”, Roger Ebbatson points out, “to marry into another niche in society than her father’s”; but she ultimately finds herself “in mid-air between two storeys of society.”26 Fitzpiers explains his decision to practise in Little Hintock on Darwinian lines: “I took a map, and I marked on it where Dr. Jones’s practice ends to the north of this district, and where Mr. ­Taylor’s ends on the south, and little Jimmy Green’s on the east, and somebody else’s to the west. Then I took a pair of compasses, and found the exact middle of the country that was left between those bounds” (50)—not that it does him any good, as he is as effectually squeezed out of his niche as everybody else is. Grace tells her father, “I wish you had never, never thought of educating me” (208), as her education only renders her maladapted to her ­“native air” (84). Like Mrs Charmond she and her husband have to abandon their foothold in the Little Hintock economy. There would have been a time when Winterborne and Marty South could and should have married, sharing as they did an “intelligent intercourse with Nature” (306) which attuned them to each other, much as an “unwritten code” unites Winterborne and Grace’s ­father (27). But everything has changed in that niche, too: “The new order, in the figures of Fitzpiers and Mrs Charmond, destroys the old, represented by Giles, Marty and the Hintock community”,27 and the fact that the doctor and the fine lady cannot govern the forces they have unleashed is cause for neither grief nor satisfaction: those forces are essentially impersonal. There is a distinction, however. Humanity can apprehend the “Unfulfilled Intention”, mourn it, rage against it, or otherwise reinterpret it, metaphorically, as fatal malignity or coincidental happenstance—that is what ­anagnorisis is. But any such interpretation would be fundamentally un-Darwinian. For ­Darwin, according to Kevin Padian, “the ‘tangled bank’ metaphor of species interactions is synergistic: the fates of all organisms are interrelated in the ecological web of life”, and it follows that “coincidence would have no meaning to Darwin because no organisms but us humans would see any significance in their fates.” The fate of Oedipus could mean nothing to him, and he appears to 26 27

Roger Ebbatson, The Evolutionary Self: Hardy, Forster, Lawrence (Brighton: Harvester, 1982), 8, and Hardy, Woodlanders, 202. Glenn Irwin, “Structure and Tone in The Woodlanders”, 79, in Norman Page (ed.), Thomas Hardy Annual No. 2 (London: Macmillan, 1984), 79–90.

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have had no susceptibility to art and literature whatever. “Virtually all patterns that humans label Chance have particular determinants … and no important process in evolution is truly random in its cause”; so for Darwin, chance is “a series of determined imponderables: only epistemological ignorance keeps us from figuring out the myriad causes behind it.”28 His theory can substantially be investigated, disputed, and translated, but tragic recognition has an entirely different effect: there is no use in investigating whether we really are to the gods as flies to wanton boys, or whether life really is a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage and is no more. Such feelings are apprehensions, not comprehensions. Anagnorisis is not the opposite of epistemological ignorance; it is the opposite of moral apathy. The forces that crush the sapling in Hintock Woods might be beyond our comprehension in their concrete inter-relatedness but they exist all the same. So, too, with people, in so far as they are the product of such forces: “no man’s hands could help what they did”, Fitzpiers says, “any more than the hands of a clock” (50). We may not know what forces make us act as we do, scientifically speaking, but they still exist. Tragedy also concerns itself with free will. We are as flies to wanton boys because we have no such thing. But in so far as Hardy saturated his experimental population of human subjects with destiny as well as with contingent determinism he created an intellectual problem. As an evolutionist he wanted to borrow the force of Darwin’s mill—its hundred thousand wedges, its knitting action, its Underground trains scurrying about on their tracks, and all the other “purblind doomsters” alluded to in his poem simply called “Hap”. As a tragedian he wanted to deny the mill’s accessibility to rational explanation, because that would reduce its power. He wanted the dramatic benefits of contingency on the one hand and fate on the other. So The Woodlanders is as intent on tragedy as it is on natural selection. Just as the “Unfulfilled Intention” passage demonstrates the novel’s Darwinian credentials so Hardy’s suggestion that “from time to time, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and closely knit interdependence of the lives” under scrutiny under High Stoy Hill (8) demonstrates its tragic ones. In fact Hardy assimilates them. Grace has been educated “far above the level of the daughters hereabout” (20) and is ready for a fall; Little Hintock itself, the eternal hamlet, “had at some time or other been of greater importance than now” (26); the community “evinces some shyness in showing strong emotion among each other”, which only leads to tragic repression (46); and “the regular terrestrial roll” 28

Padian, “Evolution and Deep Time in Selected Works of Thomas Hardy”, 232.

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of this isolated realm suddenly suffers “something dissociated from these normal sequences, and foreign to local knowledge” as if it was the State of Denmark when Fitzpiers begins experimenting with coloured light (49). “Good and great fall as well as humble”, we are gloomily informed (152), and in allying himself to the House of Melbury the doctor worries that he is “casting a die by impulse which he might not have thrown by judgment” (154), and so exposes his tragic flaw. The “curious effect of bottling up the emotions”, which people experience in Little Hintock (179), drives Mrs Charmond into the married doctor’s arms and brings about her own demise in due course when Marty South’s “bullet met its billet at last” in the form of a lock of her hair: “tragedy had been its end” (303). But to believe in natural selection is to believe that it can ultimately be ­understood: if not by its victims, at least by those who study it. To believe in tragedy is to believe that the victim can recognize but never understand the inevitability of human suffering. Hardy’s interest in those “essential laws” of nature that Darwin revealed made “arriving anew at the point of high tragedy” almost impossible because the laws of tragedy are incomprehensible. Mrs Charmond dies offstage in utterly melodramatic circumstances, during a confrontation with a previous lover on the rebound from South America (303). Melbury walks about the neighbourhood, Hardy says, with “a tragic vision that travelled with him like an envelope” (216), like Hamlet’s “nighted colour”. In fact, he just feels guilty at encouraging his daughter to marry the wrong man. Winterborne’s old servant, Robert Creedle, provides a rural eulogy for his master, saying, “Well, I’ve knowed him from table-high; I knowed his father … and now I’ve seen the end of the family, which we can ill afford to lose, wi’ such a scanty lot of good folk in Hintock as we’ve got.” (302.) It is an affecting speech, but hardly a tragic summation—and in fact we can detect in Creedle’s words more concern for a loss of social biodiversity than tragic grief. (Compare the effect with “The rest is silence”, for example, or “we that are young,/Shall never see so much, nor live so long.”) Given her education, her love for the hero, and the extent to which her life has been stained by what her father regards as “the tragic colour of the antecedent events” (294) we might expect a more profound level of insight from Grace Melbury. But, like Tess, she ends up over Winterborne’s corpse, only “moaning in a low voice, ‘how could I—how could I!’” (291.) What Hardy calls her “timid morality” prevents a deeper response, and within some months she is tidying up his memory by observing to herself that “nothing ever had brought home to her with force as this death how little acquirements and culture weigh beside sterling personal character” (310): a remark well worthy of a Victorian young lady’s commonplace book.

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iii

So George Levine is right: “the clear connection between Hardy’s bleak vision of a competitive and indifferent natural world in The Woodlanders and Darwin’s ‘Struggle for Existence,’ does not get one far enough.”29 The connection breaks down. Darwin did not bequeathe Hardy a renewed concept of “high tragedy” based on a new understanding of “essential laws” or a new vision of “the immorality of nature” and its “eternal incomprehensibility”. Rather he taught us that nature is amoral but comprehensible. There is no implacable force of evil or “hap”—just an immense amount of contingency we have not worked out yet. It is ignorance that frightens us, not malevolence. Hardy himself persisted in a state of indecision about this connection: too timid (or perhaps too modern) a moralist to commit himself to tragedy absolutely, he was too sceptical about scientific truth entirely to abandon the tragic vision of the world. Of all inanimate things in Hardy roads are the most resonant because they embody, evoke, or dramatize both the tragic and the evolutionary forms of determinism. Manifestly roads are cultural products, built with purpose; but equally they must broadly speaking go where nature dictates. Often they have their origins in immemorial folkways; sometimes they are dramatic interventions on the landscape, as many Roman roads must have been. Whereas the road sets humanity off against the background of the earth and exposes a travelling creature as tending towards some destiny (like Oedipus), human beings are not the only animals who make roads. Sheep, goats, and rabbits do—so do ants. Considering “the old ways”, Hardy wrote that “many successive generations of ants continue to use the same track they have once taken to. I have been shown ant-roads by old men who stated that they have been familiar with them from their earliest recollections.”30 Mrs Yeobright has a vision on Egdon Heath in which the barrier between man and insect is even more ­thoroughly eroded: In front of her a colony of ants had established a thoroughfare across the way, where they toiled a never-ending and heavy-laden throng. To look down upon them was like observing a city street from the top of a tower. She remembered that this bustle of ants had been in progress for years 29

30

George Levine, “The Woodlanders and the Darwinian Grotesque”, 180, in Keith Wilson (ed.), Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 174–98. Bjork (ed.), Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, i. 34.

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at the same spot—doubtless those of the old times were the ancestors of these which walked there now.31 Thus the road is something planned, willed, and put to human purpose, but it is also a line between two points and therefore instinctive and necessary. Roads form patterns of movement between destinations, turning the isolated into the connected and establishing a web whereby culture, looked down on from high enough a tower, resembles nature. In “Roads”, Robert Louis Stevenson said that a meadow footpath sets us free: we seem to have slipped for one lawless little moment out of the iron rule of cause and effect; and so we revert at once to some of the pleasant old heresies of personification … and attribute a sort of free-will, an active and spontaneous life, to the white riband of road that lengthens out, and bends, and cunningly adapts itself to the inequalities of the land before our eyes.32 But Stevenson was too blithe; there are no “lawless little moments” in Hardy any more than there are in Darwin, and in his work no road “cunningly adapts itself” to the landscape as if it possessed volition—it goes where time, topography, and its builder tells it, subservient to Hardy’s “essential laws”, as opposed to those “framed merely by social expedients … without a basis in the heart of things”. “We can clearly see”, Darwin wrote, “how it is that all living and extinct forms can be grouped together in one great system; and how the several members of each class are connected together by the most complex and radiating lines of affinities. We shall never, probably, disentangle the inextricable web of affinities between the members of any one class—though of course those affinities are there, all the same.”33 This is in part a case of the nineteenth century writing Darwin. “George Eliot”, George Levine writes (with the fifteenth chapter of Middlemarch in mind), saw a deterministic universe as a marvelously complex unit in which all parts are intricately related to each other, where nothing is really isolable, and where past and future are both implicit in the present. … For [her],

31 Hardy, Return of the Native, 343. 32 Robert Louis Stevenson, Essays of Travel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1916), 215–16. 33 Darwin, Origin of Species, 351.

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every man’s life is at the center of a vast and complex web of causes, a good many of which exert pressure on him from the outside and come into direct conflict with his own desires and motives.34 For Hardy, too, humanity is best seen “as one great network of tissue which quivers in every part when point is shaken, like a spider’s web if touched.”35 “Hardly anything could be more isolated, or more self-contained” than the lives of Marty South and Giles Winterborne, he suggests: “yet their lonely courses formed no detached design at all, but were part of the pattern in the great web of human doings then weaving in both hemispheres, from the White Sea to Cape Horn” (Woodlanders, 24). The great web requires no consciousness among those making it up. It is a product of what Hardy would call in The Dynasts (One. VI. iii) “the controlling Immanent Will”: “a brain-like network of currents and ejections, twitching, interpenetrating, entangling, and thrusting hither and thither the human forms.” It is not a paradox, then, to describe The Woodlanders as “a reciprocal network of people in painful isolation”,36 and roads in Hardy are the inert and inanimate symbols and products of networked isolation: the “lonely figure on the broad white highway” … “common to all the world”.37 Also with Middlemarch in mind, Raymond Williams sought to preserve a distinction between the network and the web. “The network”, he argued, connects; the web, the tangle, disturbs and obscures. To discover a n ­ etwork, to feel human connection in what is essentially a knowable community, is to assert … a particular social value: a necessary ­interdependence. But to discover a web or a tangle is to see human relationships as not only involving but compromising, limiting, mutually frustrating.38 I think Hardy would have found this distinction naïve. We may think we can distinguish between the networks of human solidarity and the webs of human frustration but, like Darwin’s varieties, the one keeps blending with the other. 34

George Levine, “Determinism and Responsibility in the Works of George Eliot”, 270, pmla, 77: 3 (June, 1962), 268–79. 35 Hardy, Life of Thomas Hardy, 177. 36 John Hughes, “‘For Old Association’s Sake’: Narrative, History and Hardy’s The Woodlanders”, 57, Thomas Hardy Journal, 18: 2 (May 2002), 57–64. 37 Hardy, Mayor of Casterbridge, 373, and Pair of Blue Eyes, 260. 38 Raymond Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (London: Chatto and ­Windus, 1970), 88.

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The first chapter of The Woodlanders contains Hardy’s greatest evocation of the road as network and web, evolution and tragedy: “the forsaken coach-road running almost in a meridional line from Bristol to the south shore of England”, and lost half way in “extensive woodlands” which almost obscure it. The trees “make the wayside hedges ragged by their drip and shade”, and at one particular spot “the leaves lie so thick in autumn as to completely cover the track”. This atrophied highway does not tell a story: it embodies one, evoking as it does the long-deceased “gay charioteers” and “blistered soles” that have passed over it for centuries. “To step … from the edge of the plantation into the adjoining thoroughfare,” Hardy writes, “was to exchange by the act of a single stride the simple absence of human companionship for an incubus of the forlorn.” It is to step from nature (and evolution) into culture (and tragedy)—or would be, if Hardy demonstrated any confidence in that distinction. Certainly it is to enter the world of affect as opposed to natural indifference. The “loiterer” who steps from the Darwinian mill on to the tragic stage is barber Percomb, the ultimate mal-adapt (like “a canary in a thorn hedge”). Utterly immune to the intimations the narrator shares with the reader and “mainly puzzled about the way”, Percomb taps the road with his citified cane and, as if by magic—though it is following its route exactly as usual—help is at hand in the form of local transport: “presently a slight noise of labouring wheels, and the steady dig of a horse’s shoe-tips became audible; and there loomed in the notch of sky and plantation a carrier’s van drawn by a single horse.” Is this chance or destiny? The meridional road is a straight line. At the brow of a hill the surrounding woods and hedges transform that line into a notch picked out against the evening sky as if by the storyteller but in fact only by virtue of its route and Percomb’s position along it, below the hill at the stile he has just crossed. Five minutes earlier, five minutes later, and Percomb would remain lost, fail to see Mrs Dollery’s van and abandon his attempt to buy Marty South’s hair—and Mrs Charmond would retain Dr Fitzpiers as her lover at the other end of a totally different novel, lying in what Hardy elsewhere called “the darkness of the unfulfilled”.39 The intersection is tragically coincidental, then: it starts a sequence of events that will end in death. It is quintessentially a product of “hap” that the barber’s quest for a head of female hair should lead him here, now. Percomb may wander in the gloaming, and the carrier’s van rumble along as slowly as may be, but in fact their lines are drawn with Sophoclean exactitude, like the convergence of an iceberg with the Titanic, from a 39 Hardy, Laodicean, 304.

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tragic point of view. From an evolutionary one, it is pure chance. The quality of events lies not in themselves but in how they are interpreted. This intersection lays down the first intersection of an evolutionary and tragic web. The motions of humanity and nature may appear random and arbitrary, but looked at another way every line is direct. Bees and butterflies fly “straight down High Street” in Casterbridge, “without any apparent consciousness that they were traversing strange latitudes”, and the town itself sits on the countryside “like a chess-board on a green table-cloth”.40 Swithin St Cleeve makes his way from his astronomical tower to his grandmother’s house across the field “in a line mathematically straight”, just as Ann Avice Caro disappears from Pierston’s view “up the rigid, mathematical road” that crosses Portland Bill.41 Clym Yeobright does a good deal of walking in his unhappiness, “and the direction of his walk was always towards some point of a line between Mistover and Rainbarrow.”42 Mathematical curves compel Hardy’s attention just as straight lines do. The old maltster in Far From the Madding Crowd “seemed to approach the grave as a hyperbolic curve approaches a straight line—less directly as he got nearer, till it was doubtful if he would ever reach it at all.” At the other end of the novel Fancy Robin’s grave is exposed by the gradual extension of a “liquid parabola” of rainwater from a gargoyle on the church roof above.43 Seductive women are twice associated in his fiction with the concave-convex shapes of certain varieties of decorative moulding: Lucetta Le Sueur “flung herself on the couch”, we are told, “in the cyma-recta curve which so became her”, hoping to re-infatuate Henchard; and the lips of Eustacia Vye (that “raw material of a divinity”, wasted on Egdon Heath), when viewed from the side, “formed, with almost geometric precision, the curve so well known in the arts of design as the cima-recta, or ogee.”44 Geometrically precise lines bring us back to Mrs Dollery’s van, trundling towards barber Percomb along what is nowadays the A37 from Dorchester to Yeovil: “rather a movable attachment of the roadway than an extraneous object”, and pulled by an “old horse, whose hair was of the roughness and colour of heather, [and] whose leg-joints, shoulders, and hoofs were distorted by harness and drudgery since colthood”. Van and horse, like the road 40 Hardy, Mayor of Casterbridge, 65, 105. 41 Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower (London: Macmillan, 1964), 13, and The Well-Beloved (London: Macmillan, 1960), 109. 42 Hardy, Return of the Native, 207. 43 Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (London: Macmillan, 1975), 131, 323. 44 Hardy, Mayor of Casterbridge, 178, and Return of the Native, 76.

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they travel, have been placed by usage and old association in a murky twilight between nature and culture. After twenty years on the same route the horse knows the road “as accurately as any surveyor could have learnt it by a Dumpy level”—but also as accurately as memory and instinct allow. When the van is still the reins are attached to a hook above the driver’s head, “forming a catenary curve from the horse’s shoulders.” Such are the lines drawn by culture, from manufactured substances and with rational purposes. By contrast the only function of the “loose chain” lost somewhere near the van’s axles “was to clink as it went”—like one of those “rudimentary, atrophied, or abortive organs” Darwin speaks of in the thirteenth chapter of the Origin. Like her horse Mrs Dollery is ageless, sexless, and immune to selection. She wears “especially in windy weather, short leggings under her gown for modesty’s sake”, and a hat instead of a bonnet. But every morning before she sets out she cleans another notch in the vista that is being organized for us: the rear window of her van. When the spectator looks through that window her passengers are picked out within the frame: “a square piece of the same sky and landscape that he saw without, but intruded on by the profiles of the seated passengers; who, as they rumbled onward, their lips moving and heads nodding in animated private converse, remained in cheerful unconsciousness that their mannerisms and facial peculiarities were sharply defined to the public eye.” But who or what are we to understand is doing the picking out and in response to what “essential laws”: those of art or nature, tragedy or evolution? Is the distinction between chance and destiny beginning to erode? Does chance even exist? “The ‘catenary curve’ formed by the reins of the carrier’s van which we encounter at the opening of The Woodlanders” is not the “wholly gratuitous piece of … knowledge” as John Bayley takes it to be.45 These apparently indifferent objects and the lines they inscribe evoke a deeper pattern. On the one hand there is the ancient and immemorial “evolutionary” world of the unremarkedupon, “timeless, ageless and impersonal”,46 apathetically unconscious—Egdon Heath the world over, “untameable, Ishmaelitish”, wearing “the same antique brown dress, the natural and invariable garment of the particular formation” since the beginning of time.47 On the other hand there are those individuals picked out from “the background of the earth”—and they will suffer loss, 45

John Bayley, An Essay on Thomas Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 91–92. 46 Penelope Vigar, The Novels of Thomas Hardy: Illusion and Reality (London: Athlone, 1974), 28. 47 Hardy, Return of the Native, 6.

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death, or both. There are those inside Mrs Dollery’s van, “the commonplace majority”, able to “survey life and discuss the incidents of the day with placid smiles”, and there are the “exceptional few” who are the objects of that survey, isolated, subject to the full force of natural and sexual selection. “This place was the Little Hintock of the master-barber’s search”: a “sequestered little world” at the end of what Hardy originally called “a half-invisible little lane”, “sunk in a concave, and as it were snipped out of the woodland” like the rear window of Mrs Dollery’s van. Little Hintock is “outside the gates of the world” and vulnerable to evolutionary and tragic change; more listless than meditative, more meditative than active; a place where the dwellings produce “tall stems of smoke, which the eye of imagination could trace downward to their root on quiet hearthstones” now to be dislodged. The line between nature and culture has almost disappeared, like the forsaken coach road itself. The chimneys look like trees, and the entire place is given over to the wood, its single street buried in dead leaves, the air smelling of pomace and decaying foliage, the only sound “the hiss of fermenting cider”. The houses, some of which were once “inhabited by people of a certain social standing”, are in various stages of decline into this primordial substrate, and such is the “closelyknit interdependence of the lives therein” that the villagers have lost the sense of privacy and make no use of curtains, which allows Percomb to inspect the inhabitants house by house through their windows. One home, however, is in “an exceptionable state of radiance” against the gloom, its fire blazing so far as to illuminate the smoke emerging from the chimney: picked out and isolated against the surrounding gloom and decay. The door is ajar, “so that a riband of light fell through the opening into the dark atmosphere without”, and “every now and then a moth, decrepit from the late season, would flit for a moment across the outcoming rays and disappear again into the night.” Here is another kind of line, summoning moths to their destruction: the “streak of light” that guides Fitzpiers to Little Hintock House on the night of his accident, the “bar of fiery light … proceeding from the halfopen door of a smithy” which draws Henry Knight and Stephen Smith out of the rain and towards the climactic discovery of Elfride’s marriage,48 and the “tremulous pathway of bright moonshine … stretched over the water” which George Barnet sees at Port-Bredy the night his wife deserts him in “Two Fellow Townsmen”.49 At the other end of this line is the nineteen year-old Marty South, reduced to hardworking penury not by nature—as Hardy says, “the fingers which 48 Hardy, Pair of Blue Eyes, 427–28. 49 Thomas Hardy, Wessex Tales (London: Macmillan, 1964), 141–42.

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clasped the heavy ash haft might have skilfully guided the pencil or swept the string”—but by “a cast of the die of Destiny”: except that nature and destiny have blurred in Little Hintock. The “provisional curves of her childhood’s face” have ended in “premature finality”, but Time has awarded this “particular victim” of his a rare head of hair by way of recompense. A tragic gift—or is it the case that it is simply the gift of her parents just as her social status is: the one genetically determined, the other socially and historically so? Can we any longer confidently distinguish between the two forms of convergence and the exceptionalism they produce, and commit ourselves to one form of explanation at the expense of the other?

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The Woodlanders illustrates a highly productive problem in Hardy’s intellectual and creative position: that is, a deep uncertainty about the extent to which laws like natural selection could be distinguished from the law of tragic f­atality— how the “essential laws” of Nature could be distinguished from “those laws framed merely as social expedients by humanity, without a basis in the heart of things”. Where did the heart of things lie? This work of art is constructed not on one but two “frameworks of thought” as Collingwood calls them, therefore: frameworks which, rationally speaking, should have cancelled each other out, as tragedy is perfectly irrational and evolution perfectly rational (though both are opaque, one essentially, the other for practical purposes). The compromise Hardy hammered out may have put tragedy beyond him, because anagnorisis in the isolated protagonist is inconsistent with the evolutionary machine. But that compromise certainly allowed tragic elements to live on in his fiction— where sparagmos, in particular, remains a live and terrible force, for Henchard, Tess, Jude, and others. As epitomes of chance and determinism roads provided a key imaginative insight and stage for him, from which he could again and again launch dramatizations of this very problem in human understanding.

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Humanism and After: Ibsen’s Little Eyolf Readers and audiences have experienced difficulties with Little Eyolf from the time of its publication, particularly as regards what Frode Helland calls the “strange conversion”1 arrived at by or produced in its chief protagonists, Rita and Alfred Allmers, at the conclusion of the play. “Is there at the end a change for the better between the characters, a possible, affectionate, reconciliation”, as Laura Caretti puts it; “Or is there simply an illusory hope for the future, all the more dramatic for being self-deceptive?”2 Henry James found the first two acts of the drama “indeed immense—indeed and indeed”, only to conclude that “no harm can be done equal to the harm done to the play by its own most disappointing third act…. It seems to me a singular and almost inexplicable drop…. The worst of it is that it goes back, as it were, on what precedes, and gives a meagerness to that too—makes it less interesting and less significant….”3 For Muriel Bradbrook, too, “the last act, which solves all the problems, is probably the least successful”: “psychologically accurate”, possibly, but “not dramatically convincing”.4 Even John Northam, who calls Little Eyolf “an astonishing play”, concedes that it presents “an action whose real source is never defined.”5 “A great deal of the criticism of this play”, in Barry Jacobs’ view, therefore, “is either disparaging or apologetic.”6 Whatever problems critics have had with the third act of Ibsen’s play, few have felt the need to be disparaging or apologetic about its first: an act worthy of comparison with the first scene of King Lear in terms of its revelation of the family dynamic, and which concludes with the death of the eponymous protagonist—if Eyolf can be said to be a protagonist. For Arnold Weinstein that death is quintessentially dramatic. It “changes everything, catalyzes 1 Frode Helland, Melankoliens Spill: En Studie i Henrik Ibsens Siste Dramaer (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 2000), 243: “merkelig omvendelse”. 2 Laura Caretti, “Questioning the Ending of Little Eyolf ”, 70, Studia Universitatis Babeş-Bolyai: Philologia, 51 (2006), 70–78. 3 Michael Meyer, Henrik Ibsen: The Top of a Cold Mountain, 1883–1906 (London: Hart-Davis, 1971), 247. 4 Muriel Bradbrook, Ibsen the Norwegian: A Revaluation, 2nd edn (London: Chatto and Windus, 1966), 134, 136. 5 John Northam, Ibsen: A Critical Study (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 216. 6 Barry Jacobs, “Ibsen’s Little Eyolf: Family Tragedy and Human Responsibility”, 614, Modern Drama, 27: 4 (1984), 604–15.

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­everything”; “Remove Eyolf from the scene, and the chairs begin to move”.7 But we are given to understand from the very opening of the play—as we so frequently are in Ibsen’s realist dramas—that affairs have been catalyzing for some time before the play opens, never mind after Eyolf’s death by drowning. The musical chairs have been moving for the six weeks during which the freelance intellectual Alfred Allmers has been away from home for a holiday in the mountains; for the six or eight years since his sleeping infant son fell off a table and was crippled as a result, while his parents were making love in a room nearby; and for the ten years of Allmers’ marriage that has involved the repression of a mysteriously intense relationship with his younger half-sister, Asta, even as that marriage lifted the pair of siblings out of genteel poverty and gave him the intellectual opportunities he now enjoys. In that atmosphere of seething dread that Ibsen conjures up uniquely well, these realities are uncovered and with them the suite of co-dependencies the individuals concerned have used to keep them at bay. The family’s core dependency, I want to argue—the livsløgnen or “life’slie” that has them in its grip—is a key concern of Ibsen’s: the role of rationalism, humanism, and idealism in human affairs in general and personal life in particular. (By “idealism” here I mean the general sense of the term, not the philosophical one: the notion that mankind is improvable, if not perfectible, rather than the anti-empiricist philosophical position with which Collingwood, among others, is associated.) That particular tri-partite combination— of monumental influence in intellectual modernity and still with us today—is the discursive paradigm that Ibsen is working with in Little Eyolf, just as Byron contrasted Stoicism and Christianity in Don Juan, as James Montgomery contrived to envisage (or envision) the survival of the fittest in Pelican Island despite his Evangelicalism, and as Hardy kept tragedy and evolution alike in harness in The Woodlanders. As we have seen, sometimes one such paradigm gives place to another; sometimes one such paradigm is generated from within another that seems hostile to it; sometimes two apparently contradictory frames of mind or bodies of thought can creatively co-exist without what Keats calls that “irritable reaching after fact and reason” that philosophers feel and respond to with such particular force. Ibsen’s case presents a further, fourth potential variation: a frame of mind or body of thought that is perforated, even eviscerated, by the dramatic and moral process the author undertakes, but which reveals no other serviceable paradigm in its wake or beyond it. What if an imaginative author demolishes a framework of thought and finds n ­ othing 7 Arnold Weinstein. “Metamorphosis in Ibsen’s Little Eyolf ”, 303, 302, Scandinavian Studies, 62: 3 (1990), 293–318.

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with which to replace it? What if the artist “unconcealed what is, in our instrumental and scientific ways of dealing with the world, hidden from us”, as Roger Scruton put it in Chapter 1, and found nothing beyond the revelation but emptiness? What the third act of Little Eyolf suffers from, or draws strength from, is a certain powerful indecisiveness about the modern dependency on rationalism, humanism, and idealism, mixed, mingled, and mangled as they are: an evil, perhaps, but one the abandonment of which might leave Ibsen’s people with nothing to believe in at all. To follow the process and to come to that point the reader must basically move through the play alongside its theatrical audience, as the various crutches of secular modernity are ripped away from their hapless dependents.

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The play opens on a key element of what Errol Durbach himself calls “the neoreligion of secular humanism”: “the ideal home of romance”.8 A “handsome and expensively appointed garden room, full of furniture, flowers and plants” leads out to a verandah overlooking the fjord and the “wooded mountain ranges in the distance”. The room is furnished with “loose cushions and rugs” illuminated by warm early morning sunlight, presided over by a “handsome, blonde, Junoesque woman of about 30”, wearing a “light-coloured house-coat”.9 This comfortable and prosperous home, supervised by a domestic goddess occupied in unpacking her husband’s suitcase the morning after his unexpectedly early return from vacation, is set before the audience as a bourgeois ideal, opulent, tasteful, and relaxed: a modern home for a modern family, with no apparent need for old-fashioned crutches and opiates like faith or tradition. But this is by no means the “innocuous family gathering” Arnold Weinstein describes.10 Rita withholds the news of Alfred’s return from her sister-in-law on Asta’s entrance, and prefers instead to make knowing and loaded remarks about the latter’s admirer, the road-builder Borghejm, until Asta notices her brother’s valise. “Don’t you recognize it?” Rita asks; “would you believe” he has come home, she goes on; isn’t his unexpected arrival “just like him”? These 8

9 10

Errol Durbach, “Ibsen the Romantic”: Analogues of Paradise in the Later Plays (London: Macmillan, 1982), 99; George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism: Now Completed to the Death of Ibsen (London: Constable, 1913), 130. Henrik Ibsen, Little Eyolf, trans. Michael Meyer (London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1961), 21; cited in parenthesis below. Weinstein, “Metamorphosis in Ibsen’s Little Eyolf ”, 296.

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r­ emarks are insidiously possessive and Asta responds in kind. It is “wonderful to have him home again”, Rita says. “I know how you feel”, Asta replies—­ reminding her sister-in-law that she, too, has awaited her brother in days gone by (22). It becomes clear that although Alfred’s walking tour was apparently taken on medical grounds (related to depression it seems; 22) Rita resented his absence wholeheartedly (“Alfred has never been away from me before. Not even for a day. In all these ten years we’ve been—”), just as Asta (interrupting her) supported it (“that’s why I thought it was time he got away this year. He ought to have gone walking in the mountains every summer.”). (23.) This is a bitter and futile competition over who knows Alfred best and who has his interests most at heart. Potentially catalytic rivalries like these are not unheard of between wives and sisters-in-law. But deeper and darker movements of the chairs have taken place more recently. Asta has come to call, tardily and unusually early, on impulse: “I felt so restless. I felt I had to come out and see Eyolf today” (21). In fact the Allmers’ son has nothing to do with it. In Alfred’s absence Asta has read her mother’s correspondence and discovered that she is not his half-sister at all: her father is not Alfred’s, as they both previously believed, and she is the product of adultery, not of a second marriage. She brings the written evidence in an over-sized and symbolically locked attaché case or portfolio—to which, furthermore, she has not brought the key (31). (Her locked case is in poetic contrast to Alfred’s open one: she is a taciturn introvert just as he is a voluble extravert.) Brooding on this catastrophe for weeks, she has felt unable to call on the woman who is no longer her sister-in-law and the boy who is no longer her nephew. Eventually she could stand her state of suspense no longer and sought to rid herself of the shameful documents; but as she has no expectation that Alfred will be at home (and dreads any accidental discovery in the mean time) she brings them locked up, perhaps with the intention of delivering the key to him on his return, perhaps with the hope that the case will never be opened and life will continue as normal, or that the responsibility for the secret will at least devolve to him in either event. When she sees his suitcase she invents another explanation for her impulse: that she instinctively knew he was coming home—“So that was it. That was what brought me here.” (22.) In fact she is stunned by the coincidence. Everything in her life has melted into air, including her putative engagement to Borghejm, who will hardly wish to marry an illegitimate woman in socially conservative Norway. The most important relationship of her life has retrospectively been transformed, from something safely consanguineous to something dreadfully obscure. All she dares do later in the first act is advert to something in the portfolio needing discussion on “one quiet evening” (31), which eventuality Alfred airily dismisses—Asta’s

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mother is not his, after all, though he ignorantly acknowledges in Act Two (53) that his father treated both mother and daughter unkindly, for reasons the audience now understands. Rita Allmers, too, has been in catalytic transition, stewing over her husband’s desertion of her: something so devastating she is unable to hide it even from her sister-in-law. “Oh, but Asta, how I’ve missed Alfred!”, she wails forlornly: “How empty it’s been, how desolate! Just as though someone had died here.” (23.) That the couple has not spent a day apart in ten years is odd enough; but neither (we can infer) have they been sexual partners since the day Eyolf was crippled due to their inadvertence. Thus Rita has come to hate her son for the loss of her husband—in fact, to wish her son dead—and hate Asta in her role of surrogate mother. (For the ten minutes or so that Eyolf and Rita are on stage together they say not a word to each other. “Aunt” and “father” are constantly on his lips but he says “mother” only once, and not to her. She has abdicated her role as a mother, just as Allmers had abdicated his as a husband.) Rita resented Alfred’s walking holiday mightily but also hoped that he would return from it to be hers once more. On the night of his arrival she changed into a nightgown, let down her hair, shaded the lights, and put out a bottle of champagne. All her husband did in response was enquire after Eyolf’s digestion and fall asleep. “‘The champagne stood there, but who raised his glass?’”, Rita quotes from a poet. “I left it—untouched”, Alfred replies (“in a hard voice”; 42). If a husband stonily refuses to sleep with his thirty year-old and Junoesque wife after a six-weeks’ separation from her and a welcome of this kind, we can assume he does not sleep with her at all. (This is a case of disaffection rather than impotence: later Alfred will say that their love “is already burned out in one of us”, meaning him; 61.) At the opening of the play, Rita tells Asta how “transformed” her husband appears to be, and yet how dog-tired he was after all his hiking (22). She clings to her dream of marital resumption but also finds excuses for its failure to come to pass. Allmers has also been in motion, but as he is one of Ibsen’s myopically selfcentred intellectuals—not as idiotic as Georg Tesman, but not far off—his transformation is less profound. Ten years ago he was a schoolmaster, living in single blessedness with his devoted half-sister. Then the twenty year-old and “consumingly beautiful” Rita lured him despite his initial fear of her (his word: skraek) with her loveliness but also with her wealth—her “gold and green forests” as the couple calls it (61). Alfred admits that he had Asta to think of, too (62); but the marriage also allowed him to become an intellectual, hard at work on a quintessentially humanist philosophical study, The Responsibility of Man, which Asta regards as the consummation of his existence much as Thea Elvsted worships Eilert Løvborg as a literatus in Hedda Gabler. Asta’s expectation

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was that the magnum opus would be completed during his holiday but Allmers returns announcing not only that he wrote nothing while he was away (much to Rita’s satisfaction, as the book is another rival for his attention), but that he has decided to abandon it completely. “In me something happened”, he says: “A small transformation.” “Oh God!” Rita gasps, in relief, expectation, and excitement (32), assuming the transformation involves her. But it is not his marriage Alfred intends to recommit himself to; it is Eyolf, over whose life he now wishes to exercise true responsibility, in action, by teaching the child to come to terms with his disability and fulfil the life he may yet lead—achieving, indeed, what his father has failed to carry out. Rita is taken from exaltation to collapse as one rival for her affection is replaced by another, even more consuming, for whom she herself feels nothing. Asta, Rita, and Alfred are Ibsen’s three moving chairs, therefore, set in relief by two egregiously normal human beings. Eyolf himself is like any other boy. He likes wearing an army suit, thinks his father is a hero (“What you write is important”), and is wholeheartedly in denial of his injury (“I think it would be nice if I too could climb mountains”; 25). It is clear he has no knowledge of the storms gathering around him and feels deeply about his disability, as Asta insists he does (34), only in the sense of firmly putting it to one side and dreaming of giving the local boys down by the fjord an aristocratic thrashing. Borghejm is another such everyday citizen. He reacts with delight on seeing Alfred unexpectedly and celebrates his vocation in naively egoistic terms: “Extraordinary obstacles to overcome.… Oh, it’s a marvellous life to be a maker of new roads.” (37.) Muriel Bradbrook reminds us that road building is an eminent profession in rugged Norway, endowed “with the kind of qualities that in our literature are associated with the Empire Builders of Kipling”,11 which more or less says it all. Borghejm plays the surrogate father to Eyolf as Asta plays the surrogate mother. He has given the boy a bow and arrow, and Eyolf plans that he shall teach him to swim. The person who now comes knocking at the door will not teach Eyolf to swim, however; she will drown him like a rat. The Rat Wife (Rottejomfruen) has long been understood as a prodigious invention on Ibsen’s part: “an almost ­impressionistic, Munch-like amalgam of woman as goddess and crone”, as ­Errol Durbach describes her.12 “Begging your pardon”, she asks on her entrance, “have your honours any troublesome thing that gnaws here in this house?” (27.) Certainly not, Alfred and Rita reply, with crushing irony. The troublesome thing gnawing away at their existence is the very notion of “the responsibility 11 Bradbrook, Ibsen the Norwegian, 134. 12 Durbach, “Ibsen the Romantic”, 110.

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of man” that the Allmers use to keep true responsibility at bay, swathed as that notion is with humanist good intentions and emotional dishonesty. The Rat Wife as “radically alien element”13 produces a total shift in tone and style as the bourgeois, emotional, and personal idiom of the play’s opening engagements gives way to something atavistic, autochthonous, and mystical. The Rat Wife has been out locally at her trade, she says, helping an island community overrun with the rodents: Rat Wife: The people there sent for me. They didn’t want to. But they had no choice. They had to bury their teeth in the sour apple[sure æble]. (Looks at Eyolf and nods) Sour apple, little master. Sour apple. Eyolf: (involuntarily) Why did they have to— Rat Wife: Have to what, little master? Eyolf: Bury their teeth in the sour apple. Rat Wife: Why, because they couldn’t get anything to fill their bellies with. Because of the rats and all the hungry little baby rats, you understand, young master. (28) Hers is a delectably sinister apparition, catalyzing the family dynamic in almost every direction. Her familiar, a black pug in a purse, lures and terrifies Eyolf just as Rita did Alfred: “I think he has—the most horrible face I have ever seen…. And at the same time he’s beautiful. Beautiful.” (29.) But the Rat Wife remembers a time when she did not require the dog’s assistance in drawing creatures out to the fjord to drown. “What did you lure?” Eyolf asks. “Men. One specially”, she replies (30), to make the association complete between Rita’s and her own capacity to lure a male to his death. But as well as furthering and exposing the family drama the Rat Wife’s vocation helps define the source of the action that Henry James and John Northam felt was unclear, particularly where the play’s conclusion is concerned. That is, she spells out in allegorical terms the superstitious and ravenous helplessness of modern people, who are forced to swallow a metaphorical sour apple now that every other source of moral and social sustenance has been nibbled away by the “rats” of advanced humanist thought: the apple that Alfred and Rita (like Adam and Eve, original source of all the world’s livsløgner) will necessarily bury their teeth in after their son’s death. With the Rat Wife’s departure Eyolf hobbles away to play by the shore, never to be seen again, and Rita withdraws to the verandah for a breath of air. When she re-enters Alfred theatrically delivers to his adoring womenfolk his vision 13 Helland, Melankoliens Spill, 253–4: “radikalt fremmedelement”.

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of a life of dedication to Eyolf. “I shall fulfil my ideal of human responsibility”, he smugly concludes, “through my own life”—a speech that Rita receives with withering irony: “Do you really believe you will be able to stay faithful to such high ideals in this house?” (35.) Frode Helland comments mordantly: “He will suck meaning into his life through his son, his conversion being a cannibalistic project to nourish himself on Eyolf.”14 Thus the theme of feeding and being fed upon extends itself, as a response to the empty cravings of modern existence. Borghejm, a person in whom lofty resolutions have become completely subsumed with practical achievement, now enters for the first time, and draws the reluctant Asta to the garden, with Rita’s encouragement: Borgheim: Miss Allmers, shall we two take a little stroll together? As usual? Asta (quickly): No. No, thank you. Not now. Not today. Borgheim: Ah, please! Just for a few minutes. I’ve so many things I want to say to you before I go. Rita: Something else you mustn’t talk about yet, perhaps? Borgheim: I—er— Rita: Well, things that cannot be talked about may sometimes be whispered. (37) This is a crucial moment in the game of musical chairs. Asta has come to the house this morning with a guilty secret tearing at her heart, which has changed her position vis-à-vis Borghejm absolutely. But Rita’s insinuation about romantic whisperings not only hovers over their abortive courtship. It also anticipates a crucial revelation about Asta’s sororial relation to Alfred delivered near the end of Act Two, which Rita says was delivered to her “in a quiet moment” (62) between the couple. That normal desire for private speech between lovers is something Rita envies insatiably, being deprived of it herself. Left alone with Allmers, Rita’s possessive cruelty emerges almost immediately—and no whispering is involved. An “insatiate harpy” is how Muriel Bradbrook describes her:15 Rita: No, I don’t want to be reasonable! I only want you! Nothing else in all the world! (Throws herself again around his neck) I want you, you, you! Allmers: Let me go! You’re strangling me! 14 Helland, Melankoliens Spill, 266: “Han vil suge mening til sitt egt liv gjennom sønnen, omvendelsen utgjør et kannibalistisk prosjekt om å ernære seg av Eyolf.” 15 Bradbrook, Ibsen the Norwegian, 137.

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Rita: (releases him) I wish I could! (She looks at him with flashing eyes) Oh, if only you knew how I have hated you—(39) Rita is the very obverse of reason: a person, indeed, who can only understand affection in terms of ruthlessness (38). “She expresses hatred because she loves Alfred”, John Northam comments: “she is physically demanding because she is physically neglected; she threatens infidelity because she wants her husband’s attention; she resents Asta and Eyolf because they stand between Alfred and herself.”16 Allmers’ nauseating display of self-infatuated selflessness has roused a diabolically involuted network of sexual and emotional jealousies in her, the effect of which is to drive Allmers only deeper into what she calls his “sickening, stale phrases” about their marriage, their parenthood, and his pretentious offer of his “soul”: I’m not interested in your soul! I want you—all of you—to myself—the way it used to be in those first, few, unforgettable years—(Viciously) I will never let myself be fobbed off with the scraps of love. (41) The most insulting and infuriating of all Allmers’ “bogus ideals deeply rooted in his guilt”17 is his oft-stated belief that “people change with the years” (42), his “law of change” (forvandlingens lov), which is not a law at all, no matter how many times he invokes it, but a platitude: not a means of coming to terms with life, but rather of evading it.18 “I can’t change,” Rita says: “I am what I am”, and were Allmers ever to divide himself between her and anyone else, she would have her revenge on him—a revenge that, just now, she can project only in a threatening but childish act of infidelity, with Borghejm of all people (42–3). Like Hedda Gabler Rita exults in taking someone from somebody else; is that not what Eyolf has done to her? If the child has ruined her life does he have a right to one himself? “Oh, I am almost tempted to wish that—oh, well—!” (43.) The checkmated lovers return, “disturbed, but controlled”, and shouts and screams are heard from the shore. “Where is Eyolf”, Rita cries out in alarm but 16 Northam, Ibsen, 194. 17 Durbach, “Ibsen the Romantic”, 119. 18 Some readers of the play regard Allmers’ law uncritically, as he does: “In Little Eyolf…the ‘law of change’ stands for the real conditions of human life, the reality the characters refuse to acknowledge.” (Toril Moi, “Introduction”, xix, in Henrik Ibsen, The Master Builder and Other Plays, ed. Tore Rem (London: Penguin, 2014), i–xxviii.) But Allmers knows next to nothing about the real conditions of human life or its responsibilities; that is Ibsen’s point. So his “law” is only an intellectual’s fancy.

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also surely in guilt: “Don’t let it be him!” (44.) But the evil eye she thought Eyolf had cast on her—and on Asta and Borghejm, too—has lured him to the end of the jetty and his death just as she was tempted to wish.

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The first act of Little Eyolf contrasts Alfred’s addiction to moral abstractions such as the forvandlingens lov with change happening in concrete cases around him: Asta and Rita in their relations to him, Borghejm in his relation to Asta, and Eyolf himself in sudden death. The second rotates around Asta’s grand revelation, now intensified by Eyolf’s drowning. Her illegitimacy cannot help but prey on her mind even after Eyolf’s demise, and even as Allmers blunderingly notes at the beginning of Act Two how eligible and loyal Borghejm is (48). Asta agrees, but understandably enough does not want to talk about her inability to commit to him despite his virtues. Errol Durbach believes that now she is freed of a sibling relation to Allmers an inhibition is removed and she only awaits “an appropriate moment to declare herself”.19 This is going too far; but Barry Jacobs is surely right to argue that “Asta has apparently never stopped being in love with Alfred, and this repressed love has prevented her from falling deeply in love with anybody else.”20 The relation of that repressed love to the entire situation, dramatic and intellectual, is what we now learn. First we discover that as a teenager Asta would dress up in Allmers’ cast-off clothing and masquerade as his younger brother to please him—albeit in private, at home. “Do you remember the blue blouse?” she asks, whether provocatively or not it is impossible to tell, “And the knee breeches?” Alfred’s eyes “linger on her” in response (50). “Asta’s male disguise seems at once an avoidance and an indulgence of sexual desire”, as Michael Goldman suggests.21 Is turning one’s teenage sister into a boy and a brother an expression or a repression of sexual attraction to her? Is it a case of latent homosexuality, come to that, or incestuous transgression, or simple narcissism? Is that attraction retrospectively legitimated now that she knows they are unrelated and the incest taboo is removed? It was James’ view that Ibsen’s major dramatic error in Little Eyolf lay in understating Alfred’s reaction to Asta’s revelation. But we are shown that the new facts of the case make 19 Durbach, “Ibsen the Romantic”, 121. 20 Jacobs, “Ibsen’s Little Eyolf ”, 609. 21 Michael Goldman, Ibsen: The Dramaturgy of Fear (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 99.

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no difference to him: they have loved each other as siblings and so far as he is concerned nothing can change what has passed between them, forvandlingens lov notwithstanding. His insensitivity relates to the difference Asta’s discovery makes to her as a relative of his and as a young woman of illegitimate birth, whose bastardy floods everything in her life with sexual shame. In all likelihood there was nothing sinister about her cross-dressing, but it appears so in retrospect and Alfred says nothing to assure her that the ­circumstances of her birth are not her fault. For all his cant about responsibility he has no sympathy for others at all—or the sympathy only a solipsist can extend. (The case is strikingly similar to that of his fellow-humanist, Gregers Werle in The Wild Duck, who gains a half-sister as Alfred loses one but who never sees Hedvig as anything other than a tool for him to employ in furthering Hjalmar Ekdal’s redemption.) Asta’s cross-dressing is one thing. The audience now learns that when she “walked around” in this way at home (50) Allmers called her Eyolf. So the surrogate brother and the lost son are related at another level and in another way. Little Eyolf is gone and Big Eyolf carries with her in that locked case the news that the pseudo-brother in a blue blouse safely on the other side of the incest taboo is gone, too; or present in a wholly transfigured way. There is no son or brother any more, and the sexual cat is well and truly out of the little black bag. “What is so ‘wrong’ about her”, James Kerans astutely observes, “is that she is sexually eligible for Allmers: as a girl she is not his brother, as illegitimate she is not his sister.” Accordingly, “the Eyolf in her—the young-brotherly, ‘constant’ companion—has been killed” and a grown woman has taken the changeling’s place.22 Asta assumes that her performance as a cross-dresser and her male nickname has remained their secret, locked up like the portfolio. “Alfred, you haven’t said anything about this to Rita?” she asks. Alfred’s reply is typically equivocal. “I believe I mentioned it to her once, yes.… You know how it is. One tells one’s wife everything—practically everything.” (50.) A wife’s reaction to an explanation of this kind from her husband as to his choice of their son’s name can only be imagined; but there is more. As we have seen, towards the end of the act Rita reveals that the “quiet moment” in which Alfred whispered his confession took place during their sexual tryst, at the very moment Eyolf fell from the table and was crippled. “Do you remember that moment, Alfred?” (62.) Kerans and Weinstein argue that Eyolf’s magic name was uttered at the 22

James E. Kerans, “Kindermord and Will in Little Eyolf ”, 196, in T. Bogard and W.I. Oliver (eds.), Modern Drama: Essays in Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), 192–208.

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moment of sexual climax,23 but that seems unnecessarily melodramatic for Ibsen’s purpose. Recollecting Rita’s hint in to Borghejm in Act One that “things that cannot be talked about may sometimes be whispered” some kind of “tribute in the afterglow” seems more likely.24 “At last he seemed willing to kill off his fictional brother and become Rita’s entirely,” as Barry Jacobs writes, “but at that very moment the real Eyolf suffered his crippling fall.”25 Asta will never learn the sexual circumstances surrounding her brother’s betrayal of her and its uncanny coincidence with the parental neglect of her little counterpart and surrogate, but those circumstances explain the collapse of the Allmers’ marriage and the withering sense of guilt that afflicts them both, causing them to bite down on the sour apple of humanist “progressive” disillusion. At the catastrophic moment of sexual convergence both Eyolfs were betrayed and destroyed, and if the Rat Wife comes to punish the parents for their neglect of their son then Asta and her portfolio come to reprove Alfred for his incestuous hankerings after her. Soon after Rita’s revelation about the naming of Eyolf Asta finally spells out the contents of her black bag, telling Alfred to read the correspondence when she is gone (64)—though he cannot as she has not brought the key. She began to stage-manage a revelation during their first discussion in the act, brought to the point by Allmers’ blundering remarks on her lack of resemblance to his father (52), but she held off, telling him to let the dead rest in peace and to return to his wife. It is Allmers’ decision that his marriage is over and that he and Asta can and should resume their old life together that finally drives her to make her confession, to nip that little fantasy in the bud. Rita’s vicious reminiscence of the naming of Eyolf is certainly characteristic of an insatiate harpy. If she cannot bind herself and her husband together through love, she will do it with guilt—like Milton’s fallen Eve. (“If I am guilty, so are you!”; 58.) The memory comes at the end of a conversation where they scatter blame in more or less every direction. Neither ever loved the boy. Rita couldn’t share love with anyone, as she admits, and Allmers’ grand gesture of authorial abdication had nothing to do with love for him either. He gave up his work “because you were eaten up with self-distrust”, she says (continuing the metaphorical trail of “gnawing” laid down by the Rat Wife): “You had begun to doubt whether you had any great calling to live for after all.” He predictably trots out the forvandlingens lov and she urges him to abandon it as an evasion: “Look into yourself.… And think of all that you have buried there, and would 23

Kerans, “Kindermord and Will in Little Eyolf ”, 104; Weinstein, “Metamorphosis in Ibsen’s Little Eyolf ”, 308. 24 Goldman, Ibsen: The Dramaturgy of Fear, 98. 25 Jacobs, “Ibsen’s Little Eyolf ”, 607.

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like to forget.” (57.) That Alfred can never do, even at Asta’s prompting, and the only thing that the couple can agree holds them together is shared complicity in the sexual act that day: “And what we call our loss, our grief, is merely the gnawing of our consciences. Nothing more.” (59.) But it remains to be asked: what is “the gnawing of conscience”? Whence does it come? What idea of “conscience” are these two unhappy people entertaining, given their general intellectual predisposition? What would the author of On Human Responsibility say? Not much, it seems, despite the pages of foolscap he has covered. “There must be some meaning in it”, he tells Asta at the beginning of the act: “Life, creation, providence—have they no meaning, no purpose at all?” (47.) We would call this a genuine commitment (if only to “commitment”) were Allmers someone with a real grasp of or interest in human responsibility. William Archer was of the view that Alfred’s “mood is one of bitter resentment against some unknown, malevolent Power that has wantonly done this to him.”26 But that power is only an abstraction. In fact Allmers is a combination of Gregers Werle on the one hand, with his “claim of the ideal” (ideal fordring), and Hjalmar Ekdal on the other, with his clamorous wish for a “just power ruling this world” (retfærdig verdensstyrelse), as laid out for inspection in The Wild Duck. An emotionally and intellectually empty vessel like Hedda’s husband, Alfred resorts to God, if only in a dream of the previous night in which Eyolf had come back to life. “Oh, Rita, how I praised and thanked—(Stops himself)”. “Whom?” Rita immediately responds: “The One in Whom you do not believe?” “You should not have sowed the seeds of doubt in me” during their marriage, she goes on; what Allmers calls the “empty illusions” of religious faith would at least have left her “somewhere for comfort”. “Now I have nowhere.” (59.) Allmers’ response is bitterly uncharitable: if she regrets that evolution in her why not rescind it and “leap the gulf” by suicide to join their son in the afterlife? (59.) (Of course returning to religious faith would of itself make suicide impossible: Allmers’ proposal is absurd.) Their shared incapacity to take that gamble is something they assure themselves is a genuinely existential decision by trying to convert it into a humanist ethical principle: “This is where we belong. Here on earth. Living.” (60.) Like the law of change this recognition commits the pair of them to nothing, and certainly not to anything like work and happiness. But it is enough to set them both off around a set of recuperative vistas to forget their guilt (what Alfred later once again refers to as “the gnawing of our consciences”; 72): not travel, granted, but “throwing ourselves into some activity” in Rita’s view, or a return to authorship 26

Thomas Postlewait, Prophet of the New Drama: William Archer and the Ibsen Campaign (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1986), 125.

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in Alfred’s (60). This last pipe-dream is enough to re-release his wife’s inner harpy and the cycle of blame brings them back to Eyolf’s accident, his name, and the retribution (62) they feel they each deserve—itself a form of evasion. Where would retribution come from, after all? Who can be said to intend and deliver it? Someone in Whom you do not actually believe? The invisible source of Human Responsibility? In his desperation Allmers turns to Asta with the idea of resuming the “one long ecstasy of dedication” that was their life together (63): a prospect that Asta annihilates with her mother’s letters. When Allmers wriggles around even this by claiming that their earlier life together “will always remain sacred” (64) it only remains to her to throw his law of change back in his teeth, and hoist him on his own petard.

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“The worst of it is that it goes back, as it were, on what precedes, and gives a meagerness to that too—makes it less interesting and less significant.” So James said of Act Three of Little Eyolf. Some things certainly are true of the play’s conclusion: the great dramatic revelations are over and Rita in particular, the erstwhile insatiate harpy, re-enters as an apparently crestfallen depressive. “It is late on a summer evening; the sky is clear. Dusk is falling” (66), we do not know how many days later, but it cannot be long after Eyolf’s death, if Borghejm has been asked to hoist a flag to half-mast as a gesture of mourning. He and Asta meet; both are leaving, in separate directions: he to his new road by train, she back to town by the steamer. Borghejm continues to be the straightforward if bluffly patriarchal individual he has been throughout (“be sensible for once”). He cannot help trampling over issues of which he is perfectly ignorant, urging her to imagine marital happiness by asking her to imagine that Alfred hadn’t been her brother during their happy years together. “Then this—this thing happened which altered everything for you—”. “What do you mean?” Asta asks, “starting”. “The death of his child”, Borghejm replies: “What did you think I meant?”—all unaware that a child, a sister, and a brother in her has been snatched away from her brother by her mother’s sexual misdemeanour. (69.) Thus the lover only reminds her how impossible any future relationship would be, with its locked portfolio of family secrets and sexual shame. “Would you be content with only part of me?” she asks (70), knowing what the reply must surely be from a man as conventional as him. Her decision to change her mind about Borghejm is the most explicitly dramatic moment in the third act. In their isolation and loneliness Rita and Alfred plead with her to stay: in effect to become a surrogate Little Eyolf to Rita and a

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surrogate Big Eyolf to Allmers: “as you used to be”, Rita says. It is a desperately ambiguous moment: Allmers (controlling his emotion): Stay—and share our life, Asta. With Rita. With me. Your—brother. (72) No wonder Asta withdraws her hand and impulsively invites Borghejm to join her, not on the train going in his direction, but on the steamer back to town in hers—presumably to get married. Now the significance of Borghejm’s profession reveals itself. He may be one of Kipling’s empire builders but he is also a man whose work takes him great distances in remote country, more or less by definition (as Rita points out: 38–9); if there is a man with whom Asta can bury her secret and escape her past it is him. “What is this, Asta? Are you running away?” “Yes, Alfred, I am.… From you—and from myself.” (72.) The younger couple’s departure leaves husband and wife utterly alone and at cross purposes in an environment where the ideal home has lost every atom of its romance. Rita is lost in superstitious vagaries about eyes staring out of the darkness in admonishment and retribution, and Alfred is lost in rationalist rejection of such inventions: neither the superstition nor the rationalism even sounds real, let alone adequate. The eyes she sees are simply the lights on the steamer, the tolling sound she hears is merely its departure bell, but spelling these things out to her as Allmers does is uselessly unsympathetic. Rita is prepared to admit that sufficient change has taken place in her to usher in “another way of living” (74) and even reconcile her to the dreaded book, but only “So that I may keep you here. Near me.” (75.) That sinister proposal reminds Allmers of both the mountain holiday-cum-sabbatical on which he abandoned the project and of Rita’s possessiveness, and he now produces another instalment from his vacation-narrative: a near-death experience by exposure that, he claims, lay behind his decision to return home and undertake Eyolf’s education anew. “There is no logical connection”, as John Northam points out, “between his experience and his decision”,27 but then Allmers has played fast and loose with logical connections ever since Act Two, seeing forces of retribution hither and yon, and even suggesting that the Rat Wife must be the agent of it (“She dragged him down into the deep. I’m sure of it”; 48) while comforting himself with the notion that “perhaps it’s all haphazard” (47). Both are ultimately passive positions. The mountain story remains another potentially significant piece of jetsam in an evacuating charade. Rita certainly does 27 Northam, Ibsen, 210.

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not ­believe it explains anything and is convinced that he will leave her just the same. Once again their bickering is broken into by yells from the shoreline where the local villagers are behaving badly, “drunk, of course”. “Someone’s beating his children”, Alfred priggishly observes, in a set of “old shacks” he believes Rita should waste no time in demolishing “when I am gone” (77–8). (The vacuousness of the On Human Responsibility project could hardly be made more plain.) What follows is the climactic piece of dialogue: Allmers: At least it will give you something to occupy yourself with. And you’ll need that. Rita (with decision): You’re right. I shall need something. But can you guess what am I going to do? When you are gone. Allmers: Well? Tell me. Rita: The moment you leave me I shall go down there and bring all those poor, neglected children up to this house. Allmers: What do you want them here for? Rita: I want to make them mine. Allmers: You! Rita: Yes. From the day you leave they shall all live here. As if they were mine. Allmers: In our little Eyolf’s place? Rita: Yes. They shall live in Eyolf’s room—look at his books—play with his toys. (78) If Rita really intends to make life less hard for the local poor, locked out of “gold and green forests” that they possess, Alfred remarks, “Eyolf will not have been born in vain” (79). “Will you let me stay with you, Rita?” he asks, with the stated aim of helping in this makeshift philanthropical project. Rita’s sudden resolution and the couple’s apparent commitment to the neighbourhood children as an act of social charity is the major issue concerning Ibsen’s intention at the play’s conclusion. The sincerity of that instinct, and the soundness of the couple’s sudden appreciation of human responsibility; the transformation of little Eyolf’s death and their guilt-ridden relationship into a meaningful life: are these true? Has the sour apple been exchanged for real moral nutriment, or has everything been finally and irreversibly nibbled away? Certainly at the conclusion Rita speaks of the likelihood of a “Sunday calm” descending upon the couple “now and then” and Alfred anticipates the comforting presence of the spirits of their lost loved ones in their lives: “Our little Eyolf. And your big Eyolf, too.”

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Rita: Where shall we look, Alfred? Allmers (his eyes meet hers): Upwards. Rita: Yes. Upwards. Allmers: Up towards the mountains. Towards the stars. And the great silence. Rita (stretches out her hand towards him): Thank you. (80) The lines certainly seem reminiscent of Milton’s Adam and Eve in the aftermath of their sour apple. Stoical, resigned, chastened, and re-committed, “The world was all before them, where to choose/Their place of rest”, and so forth; looking up at the stars but also at each other, in benediction. But given the entire progress of the drama to this point can we take Rita and Alfred at face value? Is there a shred of decency left in the humanist-cum-rationalist-cumidealist project, revealed as it has been by events so far to be network of egoistic improvisations? Or is the audience left with a massive ambiguity, a massive uncertainty as to Ibsen’s reaction to what has come to pass, and its own? What I cannot help noticing is that the commentators who take the Allmers’ joint resolution to be sincere mostly fall into the language of rationalist and humanist idealism that Ibsen’s drama in general and Little Eyolf in particular suggests he is so suspicious of. The couple moves “from an evasion of responsible commitment to others to a principle of ethical involvement” according to Errol Durbach, and “life-affirming common sense” breaks out in “a world of mundane and workaday responsibilities, illuminated by flashes of spiritual value and a sense of life’s larger purposes”.28 For Barry Jacobs Rita will lure her fjord-side rats “not to death, but to the possibility of a better life”, and hers is therefore a “new commitment to human responsibility”.29 “Both have gained a sounder, wider view of life”, according to John Northam: “It is a sort of victory; they have grown up.”30 What Rita “aims to do is translate human responsibility into action”31—never mind the scepticism she entertained about Allmers’ intention of doing just that with Eyolf’s education. Arnold Weinstein, too, stresses “maturation”, “the distance she has traveled”, “the energies…at last free to move outward, into the larger world, beyond”, and so forth: “Eyolf dies”,

28 Durbach, “Ibsen the Romantic”, 185, 125–26. 29 Jacobs, “Ibsen’s Little Eyolf ”, 613. 30 John Northam, Ibsen’s Dramatic Method: A Study of the Prose Dramas (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1971), 193. 31 Northam, Ibsen, 214.

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in short, “so that children may live.”32 (Good news!) The play shows, Toril Moi argues, that if we have the courage to face reality, the only viable response to the suffering of others, and to our own sense of guilt and responsibility for their suffering, is love, not in the sense of some new feeling or inner experience…, but simply in the sense of doing the things that a loving person would do.33 But whether love can ever be defined as “doing the things that a loving person would do” is surely the point at issue here. (Is love doing loving things? Or doing things in a loving way? How would we ever address the distinction?) What impels Allmers to stay with Rita, according to James Kerans, “is the possibility of finding meaning in life through aid to the anonymous ‘boys’ or substitute Eyolfs whom Rita is to bring up from shore.” Indeed, “in this gesture she reveals the essential motherliness of her nature”34—which we have had no inkling of before. (Like Hedda, surely, she is the very antithesis of the maternal: she was tempted to wish her only son dead in Act One, we might remember, just as Hedda looks forward to the conclusion of her pregnancy with nothing but dread.) It can only be replied to views of this kind that “finding meaning in life” personally, in individual terms alone, is itself a quintessentially humanist, idealist aspiration, and that in Ibsen’s drama, as in all great literature, such an expression cannot be offered up at face value. When Collingwood spoke of artists knowing they mean something but not knowing what they mean, that would sound like a weakness—to a philosopher. In this context it sounds more like a strength. There are any number of religious, social, political, even scientific and philosophical bodies of thought that loudly proclaim the “meaning in life” they have discovered for us, with which we should align ourselves, toute suite. But our capacity to find anything of that degree of significance for ourselves, and our warring and wavering senses of what “meaning” in life may actually be, are the very things that are in contention in dramas like Little Eyolf—explicitly so in that particular case, though the play enters under the principle of boldness of inclusion versus restraint in explanation. The “principles of ethical involvement” are shadowy abstractions; ethical involvement is a way of living, not of thinking. It is not good enough in such a context to be either blithely 32 33 34

Weinstein, “Metamorphosis in Ibsen’s Little Eyolf ”, 316. Moi, “Introduction”, xxix. Kerans, “Kindermord and Will in Little Eyolf ”, 200.

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ironic in the manner of George Bernard Shaw (“And so they are delivered from their evil dream, and, let us hope, live happily ever after”) or placidly epigrammatic in the manner of Sverre Arestad—sounding just like Alfred Allmers himself, in point of fact—(“the individual achieves freedom…through acceptance of responsibility”).35 The play drives us to consider the actual reality of agency, “principles”, “meaning”, and “responsibility”, and our capacity to find such things outside egoism yet within the modern and secular social dynamics that we inhabit whether we want to or not. So it seems to me that the question, “Does Ibsen expect us to believe this abrupt double conversion, or is it another of his contrapuntal, ironic endings?”36 involves a consideration not only of the terms in which the “conversion” is posited by Ibsen’s commentators, but also of what the Allmers’ alternatives are. They are in the process of swallowing the Rat Wife’s sure æple. They had no choice, as she said (28). Love, home, marriage, family, domesticity, bourgeois comfort, “gold and green forests”, intellectual endeavour, faith, and tradition are all gone and all that is left, apparently, is a set of livsløgner, humanist bromides about life-affirming common sense, ethical involvement, spiritual value, “commitment”, and the “larger world”. Lost as they are, nothing has changed: Rita’s idea of sheltering the lost lambs of the fjord is one spat out as a direct threat and reprisal were Allmers to leave her. “But can you guess what I am going to do? When you are gone?”, she asks, in that sadistic interrogative style we saw her use on Asta at the opening of the play. “The moment you leave me”, she says, the grubby foreshore urchins who let Eyolf drown will take possession of his books, toys, and furniture; the instruments of work and play Allmers arranged for his beloved’s education will be fingered by the guttersnipes he snobbishly detests. “She wants these boys to enjoy what she once preserved jealously for her own son”, in John Northam’s view.37 But this is the reverse of a triumph over selfishness. It is further insatiate mental violence directed at her husband, this time dressed up as altruism: “an unaltered desire for possession”, as Laura Caretti calls it.38 (“I want to make them mine.… As if they were mine.” She voices the identical urge to possess as regards Alfred (39–40) and Eyolf (56).) When Rita says, “You have left me empty, and I must try to fill that emptiness with something. Something resembling love” (78), we are surely right to relate that emptiness to the Rat Wife and her unfortunate 35 Shaw, Quintessence of Ibsenism, 139; Sverre Arestad, “Little Eyolf and Human Responsibility”, 144, Scandinavian Studies, 32: 3 (1960), 140–52. 36 Jacobs, “Ibsen’s Little Eyolf ”, 604. 37 Northam, Ibsen, 213. 38 Caretti, “Questioning the Ending of Little Eyolf ”, 76.

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islanders, who were obliged to eat her sour apple, faute de mieux, balk at doing so as they might. Rita reverts to ethical involvement as a justification for her existence just as the islanders reverted to the Rat Wife: because she has no choice and because there is nothing else left, morally, intellectually, and emotionally un-gnawed away. Indeed, Frode Helland is surely right to compare her altruistic urge with the Rat Wife’s own modus operandi: “The project assumes the children are like rats, that they are unwanted…. They will serve as filler in her empty darkness.”39 “Our natures do pursue,/Like rats that ravin down their proper bane,” as Shakespeare writes in Measure for Measure, “A thirsty evil, and when we drink we die.” To say that Ibsen’s conclusion is “a happy ending which the context profoundly questions”, is a substantial under-statement; it is “another fiction, another illusion”, an “empty darkness” revealed by Ibsen’s forensic passion.40 “What they say and what they share is a result of their tenacious ability to confect a narrative that gives their life a necessary veneer.”41 The “program of education, love, and generous subvention” is “tainted at the root”,42 and that is where Ibsen leaves us: with two people gazing at the peaks and the stars—but also in each other’s eyes, at the same time—more in hope than expectation, “enclosed in a life-denying cocoon of egotism”.43

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“How can he expect that others should/Build for him, sow for him, and at his call/Love him,” Wordsworth wrote in “Resolution and Independence”, “who for himself will take no heed at all?” “Like all people whose lives are valueless,” Shaw wrote of Hedda Gabler, “she has no more sense of the value of Lövborg’s or Tesman’s or Thea’s lives than a railway shareholder has of the value of a shunter’s.”44 We can only value other people if we value ourselves, and vice versa. If Rita Allmers could not love and value her own child how can she 39 Helland, Melankoliens Spill, 287: “Prosjektet forutsetter at også disse barna er som «rotter», at de er uønsket…. De skal fungere som fyllmasse i hennes tomme mørke.” 40 Inga-Stina Ewbank, “The Last Plays”, 140, 146, in James McFarlane (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ibsen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 126–54. 41 Helland, Melankoliens Spill, 290: “Det de sier og det de deler, er et utslag av deres hardnakkede evne til å finne en fortelling som gir livet nødvendighetens skinn.” (“Skinn” is profoundly a profoundly polyvalent term, connoting “hide”, “gloss”, or “appearance”.). 42 Goldman, Ibsen: The Dramaturgy of Fear, 105, 106. 43 John Reid, “‘Biting the Sour Apple’: The Nietzschean Undertow in Little Eyolf ”, 15, Modern Drama, 52: 1 (2009), 1–18. 44 Shaw, Quintessence of Ibsenism, 116.

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­ ossibly be expected to love and value children who are not her own? If Alfred p Allmers cannot carry out the most basic responsibilities of husband, father, or brother—even intellectual—how can he be expected to carry out a responsibility to society? “Do you believe”, Ibsen asked a friend, “that Rita will take on the rough children? Don’t you think it’s just a holiday mood?”45 The remark leaves us alone with the dilemma the play proposes. But when we have swallowed the bitter apple, what else can we do but “hold to ties that save us from utter meaninglessness”?46 What John Northam calls “breaking out into a direct relationship with life”47 may be the most pernicious livsløgnen of them all but without a belief in it modern secular existence would disintegrate. No wonder we might come to feel that Little Eyolf presents an action whose real source is never defined. Like its protagonists the play leaves us staring up to the mountains, to the stars beyond them, and the “great silence” beyond them: the great silence where the frameworks of thought decompose completely—a radically imaginative tragedy of the self and the will, beyond religion, science, history, and philosophy. 45 Northam, Ibsen’s Dramatic Method, 194. 46 Durbach, “Ibsen the Romantic”, 126. 47 Northam, Ibsen, 215.

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Politics and Art: James Kelman’s Not Not While the Giro When originally published this essay sought to substantiate a bold claim: that Not Not While the Giro, published in 1983, is the most distinguished set of short stories issued in the United Kingdom since World War Two. It argued that even if other British postwar collections—by Sylvia Townshend Warner, Elizabeth Bowen, John Fowles, V.S. Pritchett, Alan Sillitoe, Elizabeth Taylor, and Angela Carter, for example—were felt to be of greater artistic merit, that Kelman’s should still be regarded as the most important, capturing as it does with an urgency worthy of its subject the decline of working-class masculine culture in “post-industrial” Britain. Not Not While the Giro is particularly bold by way of inclusion however restrained by way of explanation; it is graphically pregnant with its theme even if it can deliver that theme only in imaginative terms and not in discursive ones. It is supremely a work of imaginative literature in Collingwood’s sense (quoted in Chapter 2): “even if art is pure imagination, it must spring from a soil of concrete fact; the artist must really exist in a real world, and his works of art are necessarily a kind of sublimated version of his experience as a real person, however unconscious of this fact he may be.” In that respect Not Not While the Giro is similar to the other works discussed here, by Byron, Montgomery, Hardy, and Ibsen. Like them the concrete engagement with the real world that we witness in Kelman’s stories constitutes and is constituted by an intellectual engagement with an idea of the world that is not, as such, artistic, and which seeks to explain the world in non-artistic terms. “Apart from the idea of the family, intellectually conceived as a principle of social morality,” Collingwood suggested in Chapter 1, “the tragedy of Lear would not exist.” The ideas we have seen our chosen authors engaging with are more diverse than that of the family in Western thought: Byron contrasted Stoicism with the ethic of the New Testament, Montgomery previsioned the survival of the fittest from an Evangelical standpoint, Hardy allowed evolution and tragedy to co-exist, and Ibsen blasted humanism out of his path only to find himself and his protagonists in a sort of intellectual and moral vacuum, staring out into the “great silence” beyond both the mountains and the stars. By his own account Kelman is a socialist, and socialism has an intensely powerful and jealous interest in art as a form of bourgeois betrayal and opium on the one hand, and as a potential form of enlightenment on the other. How can a person attracted to that colossal intellectual paradigm also be an artist—know © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004356856_009

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he means something but not what he means? Is not an irritable reaching after fact and reason an inalienable element in socialist thought?

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“As a young writer”, James Kelman recalled, “there were no literary models I could look to from my own culture.… I’m not saying these models didn’t exist. But if they did then I couldn’t find them.”1 So he was drawn to Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway, to Camus, and in particular to Joyce, Beckett, and Kafka, whose influence on his work are apparent to any reader. Like Joyce Kelman is drawn to interior monologue, like Beckett he frequently depicts isolated male figures in various stages of decrepitude, and like Kafka he has a penchant for the psychotically surreal. Where the short story is concerned Modernists like these left Kelman with a stylistic inheritance of special importance. In his study of the form Helmut ­Bonheim divided storytelling into four modes: two “dynamic” (speech and ­report: dialogue and narrative transcription of characters’ actions) and two “static” (description and comment: the depiction of scenes and the registration of the narrator’s response to what is taking place). “Of the four modes” the Modernist story writer, Bonheim argued, “finds those more aesthetically pleasing, namely speech and report, which are most mimetic and which suggest as little as possible the guiding hand of the artist.” “The two static modes”, he goes on, are either avoided or restricted to embedded forms, preferably at the word or phrase level; expository description, “poetic” settings and obvious authorial comment are avoided. The writer prefers scenic to panoramic report, he consistently prefers direct to indirect speech, unless he moves to stream of consciousness or narrated monologue. He conceals that manipulating hand of which earlier writers were proud, and tends to that mode or submode which will make it seem as though he were holding the mirror up to nature once again.2 The aim of the Modernist short story is therefore by sophisticated means to make the narrative appear transparently simple by forgoing comment and description in favour of apparently unmediated speech and report.

1 James Kelman, Some Recent Attacks: Essays Cultural and Political (Stirling: AK Press, 1992), 82. 2 Helmut Bonheim, The Narrative Modes: Techniques of the Short Story (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1982), 47.

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Joyce, Beckett, and Kafka were all of bourgeois origin, and given Kelman’s own background it is surprising that he read so little of the two greatest working-­class writers Britain has produced: Thomas Hardy and D.H. Lawrence. (A friend tried to introduce him to them in his youth, but he records “never having read the damn books” in the afterword to a reissue of his first major collection of short stories, An Old Pub Near the Angel. He could find no models in “his own” culture, as he said: perhaps that included deceased Sassenachs like them.) Like Hardy Kelman is perennially associated with a particular geographical area: post-industrial Glasgow is his Wessex. Like Hardy, too, his fiction is remarkably homogenous. But if he manifests Hardy’s centripetalism the comparison with the centrifugal Lawrence is at least as profound. Like Kelman Lawrence was shrilly hostile to the English literary establishment. Both writers manifest an unusual and frank, even fearless, combination of anger and tenderness in their fiction. But most importantly of all Lawrence is a case in which it is notoriously difficult to separate a writer’s ideas from his imaginative work—and of few contemporary British writers is this more true than Kelman. Not Not While the Giro has its origins in a network of political and cultural ideas that must be clarified before their ramifications can be seen in the stories themselves. We have seen Stoicism, Christianity, Darwinism, tragedy, and humanism impinge on various nineteenth-century writers in previous chapters. In this one the paradigmatic elephant in the room is socialism, to which James Kelman is committed just as James Montgomery was to Evangelicalism. His variety of socialism as recorded in his various essays and interventions is of a conventional variety with a Scottish twist: anti-intellectual, anti-aesthetic, with a pronounced element of common sense philosophy and a Presbyterian stress on self-denial and self-righteousness. In his view, the British state is both a massively intrusive Orwellian agent of repression (“police brutality, racial abuses, sectarian abuses, trade-union corruption, political corruption, and everything else that comprises the reality of this country”)3 and a quasiparental organization, whose “cuts in spending” directly produce infant mortality, suicide, death from hypothermia, crime, violence, “drug abuse, alcohol abuse, gambling abuse, prostitution, [and] madness.”’4 Somewhere over the rainbow there lies the good society that will be produced merely by subtracting all the evil elements from the present one: “in the far-off future there won’t be any racism, no sexism, no prejudice, no imperialism, no colonisation, no economic exploitation, and so on and so forth, a process of elimination.”5 3 James Kelman, And the Judges Said…: Essays (London: Secker and Warburg, 2002), 72. 4 Ibid. 141. 5 Kelman, Some Recent Attacks, p. 14.

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Under Kelman’s i­ntellectual regime, then, “the reader agrees or disagrees, is with us or against us. Complexity of perception is complicity with the enemy and engagement with individuality … is set aside.”6 From a politically agnostic point of view one can only say, as Douglas Dunn did in reviewing Kelman’s first collection of political essays, that “behaviour and convictions may well be immune to the diagrammatic analysis which Kelman imposes on them”, and that “it is remarkable for a novelist, of all people … to be seen trading with blatantly Manichean counters” of these kinds.7 So Kelman’s case is different again from Byron’s, Montgomery’s, Hardy’s, and Ibsen’s. Instead of one idea giving way to another, or anticipating another, or living alongside another, or evaporating altogether and leaving nothing else behind, we now confront the case of a frame of mind or way of looking at the world that, at first blush, looks inimical to art: an idea that floods imaginative supposal with cognitive opinion, that knows exactly what it means and what it wants to deliver, in service to an all-powerful intellectual idiom, so rooted in the concrete of human experience that nothing imaginative could grow through it. Kelman’s Manichean way of seeing the world produces on the one hand a decent and reasonable politics of advocacy (for victims of redundancy, racial violence, and industrial asbestosis, for example) and on the other a set of cultural politics that mostly has him tie himself in knots. He is a professed anti-elitist, but he does not like the idea of theatre groups or funding agencies reviewing his work before staging or supporting it; it seems he should be above such bureaucratic interference. A loather of cosmopolitan literary culture, he has been published by the cream of London publishing houses. His early publications were frequently supported by both the Scottish and British Arts councils (“a model to avoid at all costs”),8 and he has won the Scottish Arts Council Book Award three times, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize, and the Booker Prize. As Alan Freeman puts it: “Far from being confronted by the establishment’s KEEP OUT sign, he has been met by a welcome mat.”9 An excoriator of creative writing programmes, Kelman was discovered in an extra-mural writing class of the University of Glasgow in the early 1970s and has held writing professorships in Texas and Glasgow. A graduate in English and philosophy of the University of Strathclyde, he regards university English departments more or less as agents of the state. “People who get employed in departments of literature and English studies get access to all the 6 Alan Freeman, “The Humanist’s Dilemma: A Polemic Against Kelman’s Polemics”, 31, E­ dinburgh Review, 108 (2001), 28–40. 7 Douglas Dunn, “I’m Right, and Good, You’re Wrong”, Times Literary Supplement, 1 Jan. 1993, 5. 8 Kelman, And the Judges Said, 8. 9 Freeman, “The Humanist’s Dilemma”, 32.

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resources and materials in the creation of literature—books, pencils, paper, typewriters, tipp-ex, word-processors, etc. Artists who are involved with dissent usually get nothing.”10 English departments apparently “hold the power” to “say something is good without having to prove it”,11 and “force you into saying that [T.S.] Eliot’s a good writer”, which he and fellow-fascists like Evelyn Waugh by definition cannot be.12 So in Kelman’s hands criticism can descend into unabashed McCarthyism: “Was Paul Gauguin racist? Was he sexist? What about Van Gogh, was he racist? Did he hate atheists? What about Picasso, was he sexist? Did he hate homosexuals? Was Gertrude Stein elitist? Did she hate men?”13 Whatever the nature of your talent or artistic contribution, heaven help you if an ism-word can plausibly be pasted to your back. The acts of overlooking and oppugnancy that Kelman’s attitudes expose him to emerge in a mea culpa about a writer whose influence on him could have been particularly fruitful. “For several years I thought Turgenev was a stuck-up and aristocratic mean-minded shit, and I didn’t read him”, he writes. “Then at last I did read him, and found his work was great, why the hell was I so prejudiced?”14 The ironies here are bleak. Not only is Sketches from a Hunter’s Album one of the greatest collections of short stories in Western literature, but as a work of fiction its contribution to human freedom is probably second only to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For his pains in writing them Turgenev was imprisoned for a month and sent into internal exile: not a fate Kelman need anticipate in modern Britain, however vicious its governments or coercive its departments of English. This is a deeply regrettable case of political prejudice, cutting an author off from a potentially rich source of inspiration and fellow feeling. In more reflective moments Kelman can see, as Turgenev manifestly did, that “nothing is more crucial nor as potentially subversive as a genuine appreciation of how the lives of ordinary people are lived from moment to moment”, and that his writing is accordingly a struggle “towards a self-contained world”.15 You cannot write about an underprivileged suburb of Glasgow, he said in the year that Not Not While the Giro was published, “unless you can write about the whole of life.”16 “The solution may be political”, but “the politics are always 10 Kirsty McNeill, “Interview with James Kelman”, 2, Chapman, 57 (1989), 1–9. 11 Kelman, Some Recent Attacks, 7. 12 Duncan McLean, “James Kelman Interviewed”, 69–70, Edinburgh Review, 71 (1985), 64–80. 13 Kelman, Some Recent Attacks, 10. 14 Kelman, And the Judges Said, 54. 15 Ibid. 100, 41. 16 Raymond Ross, “Travels from Maryhill to the ‘Mainstream’ and Back”, Scotsman, 12 Feb. 1983, 4.

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off the page … that’s the difficulty—keeping them off the page.”17 Kelman said this in 1989. By 2003 he could see the difficulty as a challenge he was bound to accept: When you’re working on it—even if you get the sense that there is some parallel, or something that might be seen as an allegory of something— you have to take care, take great pains, not to consolidate that. In a sense you should always try to exclude yourself and not to lose view over what you’re creating. It’s difficult, but you have to really try and resist it.18 This is a simple but powerful expression of the principles outlined by Walsh and Collingwood in the first part of this study. Here we can see the positive capability of “restraint in explanation” and un-knowing in artistic endeavour—what in Keats sounded somewhat automatic or passive is here a manifest and compelling effort: “you have to take care, take great pains…”. Kelman is particularly worth coming to at this late stage in the study not least because his awareness of the general issue is so manifest and explicit. Here the case is positively one of resisting ideological influence—“keeping it off the page” in a way far more strenuous than we have seen manifested in Byron, Montgomery, Hardy, or Ibsen. Trying to exclude yourself in the name of something T.S. Eliot would have called “impersonality”; trying “not to lose view over what you’ve created”; trying not to “consolidate” the social parallel: those aims are truly hard to achieve when a readily available and powerful “framework of thought” is constantly making a claim and exerting its influence—above all by denying the very notion of impersonality and urging political “consolidation”.

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There is one area in Kelman’s work where what he calls “the endemic racism, class bias and general elitism at the English end of the Anglo-American literary tradition”19 becomes an aesthetic as well as a political issue. That area is the relationship between the two “dynamic” modes of narrative that Bonheim defined: speech and report. Like every other writer who intends to be more than an entertainer, Kelman sensed that his work must constitute, in Cairns Craig’s 17 18

McNeill, “Interview with James Kelman”, 8; my italics. Tom Toremans, “An Interview with Alasdair Gray and James Kelman”, 583, Contemporary Literature, 44 (2003), 564–86. 19 Kelman, Some Recent Attacks, 20.

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words, “a challenge to the ‘literary’ as a particular mode of suppression and censorship”.20 (We find similar rebellions against “the literary” as a pre-existing convention in both Shakespeare and Jonson, in Pope’s “line of wit”, in Burns, in Wordsworth’s rejection of eighteenth-century poetic models and Austen’s rejection of the epistolary novel, in Byron’s “Turkish Tales”, in Oliver Twist, and in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”. In that sense, “the literary” as it exists at any point in time is one of those “contaminatory” influences literature seeks out to convert. There is no great literature that is not also innovatory.) What struck him as a key element in that challenge was to see throughout the English and Scottish fictional traditions regional or working-class c­ haracters— from Walter Scott and George Eliot onwards—isolated, insulated, and controlled within speech marks by omniscient narrators who speak in a wholly different voice. “And that voice isn’t of course our voice; that voice is the voice of [bbc] Radio 3”: And that would apply in America as well, and throughout the Commonwealth, throughout the English speaking world there is the one voice, the voice of English literature, and it’s not your voice, unless you’ve managed to go through uni. and start to speak as if you came from Hampstead Heath…21 The notion that omniscient narrators speak the voice of Radio Three throughout the Anglosphere—try telling that to, say, Thomas Hardy, Mark Twain, and Henry Lawson—itself suggests you do not have to come from Hampstead Heath to use it. Be that as it may this political rejection of Received Pronunciation in the British fictional tradition was a vital step in Kelman’s progress—not as a Scotsman or a socialist, but as a writer. Even a novelist like Dickens, who is generally speaking in sympathy with the under-privileged, Simon Kövesi argues, cannot help himself where omniscient narration and Received Pronunciation are concerned: The character’s voice is trapped in a cage of apostrophes and phoneticisation, which is all the more stark in its contrast to the standard English of the narrator. Narrator and reader collude in feeling standard-English sympathy for, and so discourse distance from, the working class voice and material circumstance of the character. Narrator and reader become 20 21

Cairns Craig, “James Kelman”, 169, in Matthew Bruccoli et al. (eds.), Dictionary of Literary Biography, 194: British Novelists Since 1960, Second Series (Detroit: Gale, 2001), 166–74. McLean, “James Kelman Interviewed”, 68.

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c­ ognoscenti, while the working-class character remains a holy fool, and is patronised, made primitive, animalised.22 This view is liable to hyperbole, clearly (the provincial folk in George Eliot are hardly “holy fools” or “animalised”); but this treatment of speech is a fixation for Kelman and many of his interpreters, entranced as they are by the demerits of narrative description and comment. “English literature is based on that relationship between writer and reader”, Kelman argues, “and the person in the middle is the character …. the assumption is that the character doesn’t know as much as the writer and the reader, and you’ll often get all those wee things such as dialect, for instance, in phonetics. In other words, the person who speaks is not as good, or rather not as intellectually aware, as the writer or reader.”23 So “getting rid of that standard third party narrative voice” that emanates from Radio 3 and Hampstead Heath is no minor issue. It is “getting rid of a whole value system”.24 Struggling free of a whole value system is not all gain, however, though it may seem like one in political terms. It can involve turning a deaf ear to literature itself. As a teenager Kelman became interested in the gamekeeper from a Lawrence novel he did read—Lady Chatterley’s Lover—who certainly talks a good deal of dialect, in contrast to Received Pronunciation. But to describe Mellors as a “salt-of-the-earth working-class country-yokel sort of a guy”25 is a grievous misunderstanding. Mellors is the son of a miner, but he is also a retired lieutenant of the British Army and uses different registers of speech with Lady Chatterley as it pleases him, precisely to make points about class, speech, and idiom. Anyone less like a country yokel or less hemmed in by the “standard third party narrative voice” would be hard to imagine. Christine Amanda Müller illustrates the point with a quintessential “Glasgow novel”, John Bell’s Wee M ­ acGreegor (1903), from which she quotes a passage in which the eponymous hero is rampantly phoneticised in comparison to his educated interlocutor and the narrator at large. (“D’ye come frae Glesca? Eh?”) “The effect of the above punctuation”, she writes, “is to preserve the cultured status of English voices and to make Scottish voices seem uneducated. Indeed the passage is humorous because it plays upon this typical literary distinction”—“yet it unexpectedly shows the Scots speaker as more socially knowledgeable than the English speaker, despite

22 Simon Kövesi, James Kelman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 15–16. 23 McLean, “James Kelman Interviewed”, 77. 24 McNeill, “Interview with James Kelman”, 4. 25 Kelman, And the Judges Said, 58.

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the low-status language used.”26 The cases of Mellors and Wee MacGreegor suggest how unpredictable this phenomenon can be, once released from ­ideological preconceptions. Radio 3, Hampstead Heath, and the Received ­Pronunciation spoken by their denizens may not be in absolute control of their victims in the provinces. In particular, just because you are not as intellectually aware as another figure in the narrative landscape (or as “well spoken”) does not mean you are not as good. On the contrary: as in Wordsworth, Turgenev, Dickens, George Eliot, Lawrence, and Tolstoy, the ignorant peasant might be a repository of wisdom far more impressive than his or her educated “superior”. (Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost is saturated with the theme of educated ignorance, though no narrator is involved.) So it is that on the matter of the omniscient narrator versus the marginalized character we might want to add a rider. In theory omniscience “allocates the narrator a disembodied Olympian subjectivity, replete in self-knowledge and in total control of its expressive powers, while the characters it brings to life remain … opaque objects of the narrative consciousness whose actions are readable only as products of bodily appetites and external forces, and whose speech attests to their own lack of reflexive consciousness.”27 In theory “it is the function of third-person narrative to stand behind and beyond the discourses it sets into play in order that the reader can make sense of them within a stable interpretive and ideological framework.”28 In practice the situation is more complex: “knowledge” is nothing like the final word when we respond to people in literature. On the basis of so-called omniscience the narrator can offer judgments but the character can make appeals; narrative has authority but dialogue has authenticity; and readers rarely find themselves in positions of smug security as regards the protagonists in imaginative literature. Rather, ours is the vision of an “ironic yet sympathetic observer who is seeking to understand what he observes by placing it in a wider context, standing back to view it in a wider perspective”, as W.J. Harvey puts it with respect to classical realist fiction.29 This is one of the ways in which literature unconceals what is hidden from us by “our instrumental and scientific ways of dealing with the 26 27 28 29

Christine Amanda Müller, A Glasgow Voice: James Kelman’s Literary Language (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011), 51; my italics. Scott Hames, “Dogged Masculinities: Male Subjectivities and Socialist Despair in Kelman and McIlvanney”, 68, Scottish Studies Review, 8 (2007), 67–87. Lee Spinks, “In Juxtaposition to Which: Narrative, System, and Subjectivity in the Fiction of James Kelman”, 95, Edinburgh Review, 108 (2001), 85–105. W.J. Harvey, “George Eliot and the Omniscient Narrator Convention”, 99, Nineteenth-­ Century Fiction, 12:2 (Sept. 1959), 81–108.

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world”, as Roger Scruton put it: by blasting through the carapace of learned stupidity to what Costard calls “plantain, a plain plantain”. So there is some sophisticated naivete in Kelman’s position: not only in the peculiarly Marxist belief that intellectual awareness trumps any other human value in literature or in life (which makes Marcuse, Althusser, Macherey, é tutti quanti, such dreary reading as a rule), but also in his accompanying (and Modernist) stress on “technique” as a royal road to human experience. He frequently alludes to the “technical things”, the “different kinds of writing”, and the “tricks you can do with prose” that are squirreled away in his creative armoury.30 He has Joyce in mind when he speaks of “that straight concreteness … where every noun will be concrete: there’s only facts being stated, there’s no such thing as a value judgement”, and of getting prose “to the act without any distancing, with no narrator”—going so far even to say “to obliterate the narrator, get rid of the artist, so that all that’s left is story.”31 As we have seen in Helmut Bonheim’s work this “level of pure objectivity”32 is both a Modernist and a Marxist shibboleth, designed to establish the idea that fiction is or could become an un-mediated ideological display (governed by pre-fabricated “technique”), rather than a form of communication from writer to reader that necessarily involves a designed and constructed dramatic action. But to blur the distinction between narrator and speaker, or to annihilate it altogether by means of internal monologue, and by these means hopefully to “obliterate the narrator” is to incur risks as well as to make strides. What Ian Bell calls “the rigorously solipsistic procedures of the narration” in Kelman’s novel How Late It Was, How Late means that “readers know no more than [the chief protagonist] Sammy does, and Sammy himself seems to know very little about his own motives or the status of his actions.”33 If Kelman seeks to “get rid of the artist” he will have nothing to say in terms of order and significance; but if the artist is too rigidly associated with stated ideological positions, ideological positions are the only things his readers will see. But Kelman is certainly capable of sailing between the Scylla of dogma and the Charybdis of formalism: “The writing comes first, not the theory.”34 Earlier I quoted him saying that “you have to take care, take great pains, not to 30 31 32 33

McLean, “James Kelman Interviewed”, 65–66. Ibid. 79, 80. McNeill, “Interview With James Kelman”, 5. Ian A. Bell, “Imagine Living There: Form and Ideology in Contemporary Scottish Fiction”, 232, in Susanne Hagemann (ed.), Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996), 217–33. 34 Kelman, And the Judges Said, 67.

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c­ onsolidate” such external influences—in short to defend the autonomy of literature against institutional “contamination”—and his attitude bears comparison to Joyce’s in writing Dubliners: “My intention was”, Joyce wrote, to write a chapter of the moral history of my country and I chose Dublin for the scene because that city seemed to me the centre of paralysis…. I have written it for the most part in a style of scrupulous meanness and with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, what he has seen and heard.35 Joyce wished to suspend empathy and sentiment in adhering to the veracity of his “presentment”, and he used “scrupulous meanness” to do it; Kelman wished to campaign on behalf of the under-privileged in realist fiction but also to suspend too simplistic a “consolidation” of the political in his own work. The politics cannot be driven “off the page” as simply as he thought they could. The “self-contained world” he wanted to evoke in his art must in fact contain them as it must contain everything else real in people’s lives. But the art must not be swamped by the politics, any more than the artist can take the opposite route and declare what Collingwood called “the separateness and independence of the imagination” or “the melancholy creed of art for art’s sake”. Post-industrial Glasgow is to him as colonial Dublin was to Joyce, and social paralysis is the condition both cities share and both authors illuminate—but that paralysis runs far deeper than politics; it underlies them. If a writer turns to internal monologue to blur the hierarchy that sets report above speech he or she runs the risk that there is little dramatic activity or interaction within an individual story. It is vital therefore that the collection itself takes on a dramatic form, by contrasting various kinds of story one against the other, in sequence and across the whole. Though the stress on social and personal paralysis is similar the dramatic organization of Not Not While the Giro is very different from that in Dubliners, which moves emphatically from childhood to death. In the Kelman the locale and protagonists are fairly similar throughout: it is the variation in the treatment that breathes so much life into the collection. So it is Not Not While the Giro, rather than the later collections Greyhound for Breakfast or The Burn, that is Kelman’s finest achievement— worthy, indeed, even of comparison with Dubliners itself as a resolution of politics as a framework of thought and art as an autonomous realm.

35

Richard Ellmann (ed.), Letters of James Joyce, 2 vols (London: Faber, 1966), ii. 134.

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Not Not While the Giro is the summation of a decade of short story writing. ­Kelman published An Old Pub Near the Angel in 1973, and though the collection is promising it remains the work of an apprentice. In particular, the relationship between dialogue on the one hand and report on the other is clumsy. This is the opening of the first story, “The Cards”: “Duncan your record is appalling,” Sanderson looked over his head somewhere and then sniffed. “You should have been fired the last time you were up.” “But Mr Sanderson there were reasons for those absences,” Duncan stopped and looked away. “What excuses could there be for this,” he picked up the folder, “since the last time you were up here. Look at this.” He smacked the page with his left hand.36 Kelman’s instinct to get beyond a dead alternation of dialogue and report by blurring the distinction between them may have originated in a political view concerning marginalized speakers in dialect, but its literary consequence was the release of his talent over the ten years that followed until Not Not While the Giro was published in 1983. Over that period Kelman infallibly chose his strongest material, tending in that narrative direction, not just from An Old Pub Near the Angel but from Three Glasgow Writers of 1976 and Short Tales from the Nightshift of 1978. Greyhound for Breakfast (1987) comprises forty-seven stories, Not Not While the Giro only half that number. But the earlier collection manages to be both more varied in its stylistic approach and more concentrated in its moral focus: more varied in that it travels generically from stock-standard realism, through Gothic, surrealism, parody, the fabulistic, internal monologue, even künstlernovelle; more concentrated in its powerful depiction of the condition of post-industrial working-class masculinity. Some of the stories from An Old Pub Near the Angel are too blunt in theme as well as too clumsy in execution; some are slices of life and no more, in which Kelman has not found a moral or dramatic point. Not only do these predictable and inconsequential elements disappear in Not Not While the Giro but ­Kelman finds his dramatic and moral territory there: a submerged population of men without women or prospects, bitterly alienated from a paralysed 36

James Kelman, An Old Pub Near the Angel and Other Stories, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Polygon, 2007), 1.

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s­ ociety. But even in An Old Pub Near the Angel he is beginning to follow Joyce’s footsteps in the snow, towards a flexible medium for internal monologue: I got my penny change and sat on a high stool. Hell of a job being a barman. Watching everybody bevying the night away man. Must be pretty bad. All the conversations. Having to talk or at least acknowledge all the pieces of chat. No wonder you look so bored Percy. Why don’t you rob the till and high tail it to the badlands. That beer was very good. “Hey give us another pint man will you?” Not even rinsing the glass out. Percy. Percy. You’ll never make the big time going to those games.37 This is not Leopold Bloom but it is a step in the right direction. In Not Not While the Giro we can see Kelman revise early stories such as these, evicting the inverted commas around dialogue and loosening the paragraph convention accordingly, to make a less cluttered and more informal narrative environment for the treatment of his protagonists, and dissolving the dialogue/report alternation that sounds contrived in a story like “The Cards”. Thus Not Not While the Giro opens with the four stories from An Old Pub Near the Angel that allow him both to move beyond his first efforts but also to use them as a basis for the collection as a whole. After this opening quartet the inverted comma disappears from the dialogue, it is worth noting. But central themes—political and humane at the same time—are established in those opening stories all the same: the inter-generational relationships between men in “He Knew Him Well”; the “touch of humanity” all people need, but which Charles, the central figure of “An Old Pub Near the Angel” can neither give nor receive; the touch of humanity between men and women in particular, with all its circumambient issues of masculinity and domesticity, in “Ten Guitars”; and the broader issue of trust and reciprocity between working-class people (and all people) over money and hospitality, in “Nice to be Nice”. We use the expression “working class” of Kelman’s particular dramatic ­milieu, for example—and some of his people are employed, however tenuously. But many of his people are lost in the underclass: stranded in welfare, and habituated to a peculiarly modern, state-subsidized kind of vagrancy, between lodgings, dole office, and pub. “Kelman’s depiction”, Cairns Craig writes, “is not of a working-class community so much as of a working-class world which has become atomised, fragmented, and in which individuals are isolated from one another—a world in which political hope has been severed and only economic 37

Ibid. 10.

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deprivation remains.”38 And that depiction is also post-socialist as well as postindustrial. “Working class writing of the Thirties could name the ‘beast’, and offer images of resistance to it”, John Kirk remarks;39 now the beast is one of social disintegration that makes naming the forces concerned (labelling them along socialist lines—or conservative ones, come to that) almost impossible. Nostalgia for social cohesion and common humanity—and the institutions that accompany it, above all the family—is all that is left. Nostalgia: or the hope and belief that nostalgia is not all that it is. So as Cairns Craig goes on: “The alienation of the working class becomes the context not [or perhaps one should say, not only] for the exploration of social issues and possible political improvement, but for the exploration of humanity’s existential condition.”40 As in Dubliners the local is universal and the political becomes the moral—not so much keeping politics “off the page”, so much as realizing that they themselves emerge from and and seek to make sense of social experience and social deprivation. But this line of argument, and the Modernist, “imagist”, “objective” aesthetic ideology that frequently accompanies it, tells only half the story. Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus are marginalized, too, but though they can understand the paralysis of their society only intermittently, still Joyce employs them to breed understanding in us his readers. The two men “are not merely social representatives, embodying a particular ethos at a particular point in history, nor merely the representatives of significant moral or spiritual predicaments.”41 They are agents and reagents, too, as even Kelman’s most abject individuals are. They can speak, reflect, empathize, and imagine—the worst is not so long as they can say “this is the worst”, and generally they can say much more than that. Nor is Bloom a “hapless victim of his own ideals or his society. On the contrary, his very isolation, his alertness, his resource and his intelligence … are precisely what make, in fact, the main vehicle of Joyce’s criticism.”42 Kelman’s men may not be conspicuously gifted with resources and intelligence, but as I noted earlier in the context of omniscient narration, intelligence is not goodness, nor are stories unmediated displays. These figures, 38

39 40 41 42

Cairns Craig, “Resisting Arrest: James Kelman”, 101, in Gavin Wallace and Randall Stevenson (eds.), The Scottish Novel Since the Seventies: New Visions, Old Dreams (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996), 99–114. John Kirk, “Figuring the Dispossessed: Images of the Urban Working Class in the Writing of James Kelman”, 112, English, 48 (1999), 101–16. Craig, “Resisting Arrest”, 105. S.L. Goldberg, The Classical Temper: A Study of James Joyce’s Ulysses (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), 263. Ibid. 120.

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both in individual stories and in the collection as a whole, are certainly capable with their author’s help of illuminating the paralysis that grips them. They are men and women and he is an artist, and none of them are mere cogs in the social machine, despite Kelman’s rhetoric about “the reality of this country” and the shenanigans of its university English departments. So the collection unfolds, blending and varying a set of interests and approaches, all related to the over-arching theme of a collapse of working-class masculinity in the face of economic deprivation. First and foremost is the case of work. There are stories of individuals walking off the job, or very close to it: “Zuzzed”, set on a Channel Island potato farm, or “No Longer the Warehouseman”, in which a man with a young family makes his way home in profound depression having left the job he was offered: “To live I should be working but I cannot.”43 No explanation is offered for his inability; we assume it lies in complete alienation from the culture of employment, even of meaningful interaction with others. There are stories also of the perilous activities necessity drives such men to in finding what employment they can: “The Bevel”, for example, in which a trio of Scots are re-lining the interior of a huge chlorine tank in heatwave conditions beneath Ben Nevis, the beauty of whose peak and loch ironically counterpose the dangerous unpleasantness of their labour. Their supervisors inveigle the three men into a dangerous set of manoeuvres to overcome the bevel that keeps their scaffolding away from a section of the tank wall and so prevents them doing their job. The bevel is a line that they are being asked to cross. “The Chief Thing About This Game” is even more hairraising, and concerns a young man on his first day at a copper foundry, who is asked to manipulate molten bars of the metal while wearing only running shoes on his feet and worn gloves to protect his hands. But the best of these stories, while sharing the other two stories’ realistic ­modus operandi, is something more than a merely realist tale, and demonstrates that control of significance that we find in Dubliners and all other examples of fictional art. Indeed, “Double or Clear Plus a Tenner” is a remarkable allegory of industrial decline and dislocation. At the break between two shifts at a factory under threat of closure two groups of men, one old the other young, play two games of cards. The first is Solo, a form of whist: sociable, skilled, and unamenable to gambling, it draws an appreciative audience of fellow workers who look on and comment as the game goes on. “The game was played quietly but laughter occurred, controlled, barely audible beyond the smoke-area.” (152.) The leader of this game, Albert, is the quintessential late middle-aged 43

James Kelman, Not Not While the Giro (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1983), 141; cited in parenthesis below.

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working-class Scot, perfectly at ease in his environment, with a Tam o’ Shanter, a pipe, a discreetly admiring apprentice, and a deep reserve of self-assurance. The arrival of the foreman with the pay-packets directs conversation to the firm’s uncertain future, and the game breaks up, at which point a pointedly younger group of men begin to play pontoon—a game of no skill whatsoever, the only purpose of which is to gamble. The men play for gradually increasing stakes it is clear they cannot afford. The cards take their course, and one young man ends up £50 in debt to Albert’s apprentice. The two men leave the factory, and women and children are seen making their way towards a school as the normal day begins. The loser admits he has not got the money, and the apprentice offers him a cigarette and accepts a verbal iou that we know will never be collected. Shreds of communal solidarity continue to exist, then—and it is vitally important that they are shown to us—but desperation is steadily fraying those sympathies as young men take risks rather than provide for homes and families, or even anticipate raising school-age children as they normally would. Their unconscious faith in any such future is all but gone. The story is short and simple, but honours Kelman’s intention to examine “how the lives of ordinary people are lived from moment to moment”, and translates a Scottish idiom and environment into universal terms. It is certainly not absurd to mention it alongside Turgenev and Joyce. Gambling is another recurrent theme in Kelman’s fiction. In his moral universe it reflects working-class passivity—a dread of and veneration for chance, the element which rules so many of the lives he is depicting, the social dna of which is deteriorating at speed. “Charlie” is one such story, and it is of interest also because Kelman ironically deploys a variety of the Radio 3 voice of firstperson narration in a scenario of loss and rootlessness all the more touching because it is submerged in that remote and uncaring idiom (“owed a fortune … in theory … something like that … more or less untraceable”): Charlie had one suit and he wore it at all times. He worked for a stonecleaning outfit travelling throughout England and Wales, and in his situation this was perfect. He owed a fortune in maintenance back payments for a wife and three weans he had left up in Lanarkshire somewhere. He was self-employed. In theory he subcontracted himself out to the stonecleaning outfit—something like that. What it did mean was that he was more or less untraceable. (49) At the end of each week, rather than send money home to his family, Charlie takes exactly what is left in his wallet and puts it on the horses, with neither joy nor aptitude. He is just as hapless on the snooker table, where the narrator

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takes his money until he no longer wants to (“my own game soon degenerated to his level”). One morning Charlie leaves the boarding house as mysteriously as he came, “untraceable” to the last and maintaining human contact only through the money he ritually throws away at the bookee’s. The relation between family breakdown, betting, and indigence is economically dramatized, and another lost soul is bleakly brought out of obscurity before being sent back into it. The second gambling story in the collection is one of Kelman’s most remarkable productions: as exuberantly Falstaffian as “Charlie” is quietly tragic. “A Wide Runner” revolves around John, a London University beadle, widowed, shiftless, and alcoholic but also indulged by everybody in his circle on the basis of his strange magnetism: a person centred entirely upon himself, who lives exactly as he wishes to and pays no mind to anyone, amidst an environment of venal dependency and weakness. One of Kelman’s anonymous and vagrant young Scots is found employment and befriended—up to a point at least—by this enigmatic scapegrace: “Once he realised my interest in horse racing wasnt confined to the winning and losing of money we got on even better.” (126.) Betting on a systematic basis is a means of circumventing chance or transcending it: it is a mechanism designed to secure its devotees in the belief that they are above “the winning and losing of money” that dominates the rest of their lives. John’s modus vivendi is to “run wide”: to stand clear of people he calls “the middle men” (or “the cunts”) by severing economic dependency from his gambling—to convince himself that he gambles in the spirit of self-assertion and joie de vivre that Charlie has completely lost So the two men rigorously employ a betting system on the greyhounds during a disease-induced hiatus in the British flat-racing season. “Most of them the cunts, they’re looking to back 8 winners out of 8 fucking races” (132), but John and the narrator strictly confine themselves to four dogs in four races, chosen scientifically on the basis of their recent speeds, and withdraw after the first win: “as soon as we cheered home a winner we vanished.” So they declare their independence from chance. For a while the system proves moderately remunerative, as in a sense it must, being in defiance of the addictive element in gambling. But as it lacks the ­addictive element it lacks the compulsion, too—the scientifically based ­indifference to the winning and losing of money proves impossible to sustain. Inevitably, therefore, one night their resolve cracks as the “time dog” they have chosen (or which, rather, chooses itself on mathematical principles) looks certain to lose, and the partnership collapses into recrimination. The Scot leaves the job and John remains, last seen happily re-immersed in the Royal Ascot meeting: “That punter’s dream again, the summer sunshine with strawberries

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and champagne, and Lester [Piggott] going through the card.” (140.) Nothing has changed; John’s wide run is over, and hazard has reclaimed him. If gambling is one traditional form of escape from economically induced despair, sport is another, and a much more valued one precisely because of the social admiration it accrues and the skill it demonstrates—essentially devoid of luck as gambling is essentially saturated by it. But sport, too, is inexorably being smothered in defeatism and loss in Kelman’s Glasgow. In “Away in Airdrie” a boy gratefully accompanies his uncle to a football match; he is a young player himself, proud of his boots and jersey. But after the game Uncle Archie retreats to the pub, from which he cannot be removed, and the boy is forced to make his way home on the train alone, about to take up the smoking habit that is ruining his uncle’s health. “Remember Young Cecil” is another pitchperfect tale told retrospectively in the first person, about a promising young snooker player who takes on “The County Durham”, a professional from the north of England—the ancient sporting rival. Their match inspires the entire neighbourhood to support their champion, with bets as well as sentiment: “Everybody who ever set foot in Porter’s was onto Young Cecil that night. And some from down our way who had never set foot in a snooker hall in their lives were onto him as well, and you cannot blame them. The pawn shops ran riot. Everything hockable was hocked. We all went daft.” (95.) Needless to say the local wunderkind is comprehensively defeated and the life is taken out of him and his club: “Porter’s was like a cemetery for ages after it. Some of the old heads say it’s been going downhill ever since.… Young Cecil changed overnight. He got married just before the game anyway and so what with that and the rest of it he dropped out of things.” (96.) His community’s celebratory “daftness”— the lust for life that Charlie has completely lost and which John the punter pretends to—evaporates just as Young Cecil’s confident youth goes downhill. These stories about work, gambling, sport, and their inter-relation are all in the realist mode, whether handled in first or third-person terms. But the collection includes eight or so tales of a very different nature, which punctuate the collection as a whole in a vigorously creative way, breaking up the realist tone and establishing a counterpoint between the empirical and the bizarre. “The House of an Old Woman” is a Gothic descent into madness and alienation in which a young man is gradually ostracized by his fellow-tenants in an unfurnished and sinister house. Innocent activities such as taking a bath take on overtones of Northanger Abbey: “Then the creak! It was terrible hearing it. My body tensed completely. The big cupboard in the corner it came from, and its door moved ajar slightly, and in the shadows I could make out what appeared to be a big coat”—which turns out to be felt insulation on the hot-water ­cistern (57).

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Between the lines we can make out the narrator’s increasing mania, r­ eluctant to leave a house he dreads, avoiding work, and stalking his one-time friends, whom he has never trusted. The anomie of the realist tales therefore verges on the manifestly psychotic. “The Block” involves a similarly neurotic set of contacts between the hero, a young dairyman who encounters the body of a suicide on the way to work, and an ingratiating but sinister group of policemen straight out of Harold Pinter. In the ruins of a set of half-­demolished tenements a man’s children, the eponymous “wee horrors” of another story, become involved with a barbecue (of what, we can only imagine) organized by a pair of vagrant drunks. In “Notebook to Do with America” a man makes his way across another eloquently symbolic demolition site and visits an elderly woman who hands on to him the notebook of the title as an encouragement to emigrate. Its author lies dead on the kitchen table next door, and the hero leaves without explanation. Is he the dead man’s son? We can only assume so. These stories are enigmatic in the highest degree, but communicate themselves as gothic versions, or renditions, of the circumstances the collection elsewhere handles in more explicitly realist terms. Surrealism merges with black comedy in four shorter parables. Rats seize the opportunity to urinate on the packed lunch a warehouseman leaves temporarily unattended, and he dies of what we assume is uremic septicaemia— “They took out all his blood and filled him up with other blood”, all to no avail. A pair of feuding Scottish twins, it seems extracted from a folk tale or something similar, are tied together at the waist and slash each other with swords in a preposterous duel; when they fall to the ground the feud ceases, we are told, but the duel continues. (Are these Scots fighting each other rather than their common enemies, as they have historically been given to do? Possibly.) The blackly ironic “Roofsliding” is apparently extracted from an English anthropological study, Within Our City Slums, and is a brilliant fable of frosty metropolitan indifference told in Received Pronunciation, detailing a Glaswegian male team-pastime of sliding down the inclined roofs of tenement buildings in the prone position with the aim of catching one’s heels in the gutter. Readers are well into the story’s two paragraphs before realizing the entire narrative is a grisly hoax, and then must ask themselves exactly how complicit in the hoax they themselves have been, as readers. In “Acid” a father Stoically puts his son out of his misery by pushing him completely into a vat of industrial solvent he has fallen into at work: “Sorry Hughie he said.” These stories are distillations of the rest, gruesome and unsettling, designed very clearly to challenge and disturb that cosily detached attitude in the reader that realism (even Joyce’s in Dubliners) can unwittingly instil. In summarizing these stories I have tried to avoid leaving the impression that they are in any way depressing, any more than Dubliners is. (There is

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a good deal of black humour in the collection; in “He Knew Him Well” the ­one-armed war veteran Dennis is understood to have committed suicide by slashing his wrist. How did he do it, then?) But the bleakest stories in Not Not While the Giro are those that involve women, and the reason for that is not far to seek. “If James Kelman’s fiction has one enduring subject”, Carole Jones points out, “it is the masculine condition in the contemporary period.” It follows that women play a central role in the collection, since masculinity and femininity are values that can be estimated only by contraposition and only lived out in contact with each other: women “serve to highlight the distance of his men from the dominant notions of hegemonic masculinity, their dwindling status and visibility in a world of masculinised power”—or de-masculinised power, one might say.44 (In fact women do more than “highlight” the Kelman male’s predicament, as Jones’ choice of critical vocabulary suggests: they absolutely embody it.) Men without work, sport, or opportunities may remain men all the same. Men without women lose something far more fundamental to their sense of self, and so the sexual relation is not some separable theme along the lines of “gender politics” and “masculinised power”: it is the very core of their disintegration. An Old Pub Near the Angel has a fair number of substantial female roles. Not Not While the Giro is more parsimonious in that respect, but femininity is far more urgently its concern. “Ten Guitars” is a vital member of the opening quartet of stories in launching this theme. A young man is able to bring a student nurse only to a travesty of a home: a room in lodgings where women visitors are forbidden and the preparation of food is prohibited—though he sometimes contrives to cook eggs and heat frankfurters inside an electric kettle. She stays the night but he is almost indifferent to the outcome, such is his lack of self-esteem and rapport with the young woman. “At the beginning” of their month-old relationship “he had attempted to get it going but this was waning and now amounted to little more than jokes and funny remarks on the subject.” (22.) “It” is the only word he can find to use about sexual relations. Even when events take their course he is “still unsure but almost letting himself believe this only could be it” (26). In the morning he is duly and predictably evicted by his censorious Italian landlady; he meets the girl again that evening, though their future is unclear. In “Keep Moving and No Questions” a homeless young man meets a young woman in a London club and buys her coffee. She is clearly just as lonely as he is but returns to her digs in Bloomsbury, leaving him to walk the streets until dawn. His attempts to communicate with her are

44

Carole Jones, “Kelman and Masculinity”, 111, 118, in Scott Hames (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to James Kelman (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 111–20.

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doomed even as he makes them, and his failure with her is clearly related to the failure of his whole life to this point: My planning never seems to allow of action on an intentional nature. I can always bring myself right to a point where some sort of precipice appears odds on to be round a corner. But this bringing-of-myself appears to be an end in itself; nothing further happens which can squarely be laid as an effect of my own volitions. (145) The remote and “rational” nature of this summary—a Radio 3 voice internalized in self-judgment—indicates the extent to which existence has dried up in this superfluous man to be replaced by hollow formulations through which his tragedy peeps at us. “Volition” is the very thing he can no longer exercise. In “The Hitchhiker” the female entity is a young French backpacker, lost and alone in the Scottish countryside and observed as night and the weather draw in by the three workers we have already met in “The Bevel”. The younger man accommodates her in an empty caravan next to the men’s own but his inability to communicate at a linguistic level, as she has no English and he no French, is an allegory for his inability to strike up any deeper form of intimacy. His two older colleagues jest with him coarsely but gently, stressing their age and his sexual opportunity as older men have always done with younger ones (“Did you or didnt you”; 173); but he can make nothing of it and returns to work a beaten man. “At the turnoff for the Mallaig Road we shook hands in a solemn sort of a way, and she headed along in that direction, her gaze to where the boots were taking her. I watched until she reached the first bend on the road. She hadnt looked back at all.” (172.) The bravest and most Lawrencian of these stories is “Jim Dandy”, in which yet another of Kelman’s agelessly young and anonymous men is alone while his wife is in recovering in the maternity ward. He has let their flat become untidy, but darker masculine elements emerge in him as friends continue to buy him celebratory drinks that cannot obscure his growing disconnection from events—even when his father-in-law kindly buys him a cigar: “Aye, and me going to be a granpa as well.” (“Me a father”, the young man replies; but the intergenerational connection is nugatory.) The drinking goes on apace: In the local hangout a cloistered male group backs onto me with the stupid jokes and the new office girls and their quick glances at the door each time it bangs open. And the girl in the mirror ordering 2 shandies. Hell of a crush, I gasp to her. She half smiles as a reply. My stupid face in the mirror. (108)

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His wife’s absence returns him atavistically to his days of sexual freedom: “the dog gangs following the bitch in their maze. The wean. And” (109). Later, at a party—having sung “The Green, Green Grass of Home” for his friends’ entertainment—he drunkenly allows himself to be seduced by a friend’s teenaged daughter, Sue, who is anything but a shrinking violet, ordering coffee and sandwiches from her elder sister through the bedroom door as she fellates him: “no I’ll still be lying here out the game with Sue and me and her mouth and all of it Christ I’m finished Sue because of you and me” (114). Lines from the ancient pop song swirl meaninglessly through this dismal celebration in blackly ironic comment: “The old hometown looks the same… Is my momma and poppa… The old house is still standing…”—but the prospects of love and domesticity appear to be in ruins. Each of the two remaining stories stands outside the remainder of the collection, but for different reasons. The book starts with an achieved suicide in “He Knew Him Well”, and ends with one being contemplated in the title story, where a thirty year-old ex-criminal on unemployment benefit sits out two days in complete penury—“in a single bedsitter with sole use of a kitchenette whose shelves are presently idle”—waiting for his next cheque to arrive. He knows what normal life amounts to—“It’s a meal I need, a few pints, a smoke, open air and outlook, the secure abode. Concerted energy, decisive course of action. Satisfyingly gainful employment. Money. A decidable and complete system of life.” (192)—but is far from clear whether he can establish it, or even if he wants to. He reflects on his social, economic, and sexual helplessness (“I rely on the odd wet dream, the odd chance acquaintance”), and stirs himself into eddies of fatuous but compulsive fantasy, punctuated by a Leopold Bloom-like dread of judgement (“your worship”) and rejection of the domestic life he senses going on around him. Often enough these fantasies are fuelled by the isolated propinquity of tenement living: “The bathwater has been running. Is the new girl about to dip a daintily naked toe.” Otherwise they can only echo his total isolation: “Or even the guitar, just being able to strum but with a passable voice I could be dropping into parties and playing a song, couple of women at the feet keeping time and slowly sipping from a tall glass…” (200). His fantasy life comes to a manic sub-Wordsworthian climax as he imagines himself as a beloved mendicant from a pre-industrial age: And after a few return trips … the farmfolk and country dwellers would know me well, the goodwives leaving thick winter woollies by the side of the road, flasks of oxtail soup under hedges. Shepherds offering shelter in remote bothies by the blazing log fires sipping hot toddies for the wildest nights and plenty of tobacco always the one essential luxury, and the

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children up and down the land crying, Mummy here comes the Scottish Coastroad Walker while I would dispense the homespun philosophies of the daisy growing and the planet as it revolves etc. (206) Even nostalgia is irrecoverable. The story is not, when all is said and done, Kelman’s most successful depiction of social paralysis nor is its hero his most damning vehicle of social criticism. But as internal monologue is form of narrative ground zero his decision to end the collection with it, and borrow its title for the group as a whole, is perfectly understandable. At twenty-four pages “Not Not While the Giro” is about as long as pure internal monologue can go without testing the reader’s patience. “Le joueur” is less than two pages long but is just as original, and there is no other story like it in Kelman’s work. Based on Cézanne’s Les joueurs de cartes, the story serenely renders the painting in fictional terms, adding “a wee black & white dog” and a “huge coloured handkerchief” but also an unmistakeably Kelmanesque scenario: the game is in a bar, the players are a widower and a younger man, a father; and when the game is over “the only person present apart from the barman will be Paul Cézanne”, the eternal artist, the eternal writer and realist, the “ironic yet sympathetic observer”, looking on with scrupulous meanness, operating “with the conviction that he is a very bold man who dares to alter in the presentment, still more to deform, what he has seen and heard.” Bold in inclusion, restrained in explanation, the “framework of thought” that might have swamped these remarkable stories has encountered a need to keep it off the page, lest it alters or deforms that “self-contained world”, that “whole of life” that the writer imagines—“to exclude yourself and not to lose view of what you’re creating”. “It’s difficult, but you have to really try and resist it.” As we have seen in the preceding chapters the challenge for the artist takes many forms while remaining fundamentally similar. In the last case study we shall turn the case around or invert it and look at a writer emphatically immersed— indeed cocooned—in a “framework of thought” and seeking the truth by dealing with the world in an instrumental and scientific way, yet who finds himself instinctively coming to depend upon artistic inclinations and influences.

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From the Other Shore: Bronislaw Malinowski’s A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term As this book demonstrates in both its parts (in theory and in practice, perhaps) the restraints we place on imaginative writers are essentially few, since freedom of expression is in the nature of their pursuit and of their value to society. That is why their relation to the truth takes the form that it does: knowing you mean something but not knowing what you mean, and unconcealing the world hidden from us by the instrumental and scientific ways in which we often deal with it. (Resisting “consolidation”, as James Kelman put it.)1 Tolstoy, for example, argued only that authors should choose a subject “important to the life of mankind”, be sincere in their treatment of it, and write well. Private forms of literary expression such as letters and diaries involve ethical obligations of a more direct nature. Partners in a correspondence undertake to reply to the communications they receive; if the exchange of letters breaks down, one of them is at fault. In diaries writers give undertakings to themselves alone. As diaries are confidential such promises are easy to break; but precisely because they are promises diary keepers make to themselves, breaking them can present a peculiarly intimate sense of defection. So, as many diarists have testified, journal writing has a particular place in the spectrum of authorship: an undertaking both light and imposing. If a diary is a form of moral constraint it is also a source of aesthetic freedom. “If you are making daily entries you have no time to think,” you do not want to think, you want to remember, you cannot consciously adopt any particular artifice; you jot down the day’s doings either briefly or burst out impulsively here and there into detail; and without being conscious of it, you yourself emerge and appear out of the sum total of those jottings, however brief they may be.2

1 Perhaps I should have done more in Part One to theorize the relation between Collingwood’s and Scruton’s ideas here; but I think it is best only to observe that they are the negative and positive faces of the same insight—and that Kelman’s expression overlaps them both. 2 Arthur Ponsonby, English Diaries: A Review of English Diaries from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (London: Methuen, 1923), 5.

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“As self-delineations” diaries “deal directly with people and events which in the novel are subjected to the stresses and conventions of art and design. And in many ways they are the most natural and instinctive product of the art of writing”—“coral-like aggregates of minimal deposits,” it may be.3 Clearly this is an ideal conception. No piece of writing is actually constructed instinctively, and artifice is involved with every act of enunciation. But the ­diary remains nevertheless a less teleological enterprise than either biography or f­iction. “As the diarist does not know the future,” Anaïs Nin wrote, “he reaches no conclusion, no synthesis, which is an artificial product of the intellect. The diary is true to becoming and continuum”4—an epitome of negative capability in that respect. By being an open structure, short of both hindsight and foresight, the keeping of a diary represents a particular view of experience: “a new stage in self-knowledge and new formulation of responsibility to the self”.5 It is an “unusually definite image of oneself” generated “out of the flux of impressions that compose the consciousness”, and therefore nothing less, perhaps, than a “clue to self-mastery”. “From the wretched compromise of being too literary [to be true] yet not literary enough [to be aesthetically compelling], the diary becomes the reconciler between incompatibles, literary enough [to be engaging] yet not too literary [to stifle spontaneity].”6 That the diary is a unique literary format no one would deny; but what might it allow a social scientist of genius to “unconceal” or include if not to explain?

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Bronislaw Malinowski’s private diary was written between September 1914 and March 1915, and October 1917 and July 1918, during two pioneering anthropological trips to New Guinea undertaken while he was technically a wartime enemy alien in Australia. It was translated and published in 1967, fifty years after the period it described and 25 years after its author’s death, but was received “with feelings of disappointment, embarrassment, and dismay”7 for many reasons. First—and foremost, given that it was published in the United States when 3 Robert Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A Study of English Diaries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974), 8. 4 Anaïs Nin, The Novel of the Future (London: Peter Owen, 1969), 153. 5 Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1960), 183. 6 Fothergill, Private Chronicles, 64, 68. 7 Konstantin Symmons-Symonolewicz, “The Ethnographer and his Savages: An Intellectual History of Malinowski’s Diary”, 94, Polish Review, 27:1–2 (1982), 92–98.

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the Civil Rights movement was at its height—Malinowski habitually referred to his Trobriander subjects as “niggers” in the document. He also agonized at length about his romantic attachments to the daughters of two Australian professors (Nina Stirling, to whom he had practically affianced himself, and Elsie Masson, who he would ultimately marry), complained about his health ad nauseam, and confessed to bouts of novel-reading and a related indifference to the ethnological task in hand. Before the Diary appeared Malinowski’s was a Mosaic legend of the wholly sympathetic participant observer who first set up his tent in the native village and invented anthropological fieldwork as a moral enterprise by doing so. The Diary appeared to shatter that legend completely. Its reception was controversial, therefore. “What does it tell us about the birth of fieldwork or about Malinowski?” Anthony Forge asked: “very little of either.”8 “The volume holds no interest for anyone,” Ian Hogbin reported, “be he anthropologist, psychologist, student of biography, or merely a gossip.”9 For Audrey Richards the book contained “poetic flashes” but it would “have been better kept as a quarry for a biography than published in its entirety”,10 and for Konstantin Symmons-Symonolevicz the Diary was “a series of very private snapshots of an extremely complex person, taken without his permission”, with limited value in terms of Malinowski’s “development as an ethnographer and a theorist”.11 When Clifford Geertz called Malinowski “a crabbed, self-­ preoccupied, hypochondriacal narcissist, whose fellow feeling for the people he lived with was limited in the extreme”, labelled the Diary itself gross and tiresome, and its author’s example “embarrassing”, Hortense Powdermaker could only concur, even as she mounted a defence of her erstwhile professor. She admitted the Diary was “tedious in the extreme”, and a product of “the current exposé-sensationalism in our culture”—only “this exposé happens to be dull.”12 The scandal blew up all over again on the pages of the newsletter of the Royal Anthropological Institute in London from February to December 1980, and by 1990 Nigel Rapport could shout in exasperation “Surely Everything Has Already Been Said About Malinowski’s Diary!” before adding further thoughts 8 9 10 11 12

Anthony Forge, “The Lonely Anthropologist”, New Society, 17 Aug. 1967, 221–23. Ian Hogbin, review of Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, American Anthropologist ns, 70:3 (June 1968), 575. Audrey Richards, “In Darkest Malinowski”, Cambridge Review, 19 January 1968, 186–89. Konstantin Symmons-Symonolewicz, “Bronislaw Malinowski in the Light of His Diary”, Polish Review, 12:3 (1967), 67–72. Clifford Geertz, “Under the Mosquito Net”, New York Review of Books, 14 Sept. 1967, ­12–13; Hortense Powdermaker, “An Agreeable Man”, New York Review of Books, 19 Nov. 1967, 36–37.

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of his own to the effect that whereas it was “tedious and bitty” and “repetitive and hum-drum” it was also a “very ‘human document’” and a necessary attempt on its author’s part to “preserve the home life beyond the field as if in amber, ready to go back to, and thus free Malinowski for those flights of fancy necessary for launching into and apprehending the ethnographic situation.”13 I agree with Malinowski’s reviewers that the Diary tells us little about his “development as an ethnographer and a theorist” as such. But a vital issue in ethnographical theory haunted its composition: the urge to transform ethnography from a sub-Darwinist study of “primitive” cultures as remote-time predecessors of European modernity into a study of such cultures in their own right as ongoing forms of life. In shedding light on a new idea in ethnology the Diary cannot help shedding light on the advent of new discursive ideas in general and the complex way in which they can be bound up with the environment and the emotional state of the thinker concerned. As we have seen, the record is full of imaginative writers being impinged upon by paradigms from the world of assertion, “knowledge”, and cognition. We do not normally think of the traffic going the other way, and of imaginative literature providing a context for discursive thought. When a writer knows she means something but does not know what she means, her impact on individuals set on particular intellectual problems is likely to be difficult to quantify—but it may still exist. People who include much but explain little can provide all sorts of stimulus, in ways they themselves could hardly envisage. Malinowski’s is such a case: literary and imaginative in itself (sometimes supremely so), his diary also engages with literary and imaginative thought in ways it never dreamt of acknowledging.

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The Diary comes down to us in two unequal halves, from Malinowski’s first and third trips to New Guinea—to Mailu and the Trobriand Islands. The two parts have so much in common that to treat them as a single object is readily justifiable; but it is the second document that gives the book its title. On the inside of his notebook Malinowski wrote “A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term”, and went on:

13

Nigel Rapport, “Surely Everything Has Already Been Said About Malinowski’s Diary!” A ­ nthropology Today, 6:1 (Feb. 1990), 5–9.

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Day by day without exception I shall record the events of my life in chronological order.—Every day an account of the preceding day: a mirror of the events, a moral evaluation, location of the mainsprings of my life, a plan for the next day.14 This resolution takes us back to the moral underpinnings of keeping a diary, since its first instalment was far from strict and mostly progressed in a sequence of retrospects. Malinowski’s first entry, for example, looks back from Port Moresby to the “new epoch in my life” when on 1 September 1914 he had parted company with the eighty-fourth British Association conference at Brisbane and started work on “an expedition all on my own to the tropics” (3). Ten days later he had arrived at New Guinea and the leitmotifs of the Diary arrive with him: sea sickness, “the mistake of reading a Rider Haggard novel”, and feeling “very empty and tired inside” (7). If any particular psychological response emerges in the entries that follow it is the one we would expect in a hyper-refined Pole travelling to New Guinea in the early twentieth century: culture shock. He visited a village near Port Moresby in February 1915, for example: At low tide, the houses stick up high on their pilings. Small openings, with a high gutter, and something like strange snouts looking out from the furry wrapping; this complete lack of an open “inside” creates a strange stimmung of desertion, lifelessness—something of the melancholy of the Venetian lagoon—a mood of exile or imprisonment. In the dark openings bronze bodies appear, the whites of eyes gleam in the shadow of the rooms, from time to time firm breasts stick out—maire (crescent-shaped pearly shells). […] I was frightfully tired and had a fit of “pointophobia” (nervous aversion for pointed objects—“stichophobia?”). (87) It is a typical passage: self-preoccupied and hypochondraical but also uncannily evocative. Things stick up or stick out in a random yet purposeful way. Strange snouts look out from the furry wrapping of native huts as if they belonged to suspicious animals, yet the atmosphere is lugubriously Venetian. The residents are broken up into eyes and breasts in a sinister (though spellbinding) fashion. Breasts stick out and thereby contribute to a general sense of “pointophobia”. And there is sense of dread surrounding these ambiguous openings and invitations, drenched in silence—something is gleaming in the shadows 14

Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term, trans. Norbert Guterman, 2nd edn. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 103; cited in parenthesis below.

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like a threat. Similar phobias are recorded in the second diary: “strong nervous excitement and intellectual intensity on the surface, combined with inability to concentrate, superirritability and supersensitiveness of mental epidermis and feeling of permanently being exposed in an uncomf. position to the eyes of a crowded thoroughfare: an incapacity to achieve inner privacy” (253); “­ severe nervous tension; a feeling as if hundred of arms were coming out t­ oward me from the mixed shadows—I felt that something was about to touch me, jump at me out of the darkness. I tried to achieve a mood of certainty, security, strength. I wanted to feel alone, and impregnable” (284). It is in this context that he ­recorded “a strange dream” a week after arriving in Port Moresby: “homosex., with my own double as partner. Strangely autoerotic feelings; the impression that I’d like to have a mouth just like mine to kiss, a neck that curves just like mine, a forehead just like mine (seen from the side).” (13.) The closing parenthetical remark might seem the last word in narcissism, but it also has the disarming, even comic effect of catching the diarist in mid-pose—even while he poses as himself. Being impregnable and finding “a neck that curves just like mine” are impossibilities in fieldwork, and Malinowski soon realized that his labours would be far more arduous than he had anticipated. He was not doing enough “with the savages on the spot”. He needed to learn their language. Buried in the Times he ruefully admitted that “nothing whatever draws me to ethnogr. studies” (42). “I have finally arrived at Mailu”, he noted, “and I really do not know, or rather I do not see clearly, what I am to do. Period of suspense. I came to a deserted place with the feeling that soon I’ll have to finish, but in the meantime I must begin a new existence.” (49.) The sense of being forced to finish before having time to start made his work something quite other than a mere chore. It was both compellingly inescapable and totally unapproachable. “I feel capitis diminutio” he recorded: “a worthless man, of diminished value” (29). It is a clear case of intellectually induced depression. Under these circumstances Malinowski turned his back on his subjects and immersed himself first and foremost in the landscape, which became an objective correlative for the dire intellectual challenge that he faced. “I was unable to concentrate amid this landscape”, he noted on his way from Port Moresby to Mailu in October 1914: Not at all like our Tatras mountains at Olcza, where you’d like to lie down and embrace the landscape physically—where every corner whispers with the promise of some mysteriously experienced happiness. Out here the marvellous abysses of verdure are inaccessible, hostile, alien to man. The incomparably beautiful mangrove jungle is at close q­ uarters an ­infernal, stinking, slippery swamp, where it is impossible to walk

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three steps through the thick tangle of roots and soft mud; where you cannot touch anything. The jungle is almost inaccessible, full of all kinds of filth and reptiles; sultry, damp, tiring—swarming with mosquitoes and other loathsome insects, toads, etc. (24) Surely this inaccessibility is as much cultural and intellectual as it is physical and sexual. The Tatras mountains whisper the promise of happiness because they are knowable and known—to a Pole. In the tropical mangroves “you cannot touch anything” or take so many as three steps. The people he has come to study are transformed into “filth and reptiles”, “mosquitoes and other loathsome insects, toads, etc.” His work is (“at close quarters”) “an infernal, stinking, slippery swamp”. “Took a walk amid the sago palms”, he wrote two months later: Antediluvian forest: ruins of an Egyptian temple: gigantic, or rather colossal, trunks covered with geometric husks, mossy, enclasped in a tangle of various kinds of bindweed and climbing plants, with short stubby arms of leaves—strength, obtuseness, geometric monstrosity. (53) Like the mangroves, these massive trees embody the integral and monolithic appearance of a remote culture: physically blunt and mentally dull-witted, ­ungainly, entangled, and plated in custom and taboo, and for this reason ­ impassively self-reliant. The palms are Egyptian columns, but they are also his Melanesian subjects. No visitor could ever understand the nature of such beings. If the land appeared inaccessible the sea and sky were constantly in flux; and surely what Audrey Richards had in mind when she mentioned the “poetic flashes” in the Diary are the numerous seascapes that punctuate it, reminiscent of Gauguin’s Polynesian pictures by virtue of their polychromatic quality. Soon after his arrival in Port Moresby, Malinowski was referring conventionally enough to “the lightly rippled sea shimmer[ing] in a thousand tints caught briefly on its continuously moving surface” (14). Within a matter of days he had developed an idiom completely free of cliché: “the sea and the sky blazing with red reflections, in the midst of sapphire shadows” (22); “Sky milky, murky, as though filled with some dirty fluid—the pink strip of sunset gradually expanding, covering the sea with a moving blanket of rosy metal.” (40.) The references to gemstones, metal, and dirty fluids are inherently surrealistic, as are the arresting combinations of colour: “Wonderful violet cloudlets in the pale seagreen sky; red sunset, under it glows the narrow belt of the sea.” (82.) The intensity of these responses is often striking. “Marvellous sunset. The whole world drenched in brick color—one could hear and feel that color in the air” (67), just as the sea manifests “an intense, polished, tense blue (something

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that lies in wait, where you feel life, as in the eyes of a living person […])” (71). The theme comes to a climax on a voyage to Woodlark Island in February 1915, when Malinowski—blaming “the uncreative demon of escape from reality”— came on deck with Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills in hand: What was going on around was marvelous! Sea perfectly smooth, two abysses of blueness on either side. To the right the indentations of Sariba, islands, islets, covered with tall trees. To the left, the shadows of distant mountains—the shores of Milne Bay. Farther, the shores move away on either side; to the left only the high wall of East Cape, covered with clouds, forming the threatening point of the horizon; to the right pale shapes loom up out of the eternity of blueness, slowly turning into volcanic rocks, sharp, pyramid-shaped, or else into flat coral islands: phantom forests floating in melting blue space. One after the other comes into being and passes away. The space darkens—brick-colored spots on the clouds—to the east, a flat sheet of coral covered with gigantic trees over yellow sand in the cold blueness—strangely reminds me of the islets in the Vistula. (91) The nostalgic note reminds us of the danger in these painterly interludes. Like sirens, they drew Malinowski from human reality into nostalgic reverie. “Loss of subjectivism and deprivation of the will”, he wrote, combined with “living only by the five senses and the body (through impressions) causes direct merging with surroundings.” (33.) So it was that what he called the “joie de vivre tropicale” was “at once oppressive and stimulating—broadens horizons and paralyzes you utterly” (80). The “strong zodiacal light” of the tropics (71) produced a false intellectual dawn in which responding attentively to light and distance was a substitute for responding attentively to “ethnogr. studies”. Such sea-visions were evasive in a second sense, too: evocative as they were they grew towards writing “consciously composed as art” rather than the “natural disorder and emphasis” upon which diary writing depends. They were a writerly addiction, just as reading Kipling’s stories was a readerly one.15 15

Understandably enough, a good deal of academic interest has arisen out of comparing Malinowksi in the Trobriands with Conrad up the Congo (see James Clifford, “On Ethnographic Self-Fashioning: Conrad and Malinowski”, in Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, and David E. Wellbery (eds.), Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 140–62, and Christina Thompson, “Anthropology’s Conrad: Malinowski in the Tropics and What He Read”, Journal of Pacific History, 20:1 (1995), 53–75). But Argonauts of the Western Pacific

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Only on land could Malinowski escape the zodiacal light of aestheticism, or convert it into tactile intellectual value. “Here and there you can see the green slopes of the surrounding hills”, he told himself at the end of October 1914, “but otherwise the thickets cover everything.” We crossed a muddy little river. A garden on one slope. I stopped to rest when we came to a little burned patch. It was hot and very humid, I felt fairly well. I began to climb up through the overgrown garden and impassable paths. Slowly a vista opened up: a flood of green; a steep ravine overgrown with jungle; a rather narrow view on the sea. I asked about the division of land. It would have been useful to find out about the old [pre-colonial?] system of division and study today’s as a form of adaptation. I was very tired, but my heart was all right and I was not short of breath…. (32) The overgrown gardens and impassable paths slowly give way to a vista, and Malinowski’s sentences expand to encompass it: “a flood of green” and a “narrow view” emerge that prompt genuine ethnographic enquiries into systems of land ownership. It is the first inkling of a breakthrough: “my heart was all right”. Malinowski’s seascapes are overwhelmingly visual spectacles, but the ­jungle—being what it is—requires a synaesthetic response. “I am beginning to concentrate and to relax!” he wrote triumphantly in February 1915: Plans for the future…. As I walked I threw enormous shadows on the palms and mimosas by the road; the smell of the jungle creates a characteristic mood—the subtle, exquisite fragrance of the green keroro flower, lewd swelling of the burgeoning, fertilizing vegetation; frangipani—a smell as heavy as incense, with elegant, sharply drawn profile—a tree with an elegant silhouette, its green bouquet with blossoms carved in alabaster, smiling with golden pollen. Rotting trees, occasionally smelling like dirty socks or menstruation, occasionally intoxicating like a barrel of wine “in fermentation.” I am trying to sketch a synthesis: the open, joyous, bright mood of the sea—the emerald water over the reef, the blueness of is ­generally speaking a far more “Conradian” book than the Diary: in particular the “halo of romance” that Malinowski ascribes to kula and the value he gives to vessels in general: “a craft, whether of bark or wood, iron or steel, lives in the life of its sailors, and is more to the sailor than a mere bit of shaped matter.” (Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), 86, 351.)

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the sky with tiny clouds like snowflakes. The atmosphere of the jungle is sultry, and saturated with a specific smell which penetrates and drenches you like music. (85) Only a day or two before he had played with what he called “literary conceptions”: “in the beauty of a landscape I rediscover woman’s beauty or I look for it” (83). But this passage forgoes that kind of aesthetic self-indulgence and yokes a genuine realism to a diary-style presentation. His plans are accompanied by an olfactory, visual, and auditory sequence that is realistic rather than zodiacal, scientific rather than poetic. The subtle and the exquisite are penetrated by the lewd; “blossoms carved in alabaster” are “smiling with golden pollen” in a bucolic idyll; dirty socks and menstruation give way to wine in ferment; and everything is intellectually in ferment, too, so that the ethnographer can imagine a burgeoning and fertile synthesis of “sea-values” (joyous and bright; visual) with “jungle-values” (sultry and drenching; musical) that would be lasting and real: “filled with the bliss of direct contact” and a “genuineness of the mood” (85). The last entry in the first diary was written amid the Whitsunday Islands, half way between Cairns and Brisbane on the Queensland coast. It recuperates New Guinean themes and it poetically infuses the vision from on board ship with an intellectual vision of progress and (limited) achievement, requiring further immersion in reality: Should like to make a synthesis of this voyage. Actually the marvelous sights filled me with noncreative delight. As I gazed, everything echoed inside me, as when listening to music. Moreover I was full of plans for the future.—The sea is blue, absorbing everything, fused with the sky. At moments, the pink silhouettes of the mountains appear through the mist, like phantoms of reality in the flood of blue, like the unfinished ideas of some youthful creative force. You can just make out the shapes of the islands scattered here and there—as though headed for some unknown destination, mysterious in their isolation, beautiful with the beauty of perfection—self-sufficient. (98) Malinowski would require two more terms of fieldwork to chasten such visions of self-sufficiency; but something has been achieved nevertheless, even at this early stage. Above all there are plans for the future, but accompanying them there are other reflections: the hope of synthesis; the onset of “noncreative delight”; the sense of internal echoing, intellectual, sensory, or both; the sea fuses into the sky in one uninterrupted vision; mountain silhouettes appear,

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“like phantoms of reality in the flood of blue” and “like the unfinished ideas of some youthful creative force”, to which he can now lay claim; the scientist feels himself at last “headed for some unknown destination”, and the note is one of confidence, not trepidation and self-doubt.

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Painterly-cum-writerly escapes into the zodiacal light of the visual were one apparent distraction in New Guinea, though we can now perhaps see how they may sometimes have clarified the scientific task in hand, or at least made it appear practicable. Another was the reading of novels, an activity that Malinowski regarded with deep opprobrium but could not resist. A week after arriving in Mailu in late October 1914 he confessed he had spent the time badly. “I was much too disorganized. I finished Vanity Fair, and read the whole of [Conrad’s] Romance. I couldn’t tear myself away; it was as though I had been drugged.” “Life amid palm groves” might appear “a perpetual holiday”, “yet only a few days of it and I was escaping from it to the company of Thackeray’s London snobs, following them eagerly around the streets of the big city. […] I am incapable of burying myself in my work.” (16.) (The contrast between escape and burial speaks for itself, as does the relation between bingeing on fiction and being “disorganized”.) “The work I am doing is a kind of opiate rather than a creative expression,” he told himself some days later; “I am not trying to link it to deeper sources. To organize it. Reading novels is simply disastrous. Went to bed and thought about other things in an impure way.” (31.) (We note his intellectual desire to “link” and to “synthesize”, undermined by the literature of power.) “Bogged down” in The Count of Monte Christo, “I could not manage to come back to reality.” (35.) Malinowski’s reading, across the two diaries, is both broad (given the circumstances in which he was living) and compressed (in terms of genre). Most of what he read was fiction, and in the first diary he records reading Vanity Fair, stories by Gautier (“I felt their hollowness”; 59) and Maupassant, Victor Cherbuliez’ romance, L’aventure de Ladislas Bolski, The Count of Monte Christo (“Dumas, say what you will, has a certain fascination”; 62), Kipling’s Kim and Plain Tales from the Hills (“A fine artist (naturally not if compared with Conrad)”; 40–41), Fenimore Cooper’s The Pathfinder, Shakespeare (“leafed through”), the poems of “Laurence Hope” (“decidedly they are first-class”), W.W. Jacobs’ stories, H.G. Wells’ New Machiavelli, George Bernard Shaw, and George Moore’s ­Evelyn Innes—in short, the kind of books one might expect to find lying around in colonial New Guinea during the First World War.

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For non-fiction we find ­Jacobus de Voragine’s thirteenth-century hagiography, The Golden Legend, Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion (“A Study in the Relation of Military Power in Nations to their Economic and Social Advantage”), Edmund Candler’s Indian travelogue, The Mantle of the East, Ernest Renan (presumably the Vie de Jesus, but Malinowski is not specific), and William Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico. In the second diary there is more of what might be called trash: BulwerLytton and Arthur Conan-Doyle, possibly; certainly Maud Diver, George Barr McCutcheon’s Brewster’s Millions, Max Pemberton’s Wheels of Anarchy (“The Story of an Assassin”), William J. Locke’s Faraway Stories, The Glory of Clementina Wing, and The Wonderful Year, Joseph Hocking’s All for a Scrap of Paper (“A Romance of the Present War”), Walter Lionel George’s The Making of an Englishman (which Malinowski calls after its French hero, Cadoresse), Beatrice Grimshaw’s When the Red Gods Call, and Rolf Bennett’s Captain Calamity. (Revolt against the Fates and The Poker’s Thumb, mentioned by him, have disappeared even from sub-literary history; I do not know who wrote them.) But Kipling was still there, as was Wells (Kipps and Tono-Bungay), Robert Louis Stevenson (Vailima Papers and Vailima Letters), and Meredith; so was Swinburne and Charlotte Brontë; so was Ford Madox Ford’s wartime fantasy, Zeppelin Nights, Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (in the Trobriands, of all places), Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles (which left “a strong, though unpleasant impression”; 190), and a suite of French classics borrowed from a local resident: Montesquieu, Hugo, Chateaubriand, de Lamartine, and Prevost. Last but not least, The Brothers Karamazov. It is not accurate, then, to conclude that “Malinowski’s novels … are decidedly a middle-class-to-mass lot: bestsellers … and, in general, materials that a figure like Malinowski classified as ‘trashy novel[s].’”16 There are many random items but there is also a group of books relating directly to the ongoing war, to which Malinowski’s mother and homeland were directly exposed and in which his fiancée’s first lover had been killed, at Gallipoli. Angell’s The Great Illusion, for example, was an idealistic theory on the unnecessary connection between militarism and economic growth, which predicted (as late as 1911) that “physical force is a constantly diminishing factor in human affairs”;17 Zeppelin Nights is a Bocaccian cycle of historical stories told during an air raid; All for a Scrap of Paper rotates around a Quaker pacifist (“A very inferior novel but the ­patriotic 16 17

Scott Michaelson and David E. Johnson, Anthropology’s Wake: Attending to the End of C ­ ulture (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 14. Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study in the Relation of Military Power in Nations to their Economic and Social Advantage, 3rd edn. (London: Heinemann, 1911), 144.

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tone moved me”; 209); the title of a collection of poems, Memorial for Fallen Soldiers, tells its own tale; and Kipling’s A Diversity of Creatures contains his most powerful war stories: “Mary Postgate” and “‘Swept and Garnished’”. The kula cycle might have seemed a long way away from such concerns; but then perhaps such “primitive” cultural arrangements prevented warfare, and perhaps militarism was (Angell’s view to the contrary) a peculiarly modern curse. These were hardly matters of indifference to an ethnologist at work in Melanesia. But there is a broader view that could be taken of Malinowski’s books: that they concern the nature of society, its resistance to change, and its relation to the individual. It is true that a historian like Prescott showed little interest in Mesoamerican culture as such (which he refers to loftily as “domestic manners”); but the novelists Malinowski read were, by contrast, fascinated by society and its discontents. To what extent did his holiday reading, then, in fact encourage his ethnographic studies? Malinowski read stories about heroes and heroines transforming themselves into social successes—or failing to do so. The hero of Brewster’s Millions has to make that transition on unexpectedly coming into a fortune; the same fate descends on the heroes of Kipps and Tono-Bungay and even the heroine of Jane Eyre, after a more modest fashion. The Making of an Englishman involves a Frenchman aspiring to transit from a culture on one side of the Channel to one on the other. In Vanity Fair and Tess of the D’Urbervilles two heroines are lifted from their humble stations in life as governess or milkmaid, for better or for worse; both books are comments on society, whether comic or tragic. George Moore’s Evelyn Innes, about a successful but unhappy opera singer who abandons a life of adultery for her native Catholicism, also meditates on the place of an individual as regards social structures. Evelyn “was weary of living in the inhospitable regions outside of prejudice and authority”, Moore tells us: She felt it was prejudice and authority that gave a meaning, or a sufficient semblance of a meaning, to life as it was; she was a helpless atom tossed hither and thither by every gust of passion as a leaf in the whirlwind, and she longed to understand herself and her mission in life.18 Malinowski was not a student of Catholicism; but no wonder the novel left a “strong impression” (99) on an ethnographer for whom prejudice and authority were mysteries he was trying to penetrate. Villette (in which Malinowski found the same “feminine tact, intuition, grasp of inwardness of things and longing for life” that he associated with that other sub-ethnographic classic, 18

George Moore, Evelyn Innes (1898; London: Ernest Benn, 1929), 208.

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Pride and Prejudice; 200) is also a meditation on “inhospitable regions outside prejudice and authority” and the hero’s inability as a Catholic to overcome his anti-Protestant superstition. “What limits are there,” Heger asks Lucy Snowe, “to the wild, careless daring of your country and sect?”19 Between them all these novels, highbrow or middlebrow, suggest that social communities are the most complex objects individuals can encounter, and that outsiders run grave risks in seeking to acquaint themselves with societies into which they are not born, or leave those in which that they have been brought up. Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes and the more lowly Letters of a ­Chinaman (“To English Readers on the English and Chinese Superstitions and the Mischief of Missionaries”) by “Ah Sin” highlighted cultural difference, as did ­Candler’s Mantle of the East, the final chapter of which (“London”) concerns the inability of an expatriate to re-settle in what had once been his home. And many of the novels Malinowski read have an almost manifestly “ethnographic” quality, from Fenimore Cooper’s Great Lakes to Thackeray’s London, and Hardy’s Wessex to Dostoevsky’s Novgorod, the sociology of which Dostoevsky catalogues with lavish attention to detail. From his correspondence with his future wife we know that Malinowski noted “a rather weak story of Kipling” (“Regulus”: a Stalky tale) which, all the same, “is right in showing the necessity of a humanistic education”. (“Balance, proportion, perspective—life”, Kipling’s Latin master lectures a chemistry teacher: “Your scientific man is the unrelated animal—the beast without background. Haven’t you ever realized that in your atmosphere of stinks?”)20 In his tent in the Trobriands Malinowski ran the risk of becoming the “unrelated animal” Kipling describes, by virtue in fact of ­persisting in his “background” in Poland and failing to achieve balance, ­proportion, and perspective. He describes Kim, on the other hand, as “a very interesting novel, gives a great deal of information about India” (41)—as well it might, given that a central character in the novel is both an ethnologist and a spy. No beast is without a background in Kim, and the texture of the book exists at a border between fiction and a form of Anglo-Indian ethnography: They were sons of subordinate officials in the Railway, Telegraph, and ­Canal Services; of warrant-officers, sometimes retired and sometimes 19 20

Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. Tim Dolin and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 418. Helena Wayne (ed.), The Story of a Marriage: The Letters of Bronislaw Malinowski and Elsie Masson, 2 vols. (London: Routledge, 1995), i. 135, and Rudyard Kipling, A Diversity of Creatures, ed. Paul Driver (London: Penguin, 1987), 221.

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acting as commanders-in-chief to a feudatory Rajah’s army; of captains in the Indian Marine, Government pensioners, planters, Presidency shopkeepers, and missionaries. A few were cadets of the old Eurasian houses that have taken strong root in Dhurrumtollah—Pereiras, De Souzas, and D’Silvas. Their parents could well have educated them in England, but they loved the school that had served their own youth, and generation followed sallow-hued generation at St. Xavier’s. Their homes ranged from Howrah of the railway people to abandoned cantonments like Monghyr and Chunar; lost tea-gardens Shillong-way; villages where their fathers were large landholders in Oudh or the Deccan; Mission-stations a week from the nearest railway line; seaports a thousand miles south, facing the brazen Indian surf; and cinchona-plantations south of all. The mere story of their adventures, which to them were no adventures, on their road to and from school would have crisped a Western boy’s hair.21 Another thing such books suggest is that ethnography need by no means necessarily involve exotic peoples. In 1917 Malinowski sent Elsie Masson a copy of Zola’s La terre, which is ethnographically explicit in a wholly different territory. “You’re a breed that has reached the end of its tether,” the schoolmaster, Aristide Lequeu tells his village audience in the public house in Beauce: You’ve been eaten up by your idiotic love of the land, that miserable bit of land which has got you by the short hair, which prevents you from seeing any further than your noses, which you’d commit murder for! You’ve been wedded to the land for centuries and she’s made you into cuckolds. Look at America, the farmer is master of his land there. There’s nothing to attach him to it, no family link, no memories. As soon as his field is exhausted, he moves on. If he hears that five hundred miles away they’ve discovered more fertile plains, he ups and settles there. He’s free and he’s making a lot of money, whereas you’re just poverty-stricken prisoners. “I wonder whether you will see”, Malinowski wrote to Masson about Zola’s novel, “why it strikes me as somewhat akin in its tendency to my Kiriwinian efforts.”22 The coral garden was the antithesis of the Nebraskan prairie.

21 22

Rudyard Kipling, Kim, ed. Edward W. Said (London: Penguin, 1987), 171–72. Emile Zola, The Earth, trans. Douglas Parmée (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980), 455; Wayne, Story of a Marriage, i. 13.

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The most forthright of these novelists as regards a quasi-ethnographical vision of society is H.G. Wells and his anatomizing of the English class system. Kipps and Tono-Bungay both involve lower middle-class heroes suddenly thrust into society, the one by inheritance the other by the profits from a bogus panacea. “The fact is”, the socialist Masterman tells Kipps, “society is one body, and it is either well or ill. That’s the law. This society we live in is ill. It’s a fractious, feverish invalid, gouty, greedy, ill-nourished.” “The great house, the church, the village and the labourers and the servants in their stations and degrees”, Ponderevo tells us in his opening chapter, “seemed to me … to be a closed and complete social system…. That all this fine appearance was already sapped, that there were forces at work that might presently carry this elaborate social system … to Limbo, had scarcely dawned upon me even by the time that Tono-Bungay was fairly launched upon the world.”23 But it was The New M ­ achiavelli that had the profoundest impact on Malinowski, since its hero was a fully blown intellectual rather than a “helpless atom” like Evelyn Innes. “Many statements impressed me extraordinarily,” Malinowski recorded (78); “moreover, he is very like me in many respects. An Englishman with an entirely European mentality and European problems.” The New Machiavelli has not aged well; nowadays it looks like a latter-day Disraelian fantasy in which English social ills can or should be corrected by an intellectual elite that masters what Wells pretentiously calls “constructive statecraft”. “We imaginative people”, his narrator Richard Remington points out, “are base enough, heaven knows, but it is only in rare moods of bitter penetration that we pierce down to the baser lusts, the viler shames, the everlasting lying and muddle-headed self-justification of the dull.”24 The “tough-minded” Remington has “emerged into the new Nominalism” and plans “to show a contemporary man in relation to the state and social usage, and the social organism in relation to that man”, just as Malinowski sought “to realise the vision of the world, as it is reflected in the minds of the natives.”25 The post-Fabian fantasy was something Malinowski could take or leave; the desire thoroughly to know a society and see through its superficies to what he called (with Tono-Bungay in mind) the “socio-­psychological correspondences” underpinning it (286) was an intellectual intoxicant. If Wells could demonstrate that ability in fictional London, could Malinowski not do so in the non-fictional Trobriands? 23 24 25

H.G. Wells, Kipps, ed. Simon J. James (London: Penguin, 2005), 230; and Tono-Bungay, ed. Patrick Parrinder (London: Penguin, 2005), 15. H.G. Wells, The New Machiavelli, ed. Simon J. James (London: Penguin, 2005), 291, 249. Ibid. 316, and Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific, 298.

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iv

The features of the Diary I have described thus far are common to both instalments of the journal. There are fewer seascapes in the second diary, it is true, but they are just as intense. And it is in the second journal that he describes fiction as a “window open on life” (278). But two developments bring the second journal to an unprecedented pitch. The first was his liaisons with Elsie Masson and Nina Stirling. (He compared both to Tess Durbeyfield: Nina as Hardy’s maiden; Elsie as the “maiden no more” to whom, like Angel Clare, he was betrothed; 189, 149–50.) The second development was the undertaking, made in its first entry, of 10 November 1917, to “start keeping the diary with real determination” (110)—which proved mostly well founded. There would be few more interruptions and retrospects, and to miss an entry even for a day merited the rebuke, “very bad!” (129.) The strictness of the diarist revealed the delinquence of the ethnographer, however. At the hospital in Samarai he recorded, “mentally I caressed the ‘matron,’ who seems an attractive dish. […] I fondled her and undressed her in my mind, and I calculated how long it would take me to get her to bed. […] In short, I betrayed [Elsie] in my mind.” (109.) Fantasies of Elsie in propria persona did nothing to counteract these specular temptations. “I wanted to have her near me again. Visions of her with her hair down. Does intense longing always lead to extremes? Perhaps only under mosquito netting.—Woke up at night, full of lecherous thoughts about, of all the people imaginable, my landlord’s wife! This must stop!” Such “momentary moral disorders” (110) produced what Malinowski later called “a strong aversion to sloshing in the mud (onanism, whoring, etc.)” (181)—though such aversions were themselves short-lived. (“Resistance to lecherous thoughts weaker”; 131.) Intermittently and with the passage of time all these elements—landscape, literature, sex, and morality, not to mention his health—began to intermingle and become attached to his recurrent need for intellectual clarification: to see deeper into the life going on around him, and to understand in particular the Trobiander’s “main passions, the motives for his conduct, his aims.” (“At this point we are confronted with our own problems: What is essential in ourselves?” 119). The ethnologist would not see in the same way as Hardy, Conrad, or Zola but he might hope to see as deeply. Clarity of vision, putting recreational literature in its rightful place, seeing life with Elsie as commensurate with life in “this rotten hole” (201), and having the personal discipline to abjure “telesentimental monomania” (181) and to integrate all those needs in a deeper understanding of both himself and the Islanders: these aims gradually

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became centripetal rather than centrifugal. “This morning,” he told himself in January 1918, “it occurred to me that the purpose in keeping a diary and trying to control one’s life and thoughts at every moment must be to consolidate life, to integrate one’s thinking, to avoid fragmenting themes.” (175.) The desire to link and to synthesize emerges once more, alongside a “reaching after fact & reason” which is the reverse of “irritable”. The nascent social scientist urges forces of “consolidation” in himself; where the artist fears what Dorothy Walsh calls “dissolution in explanation” Malinowski craves integration and dreads fragmentation. Gradually, even if the forces of intellectual chaos grew little weaker, the forces of intellectual clarification grew more potent. Thus in March 1918 he started a sequence of entries in which Elsie was not held off in opposition to the work he was doing but was identified with it: “how wonderful it would be to have her here” (214)—not for the purpose of self-gratification but in order that she might see what he was doing. “Thought about E.R.M. and referred material to her.” (217.) By December 1917 he was already paving the way towards his anti-historical, “cultural” analytical perspective: Under the mosquito net I thought about relation between the historical point of view ([…]causality as in respect of extraordinary, singular things) and the sociological point of view (in respect of normal course of things, the sociological law in the sense of the laws of physics, chemistry). “Historicists” à la [W.H.R.] Rivers = investigate geology and geological “history,” ignoring the laws of physics and chemistry. (161) Arguably, history tends to record what gets laid down in time, stratigraphically, rather than what the layers are made of, which could be the anthropologist’s realm. Some days later came a longer passage that is clearly climactic, oceanic in its clarity but this time no longer a painterly end in itself: Distinct feeling that next to this actual ocean, different every day, covered with clouds, rain, wind, like a changing soul is covered with moods—that beyond it there is an Absolute Ocean, which is more or less correctly marked on the map but which exists outside all maps and outside the reality accessible to [observation]. This sounds like Platonism, and Malinowski wonders briefly whether he is contemplating the “emotional origin” of that system of thought, before coming back to reality in a way that the diary format compels:

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Came back, sat on the beach. Moonlit night. White sand, over it dark shapes squat, in the distance, the sea and the profiles of mountains. Combination of moods: Baia di Napoli and Gumawana “from inside.” Thought about how to describe all this for E.R.M. The moon, the sea, the mood. The moon induces a specific, clearly defined mood, I hum “[Laraisebrue], and then there was Suzanna, pretty, pale, and virtuous.” Expression of feelings, complementary social milieu, imaginary. Suddenly I tumble back into the real milieu with which I am also in contact. Then again suddenly they stop existing in their inner reality. I see them as an incongruous yet artistic and [savage], exotic  =  unreal, intangible, floating on the surface of reality, like a multicoloured picture on the face of a solid but drab wall. (234–35) This is a remarkable revelation, part “instrumental and scientific”, part imaginative: “Expression of feelings, complementary social milieu, imaginary.” The Trobrianders squat like sago palms (or the columns of an Egyptian temple), strong and obtuse; but their black shapes complement the white sand and blend with the timeless profiles of the mountains behind them. The Bay of Naples and the tropical village combine, and both are worthy of the ethnologist’s wife-to-be. The reverie, instinct with European cultural archetypes (“pretty, pale, and virtuous”), gives way to reality with which the ethnologist is, at last, “also in contact”. Then the villagers float off again from his concentration, but the effect is not as damaging as it seems. They constitute a multicoloured picture, unreal and intangible—but then so do we all: none of us is anything other than a projection on the face of that “solid but drab wall” of socio-psychological correspondences that we inscribe and which inscribes us. All we can say is that perhaps Malinowski got his emphasis wrong: that wall is drab but solid, not solid but drab. Back in 1914 the image had been that of “shadows cast on the screen of the fog” (38) or (in 1915) “shadows of reality projected on the screen of appearances” (90). Even a few months earlier he had compared “the reflection of fleeting shimmering gleams on the rippling changing surface” to what he called “the immense smile of the depths” (186). In March the shadows are thrown onto something more substantial and less vertiginous. The underlying reality is no longer an invisible, unattainable Platonic ideal, but a man-made structure, utilitarian and obtuse, no doubt, but solid and dependable just the same. Earlier Malinowski had recorded, alongside his “tendency to read rubbish”, that his “thoughts pull me down to the surface of the world” (131); now the surface of the world is comprehended in much richer terms, whereas “the principles of association by space, time, similarity are just the most external

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­categories, which give hardly any clue at all” (236). Perhaps that “rubbish” by Charlotte Brontë, Thackeray, and Dostoevsky was not what it appeared.

v

The deaths of two people usher in the resolution of this puzzle and the end of the Diary. On 24 January 1918, Inekoya, the wife of a local informant, died a drawn-out and painful death on the very day that Malinowski’s mother died in Poland. Malinowski prevaricated in response to Inekoya’s demise, noting first that “all my despair, after those killed in the war, hangs over this miserable Melanesian hut”, before confessing that he only pretended to weep in visiting her husband (196). But Inekoya’s death coincided with a period of depression, illness, and decision about Elsie and the sickly Nina (whom he identified with the dead villager) that also coincided with the kula season. Five months later, on 11 June, already assailed by “metaphysical feeling[s] of precariousness of things” (283), he received news of his mother’s death, which reconfirmed “the terrible mystery that surrounds the death of someone dear, close to you” (293). The diary broke up by the beginning of July, but not before Malinowski recorded finding himself at a new plane of mental understanding: Now I often have the feeling of being at “the bottom of consciousness”— the feeling of the physical foundation of mental life, the latter’s dependence on the body, so that every thought that flows effortlessly in some psychic medium has been laboriously formed inside the organism. […] I went for a walk; it was drizzling, night was falling, the damp road glistened in the twilight. (294) The realization here is a complete one even if it remains only a feeling: “that every thought that flows effortlessly in some psychic medium has been laboriously formed inside the organism”. That is true not only of Trobriand Islanders, in their dealings with each other and the world, but of anthropologists, and A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term is the record not only of that realization but also of its own laborious formation amid the patterns of experience it transcribes. The intellectual medium in which apprehensions and comprehensions of various kinds mingle and cohabit is something as laboriously formed by discursive thinkers on their side of the net as by imaginative ones on theirs; but once it has been ushered into existence—always around a project, originating in scientific research or artistic creativity—thoughts of all kinds “flow effortlessly”, whatever their final nature or destination.

Conclusion “Art is the foundation, the soil, the womb and night of the spirit; all experience issues forth from it and rests upon it; all education begins with it; all religion, all science, are as it were specialized and peculiar modifications of it. Art is the sleep of the soul; as a baby does little but sleep, so the infant soul knows hardly any experience but art; as a grown man sleeps from his labours, so the awakened spirit returns into art to find new strength and inspiration, going down into that as into the fountain in which Hera renewed her virginity.” Perhaps after looking at Malinowski’s diary we are in a position to decode some of these grandiose metaphors with which Collingwood is so lavish. ­Malinowski is a scientist; his is the realm of acquaintance rather than description, of assertion, the literature of knowledge, and cognitive truth. What then should he have to do with the languages and resources of art, or the fountain in which Hera renewed her virginity? In the ethnographic journal he kept in New Guinea he found no use for such fripperies, but in the diary in the strict sense of the term, the personal one, the literature of power plays not one but two vital roles. First of all, in it Malinowski wrote imaginatively, creatively, often indulging himself—or so it seems—with extravagant land- and seascapes, as if he were bent on re-writing Noa Noa. But we saw that such passages often appear to be direct correlatives for his relations with and attitude to his intellectual subject matter: Melanesian ethnography. The village near Port Moresby given over to “a mood of exile or imprisonment” and producing in him only what he comically called “pointophobia”; the mangroves “where it is impossible to walk three steps through the thick tangle of roots and soft mud”; the sago palms with their “strength, obtuseness, geometric monstrosity” are emblems of frustration. But the moment when overgrown gardens and impassable paths gave way to a “vista”, “a flood of green”, “a rather narrow view on the sea”, and (accompanying this) an intellectual enquiry into “the old system of division” operating on the native gardens: on this occasion and others like it the landscape patently stands for a breakthrough in his work. In a similar spirit the “zodiacal light” of the sea and the sky often seems to stand quite directly for the enquiring intellect, like that “perfect image of a mighty Mind” vouchsafed to Wordsworth on Mount Snowdon in the last book of The Prelude. “The pink strip of sunset gradually expanding, covering the sea with a moving blanket of rosy metal”; “pale shapes loom up out of the eternity of blueness … one after the other comes into being and passes away”; “the sea is blue, absorbing everything, fused with the sky … phantoms of reality in the flood of blue”: all these visions are “exalted by an underpresence”, as Wordsworth called it, which © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���8 | doi 10.1163/9789004356856_011

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is Malinowski’s immense intellectual effort to apprehend and comprehend a world so remote from his beloved “Tatras mountains at Olcza, where you’d like to lie down and embrace the landscape physically—where every corner whispers with the promise of some mysteriously experienced happiness.” What I am trying to suggest is that these interludes are not the superficial and escapist doodlings of a hyper-educated early twentieth-century Westerner in a state of culture shock, as early reviewers of the Diary tended to conclude. But then neither are they consciously intended pieces of intellectual ­exploration. They are the foundation, soil, womb, and night of Malinowski’s ethnography: the expressions of a man pregnant with a message that he cannot deliver, and who knows that he means something but cannot tell what. (“When you know what you mean, you have achieved philosophy; but when you know you mean something, and cannot tell what, you have already achieved something…”: the philosophy may emerge in due course.) These zodiacal visions serve this vital purpose: to maintain the ethnographer in his belief that there is a job to do and that it can be done, that vistas will open up, seas and skies will fuse, and the silhouettes of knowledge will emerge from the mist. “Art is the cutting edge of the mind, the perpetual outreaching of thought into the unknown, the act in which thought eternally sets itself a fresh problem.” That is why it is at the source of all thought, and not simply an entirely imaginative expression or intuition. “Strictly speaking all experience is aesthetic, because imagination is a factor in every single cognitive act; and no experience is purely aesthetic, because there is no concrete experience from which the logical act of assertion is wholly absent”: and if ever there was a monument to such a notion, and the related one that “experience as such is not partly intuitive and partly conceptual, it is all intuitive and all conceptual”1 the A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term is that monument. It is a monument, too, to intellectual supposal as Collingwood considered it: “a question which expects no answer” but which eventually discovers one all the same—of Roger Scruton’s “unconcealing of what is … hidden from us”. So much for Malinowski as a writer in the Diary. What of him as a reader— a guilty and compulsive reader of almost everything except ethnography? Surely these mostly threadbare books were a distraction from his real work, as he constantly remarked? (“Reading novels is simply disastrous”; “it was as though I had been drugged”.) Looked at in an “instrumental and scientific way”,

1 R.G. Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, or The Map of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1924), 83, 95; my italics.

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as Roger Scruton puts it, no doubt they were. But they had a parallel role to play in the foundation, soil, womb, and night of the project that would eventually spawn half a dozen ethnographic masterpieces, from Argonauts of the Western Pacific to Coral Gardens and Their Magic. If visions of land and seascapes kept Malinowski in a state of unconscious reassurance about the capacity of his intellect to deliver what it was carrying, the books (especially the novels, and especially the ones by, say, Dostoevsky, Kipling, Charlotte Brontë, Zola, Hardy, Thackeray, H.G. Wells, and George Moore) implicitly reminded and reassured him that however inaccessible they may appear peoples and societies could be known and understood, whether in imaginative or discursive terms. Escaping “life amid palm groves” in favour of “the company of Thackeray’s London snobs,” and “following them eagerly around the streets of the big city”; contemplating the fates of Lucy Snowe in Villette, Tess Durbeyfield in Wessex, and Evelyn Moore in London—never mind the Karamazov brood in Novgorod; witnessing Kipling and Zola evoking mountain India and rural France (by contrast with that “unrelated animal”, as Kipling called him, “the beast without background”); eavesdropping on Wells’ rampantly over-intellectualized dirigiste visions of social control: all these instances made it clear to him that societies were real, were unique, and had transformative effects on the individuals who made them up, for better or for worse: “like a multicoloured picture on the face of a solid but drab wall”. These works of fiction—and this is a point of direct relevance to the anti-cognitivist arguments rehearsed in Chapter 1—point to the real world, even if it is nominally fictionalized in Villette and Tess; they are truth-directed uses of falsehood, as Roger Scruton has suggested. The reality of social life, unconcealed in fiction and in non-fiction alike, lies behind the vision of his life and his discipline that Malinowski was able to achieve in his preface to Argonauts of the Western Pacific: The goal is, to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world. We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him. In each culture, the values are slightly different; people aspire after different aims, follow different impulses, yearn after a different form of happiness. In each culture, we find different institutions in which man pursues his life-interest, different customs by which he satisfies his aspirations, ­different codes of law and morality which reward his virtues or punish his defections. To study the institutions, customs, and codes or to study the behaviour and mentality without the subjective desire of feeling by  which these people live, of realizing the substance of their

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­ appiness—is, in my opinion, to miss the greatest reward which we can h hope to obtain from the study of man.2 Manifestly this is testimony to “our instrumental and scientific ways of dealing with the world”. But there had been a time in 1914 and 1915 when this Olympian vision of social science must have seemed impossible to its future author. Then he was lost in supposal, and perhaps would have responded sympathetically to his compatriot’s anti-scientific jeremiad: Art for me is an end in itself. Conclusions are not for it. And it is superior to science, in so far that it calls on us with authority to behold! to feel! Whereas science at best can only tell us—it seems so! And thats all it can do. It talks to us of the Laws of Nature. But thats only one of its little jokes. It has never discovered anything of the sort. It has made out with much worry and blundering a certain sequence of facts beginning in the dark and leading god knows where. Perhaps no artist has made the point so well as Conrad does here, in a kind of wilful ignorance that is practically sublime. Worry and blundering afflicted Malinowski with painful insistence in New Guinea; “it seems so” was all that he could say, even to himself, for months on end. But Art’s capacity to make him behold and feel kept him engaged in his studies just the same, until some laws of human nature appeared out of the mist.

...

Very well—and it is telling that Collingwood the philosopher has outlined a case that suits Malinowski the social scientist. That case does indeed suggest that a scientist can have recourse to the fountain in which Hera renewed her virginity, and can retain as a dream what he must eventually discover as a reality. Before he can build, he must believe that it is possible to do so, that it is worth doing, and that others have committed themselves to similar endeavours, as did the novelists who were Malinowski’s precursors. But what about the creative writers whose efforts have been assessed here, from William Wordsworth to James Kelman? There, it seems to me, the attitude must be tellingly different—though it may betray certain similarities, given that any kind of 2 Bronislaw Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1922), 25.

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intellectual undertaking (artistic or discursive, “cognitive” or “non-cognitive”) carries with it similar demands in terms of effort and concentration. Perhaps the first distinction to make concerns the dramatic or poetic writer’s cognitive relation to what he or she delivers. King Lear has featured as a touchstone of sorts on a few occasions in this book, and so has the critical work of S.L. Goldberg. Here is the critic on that play—and I must quote at length, given the value of the discussion: Lear … is not a pre-existing person for us (as he is for Kent, say) to whom Shakespeare has given insights to see (and for us to see with him), as if Lear existed apart from what he acknowledges, or as if we already knew these to be valid insights before the play leads us to acknowledge them as such. Nor in the case of Shakespeare himself does the meaning of his play consist in a number of pre-existing insights or truths, which we already knew to be truths and could see for ourselves if we looked hard enough, which Shakespeare is drawing to our attention, and which he personally endorses by making his hero eventually come to see them. The tissue of words and actions of which the various characters are created, and the total dramatic action comprising them all, are not a contingent, dispensable device by which Shakespeare tries to tell us his thoughts about life. There is no such device whose artistic “success” we could somehow measure, any more than we could somehow measure the “profundity” or “truth” of Shakespeare’s thoughts by reference to philosophers and theologians. His insights do not exist for us independently of the way he “happened” to put them (and it is unlikely, to say the least, that they existed in any such way for him either). They exist as insights only as what he “sees”, or more strictly, in what he causes us to “see”, or more strictly still, in what his art makes us acknowledge the reality to be. They are only truths and insights in so far as their dramatic medium as a whole realizes them as such. No single character, however noble, however much he is wronged by others, however much he suffers, however close to death, can be treated as a privileged device to “see” what Shakespeare meant to say in the play; nor can the meaning of the play lie in the meaning any single character comes to “see” in his own experience. That meaning is to be found in no less than everything in the dramatic world we have to acknowledge as both real and true to our sense of common life, and it consists in whatever we have to acknowledge its full substance and shape to be.3 3 S.L. Goldberg, An Essay on King Lear (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 42–43. Goldberg’s remarks on the relation of what dramatic characters “see” to the drama as a whole

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Here is a powerful case made, one would have to say, for the non-cognitivists of Chapter 1. For it apparently testifies to a mode of communication absolutely distinct from the world of assertion: a mode impossible to paraphrase, impossible to translate, and impossible to controvert. As a description of the unique conditions of dramatic art—writing in “a mode of dramatic tension” as Dorothy Walsh called it—it is hard to see how it could be improved upon. For writers intent upon what Joseph Conrad calls “the Laws of Nature” there must be a sense in which “pre-existing insights or truths” are pointed out and discovered in the work that they do; their insights indeed exist independently of the way they happen to put them, or they could not be open to scientific scrutiny. Not so for dramatists like Shakespeare or dramas like King Lear. But on the other hand, how strangely Goldberg echoes—of all things—Malinowski’s preface to the Argonauts! “The goal is, to grasp the native’s point of view, his relation to life, to realise his vision of his world.” “We have to study man, and we must study what concerns him most intimately, that is, the hold which life has on him.” “To study the institutions, customs, and codes or to study the behaviour and mentality without the subjective desire of feeling by which these people live … is, in my opinion, to miss the greatest reward which we can hope to obtain from the study of man.” Take “the natives” out of Malinowski’s formulations and is not the stress more remarkable for its similarities to the critic’s vision of the drama than its differences? Shakespeare’s “insights”—and Goldberg’s surrounding vocabulary suggests how finally unsatisfactory that term is—“exist as insights only as what he ‘sees’, or more strictly, in what he causes us to ‘see’, or more strictly still, in what his art makes us acknowledge the reality to be”. The “meaning” of King Lear “is to be found in no less than everything in the dramatic world we have to acknowledge as both real and true to our sense of common life, and it consists in whatever we have to acknowledge its full substance and shape to be”. Dramatic world, social world: Malinowski and Shakespeare alike “cause us to see” these things. The “hold which life has” on the Trobriand Islander, and the hold that Lear and his daughters (all three of them), their husbands, his fool, Gloucester, Edmund, Edgar, Kent, and all the rest have on life: Shakespeare and Malinowski alike evoke these things.4 relates to the entire discussion of anagnorisis in Chapter 6. Not even Macbeth’s magisterial summary of life as a tale told by an idiot can be said to be “the meaning” of the play in which he figures: a meaning which can only emerge out of the conflict between all the points of view it houses, from Banquo’s to the witches’. 4 In the previous chapter we saw Malinowski ponder the “relation between the historical point of view ([…] causality as in respect of extraordinary, singular things) and the sociological point of view (in respect of normal course of things, the sociological law in the sense of the

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The cardinal difference is that we have no way to measure “the ‘profundity’ or ‘truth’ of Shakespeare’s thoughts by reference to philosophers and theologians”: to that extent King Lear is “monadic” in comparison with a work of social science. The fact that Malinowski on the one hand and Shakespeare on the other be so readily compared suggests that Collingwood was not mad to suggest that, at its origins, thought is a combination of elements: The fact is that imagination never thus exists in vacuo, and therefore the problem of how it is to escape from its vacuum is an unreal problem, and insoluble because it is unreal. Supposal and assertion are not two independent chapters in the history of the mind; they are two opposite and correlative activities which form as it were the systole and diastole of knowledge itself. A crude empiricism imagines that knowledge is composed wholly of assertion: that to know and to assert are identical. But it is only when the knower looks back over his shoulder at the road he has travelled, that he identifies knowledge with assertion.5 The implications of this view for the philosophical positions set out in Chapter 1 hardly need spelling out by me. And artists can intimate this state of affairs from their side of the net, just as Malinowski could on his—though in an intellectually positivist era like his, there was less likelihood of a scientist (even a social scientist) acknowledging the imaginary than an artist acknowledging the real. There is something beyond the frame of Starry Night and Van Gogh knew that there was, just as the idea of the family forms the intellectual substrate for King Lear: otherwise there would be nothing to paint, nothing to write. But works of art have a tendency to form an exclusive relation with their creators, precisely because of that principle I tried to sketch in The Autonomy of Literature: that as they grow and develop works of art reveal their nature in a form of dialogue with those laws of physics, chemistry).” “Historicists’ à la Rivers”, he went on, “investigate geology and geological ‘history,’ ignoring the laws of physics and chemistry.” This may remind readers of a famous comment made by D.H. Lawrence about the fiction he intended to write after Sons and Lovers: “Like as diamond and coal are the same pure single element of carbon. The ordinary novel would trace the history of the diamond—but I say ‘diamond, what! This is carbon.’ And my diamond might be coal or soot, and my theme is carbon.” (James T. Boulton (ed.), The Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 78.) The desire in both writers to find the chemical element, so to speak, behind the historical or social allotrope is strikingly similar. 5 Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, 77.

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engaged upon them—a dialogue upon which every conceivable influence is converging, psychological, moral, historical, and expressive. This virtual relationship is the opposite of narcissistic, but it is or can feel exclusive, such is the power of its reciprocity. In Chapter 1 Iris Murdoch summarized Plato’s anxiety about the “degenerate anamnesis” of art, “where the veiled something which is sought and found is no more than a shadow out of the private store-room of the personal unconscious”—“timeless, radiant … separate … and unique”. If so creative a writer as Plato could entertain such anxieties about artistic narcissism, no doubt other creative writers do, too. Sir Philip Sidney also spoke of the poet “lifted up with the vigour of his own invention” and growing “another nature” by doing so. In Chapter 2 Collingwood spoke of the illusions and delusions of “a purely imaginative fairyland” that an artist might idealize. And so it is that just as Malinowski sank down with relief into the fountain in which Hera renewed her virginity so imaginative writers feel similarly compelled, intermittently, to rear up out of it and claim a connection with un-transmuted reality: what Hilary Putnam calls “moral perplexities in the widest sense”. Poets may occupy a golden world via description, as Sidney said, but they crave and are acquainted with the brazen one, too. So we find, amidst countless other examples, the stress Ben Jonson lays in the prologue to Every Man in His Humour on “deeds, and language, such as men do use” to “shew an image of the times” (as opposed to rusty swords and “some few foot and half-foot words”), and the stress Wordsworth lays in the preface to Lyrical Ballads on the “language really spoken by men”—though of course no dramatist, poet, or novelist could ever reproduce such a thing note for note, as Not Not While the Giro demonstrates. We find the postponement of the conventional marriages at the end of Love’s Labours Lost (“Our wooing doth not end like an old play:/Jack hath not Jill…”) and the plays within the plays that Shakespeare puts to such decidedly paratextual purposes (to discuss drama’s relation to reality in Hamlet, to show how the lovers could so easily have met a tragic end rather than a comic one in Midsummer Night’s Dream, and to remind us that Don Armado’s passion for the Nine Worthies is not to be sniggered at in Love’s Labours Lost itself, however absurd his manner of expressing it). We find Daniel Defoe’s droll insistence that Moll Flanders cannot tell her entire life story as certain events are sub judice; the various discussions of fiction and society in Northanger Abbey (the “neighbourhood of voluntary spies”, “roads and newspapers”, “the anxieties of common life”, and so forth); the drop of ink at the end George Eliot’s pen that allows her to show us Jonathan Burge’s “roomy workshop”; the last lines of Sons and Lovers, where we feel that the “faintly humming, glowing town” to which Paul Morel turns his steps is no longer a wholly fictional one; the comically inkhornish notes to The Waste Land; Stephen Dedalus’s meta-fictional disquisition

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on Shakespeare and paternity in the “Scylla and Charybdis” episode of Ulysses; D.H. Lawrence stating a preference for Etrurian funerary chests over the Elgin Marbles in Etruscan Places (“One wearies of the aesthetic quality—a quality which takes the edge of everything, and makes it seem ‘boiled-down’”):6 not to mention Wallace Stevens’ “Idea of Order at Key West” and countless other poems of his besides, and The Canterbury Tales more or less in its entirety. It is not the case, as Collingwood suggested in his polemical assault on empiricist psychologies of art, that the writer “knows nothing either of a real world … or of minds other than his own”, or that works of art are “windowless monads”. “Even if art is pure imagination”—and this it can never be, as he says—“it must spring from a soil of concrete fact”: “all imagination builds on fact and, as question, returns to fact”.7 Collingwood is of the view that artists and writers erroneously feel that they do exist in a world of pure imagination, when in fact they do not: the artist is “a person who has tried to be a dreamer and failed.”8 With the greatest of respect I am not sure that either “dream” or “failure” are the right terms. Building on fact and returning to it, as question, seems closer to the process, the autonomy of literature being what it is. Conrad was intellectually averse to scientists, and D.H. Lawrence is fully in denial of all those more sophisticated forms of thought that Collingwood described as emerging from the soil, womb, and night of art—religion, science, philosophy, and so on: The saint wishes to offer himself up as spiritual food for the multitude. Even Francis of Assisi turns himself into a sort of angel cake, of which anyone may take a slice…. The philosopher on the other hand because he can think, decides that nothing but thoughts matter. It is as if a rabbit, because he can make little pills, should decide that nothing but little pills matter…. To the scientist, I am dead. He puts under the microscope a bit of dead me, and calls it me. “Once and for all and for ever,” Lawrence asks, “let us have done with the ugly imperialism of the absolute.”9 There is surprisingly little written on the overall intellectual value and purpose of literature. We can begin to list the many 6 D.H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 164. 7 Collingwood, Speculum Mentis, 68, 71, 79, 80. 8 Ibid. 100. 9 D.H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 194–95, 196.

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forms that intellectual (as opposed to emotional) thought takes as seen from a philosophical point of view: empiricism, deduction and induction, the forming of concepts, the construction of analogies and systems, the testing of hypotheses, the relation of premise to inference, even heuristics and hermeneutics. But evidently literature hardly acts in any of these ways, being fundamentally poetic and dramatic. Is it possible to ascribe an intellectual purpose to it at all? Is its function perhaps to make ongoing war on the absolute—as Dorothy Walsh puts it, “without hankering after the simplicity of reduction, without hankering for dissolution in explanation”? What we can see, I think, is that imaginative literature provides a peculiarly flexible medium for ideas— “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” but without complacent withdrawal, either.

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Index Anagnorisis 119–21, 126, 205–6 Aurelius, Marcus 82–3, 86–7, 92 Babel, Isaac 26, 54 Bell, Clive 17 Blake, William 53 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre xi, 12 Byron, George Gordon, Lord 25, 74–95 Clare, John 53 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 12–13 Collingwood, R. G., The Principles of Art 33, 38–41 Speculum Mentis 41–50, 181, 201–202, 207, 209 Currie, Gregory 17–18 Conrad, Joseph 23, 122, 188–9, 204 Darwin, Charles 105, 113–14, 116, 121–24, 184 Diffey, T. J. 8, 17, 31 Eagleton, Terry 4–5 Eliot, George 41–2, 130–1 Adam Bede 20–21, 26–7 Eliot, T. S. 54 Elliott, R. K. 21, 25, 26, 31, 49 Gaut, Berys 14–16, 36 Goldberg, S. L. 24, 27, 28, 171, 205–6 Gombrich, Ernst 36–7 Graham, Gordon 19, 30, 31, 32 Hardy, Thomas 117–36 and roads 129–36 The Mayor of Casterbridge 120–1 Tess of the D’Urbervilles 120 The Woodlanders 124–36 Hazlitt, William 81 Hospers, John 7, 8, 18 Ibsen, Henrik, Little Eyolf 137–57 Ingarden, Roman 21–2 Joachim, Harold 45–6 Johnson, Samuel 10 Joyce, James, Dubliners 168

Keats, John 9, 13, 37, 50, 90 Kelman, James 158–80 Not Not While the Giro 169–80 Kharms, Daniil 35 Koethe, John 18, 19, 30–31 Lamarque, Peter, and Stein Haugom ­Olsen 4–5, 8, 12, 29–35 Langer, Susanne 7 Lansdown, Richard, The Autonomy of L­ iterature xi–ii, 28, 38–40, 50, 207–8 Lawrence, D. H. 23, 120, 205–6, 209 Leavis, F. R. 20, 27 Mailer, Norman 88 Malinowski, Bronislaw 181–200, 201–204 Argonauts of the Western Pacific 188–9,    2–3–4 A Diary in the Strict Sense of the Term 182–200 Mann, Thomas, Herr und Hund 26 Midgley, Mary 84 Monbron, Louis Charles Fougeret de 85 Montgomery, James 96–116 Morgan, Douglas N. 22–3, 25 Murdoch, Iris 6–7, 11 New Historicism x, 38 Novitz, David 15–16, 46 Nussbaum, Martha 24 Philodemus 83 Plato 6–7, 9–10 Pound, Ezra, “In a Station of the Metro” 34 Protagoras 83–4 Putnam, Hilary 24 Ruskin, John 28 Santayana, George 87–8 Scholes, Robert 17 Scruton, Roger 27, 31, 35, 181 Shakespeare, William, King Lear 8, 12, 16, 120, 137, 205–6 Sidney, Sir Philip 10–12 Sparshott, F. E. 26

222 Stevenson, Robert Louis 130 Stolnitz, Jerome 9, 22 Van Gogh, Vincent, Starry Night 17, 207 Worthington, Glenn 17 Walsh, Dorothy 7, 8, 23, 24, 32, 49–50

Index Williams, Bernard 84 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 35–6 Wood, Justice Diane P. 32–3 Wordsworth, William 28, 53–73, 156 Worthington, Glenn 17