Something Missing

Sir,
It is a pity that Raymond Tallis's third article on 'The Survival of Theory' (PNReview 102), in which he effectively argues the precedence of an author's work over his or her personal or ideological shortcomings, should be marred by petty prejudice against Brecht ('a total shit').

More serious, however, is the suggestion that Brecht provides justification for pseudoleft 'politically correct' cultural theories of the kind that Raymond Tallis so deplores. 'The key for moral overstanders,' we are told, 'is Brecht's assertion that 'To speak of trees is to pass over so many crimes in silence.'

Unfortunately for Raymond Tallis's argument, Brecht did not make such an assertion. What he did write, in his poem 'To those born after', written in exile from Nazi Germany on the eve of the Second World War, was: 'What kind of times are these, when/to talk of trees is almost a crime/Because it passes over so many misdeeds in silence!'

Raymond Tallis will surely appreciate the difference made by a few missing words and a missing context. Far from making a general statement about the immorality of leaving certain (political) things unsaid, Brecht looks forward in this poem (how naive can a total shit get?) to kinder times when it might no longer be necessary to rail against injustice. This makes the lines misquoted by Raymond Tallis singularly unsuitable for appropriation both by pseudo-left cultural theorists and by cultural conservatives. Poor unfashionable B.B.!

EDWARD MACKINNON
Eindhoven, Netherlands


Roads Not Taken?

Sir,
Raymond Tallis's spirited, commonsensical demolition of post-Saussurean theorrhoea has left me wondering how literary criticism might have developed had Messrs Barthes and Derrida failed to take over an unsuspecting critical establishment in. the later 1970s. Those old enough to remember how Leavis and Leavisites managed to destroy -chiefly through arrogance - the very values of high art and literary excellence they wished to promulgate may have forgotten that during the fifties and sixties literary criticism flourished in a climate of passionate disagreement. On the whole, disagreements among the critics gave health to literature. The great teachers in Britain and America were, after I.A Richards, Leavis himself, William Empson, R.P. Blackmuir, Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, D.W. Harding and a number of others, their work overlapping with that of philosophers (Wimsatt and Beardsley) and linguists (Sapir and de Saussure).

In 1970, Philip Hobsbaum, instigator of 'The Group' in London and Belfast and a lecturer at Glasgow University, published an exhaustive overview of then-existing literary disagreements. A Theory of Communication is still a remarkable book, grounded in enthusiasm for what Hobsbaum felt no embarrassment in terming 'great works of literature' and suggesting that the linguistic spedalisms that have since tom criticism into fragments might be reconciled by 'organicist' or holistic approaches to living works. The critic, he insists, should treat each work as a relevant unit of language. 'Any theory of [critical] language must be at once semantic [don't separate language from meaning], evaluative [some works are more valuable than others], contextual [in a work of literature words should not be considered out of context] and socially oriented [criticism should relate to the social implications of the text].' Hobsbaum goes on, 'All criticism, whatever its explicit avowals, tends towards evaluation. In a work of great value, interpretation and evaluation are the same process… Thus, when we say how good a specific poem is, we are also committing ourselves to a judgement of what it is about.' (A Theory of Communication, 208).

It is a measure of the confusion sewn by misguided semioticians that Hobsbaum's approach now sounds naive, or even like heresy in the light of deconstruction's anti-canon. Quite rightly, it seems to me, critics of Hobsbaum's generation were beginning to emphasize the role of the reader in recreating the work which, until it is read and understood, is of course no more than an arrangement of marks on a page.

Another critic who particularly emphasized the reader (in a way rather different from Hobsbaum, and indeed from Barthes, too) was the American educationalist Louise M. Rosenblatt who in a fine study entitled The Reader The Text The Poem (1978) differentiated between the paper and ink of a 'text' and the 'poem' the reader evokes or recreates during the act of reading. Dr Rosenblatt's book centres on what she calls the reader's 'transactional' relationship with the text, shifting the emphasis away from the author (who can be considered the text's first reader) to mental attitudes that affect the reader's response. In investigating the two-way nature of such responses Dr Rosenblatt lays emphasis on the state of mind a reader adopts towards a text even before he/she begins reading. An 'efferent' reading is a reading undertaken mainly for the purpose of gaining information; an 'aesthetic' reading implies participatory pleasure in evoking the work. Her arguments, based on the Ames-Cantril experiments in transactional psychology and the aesthetics of John Dewey, advocate a personal as opposed to a generic approach to the 'text'. And like Philip fIobsbaum's, her paramount purpose was to teach. The assumption for both rested in their love and respect for fine literature; they worked hard to create a criticism that might, show people how literary works of a high order could, as Wallace Stevens maintained, not only please people but 'help them to live their lives.'

ANNE STEVENSON
Llanbedr, Gwynedd


Inadvertent Power

Sir,
I, too, should like to join in applauding Raymond Tallis for his excellent teasing-out of the tangle of self-deception and deliberate deceit that is literary theory. I wonder, though, if he does not, in the justified heat of his polemic, make too much of an indulgence in 'theorrhoea' as a substitute for an essential powerlessness. Influence, unfortunately, is power, and these schoolchildren who 'will be encouraged to forget literature' by such as Eagleton are being abused by elders who do possess, and exercise, power.

Another matter is that though the 'deconstruction workers' are ever-eager to analyse 'the structure of authority', it seldom seems to occur to them that 'authority' and 'power' are as much at work within their world as in the great, nasty world outside. Yes, there are complaints that I have heard about the excessive number of WASP males who still hold powerful posts at American Universities (a deplorable situation now happily in the process of rectification), but it seldom seems to be admitted that a 'deconstruction worker', by virtue of holding an influential position within an influential institution, necessarily exercises power himself or herself, power in relation to the students he or she teaches and whose work he or she judges, power in the matter of recommending theses for prizes or publication, etc. and power, too, in the matter of who gets what job and who doesn't, if he or she is suffidently high up the academic ladder (those advertisements for jobs in departments of English mentioned by John Lucas in his good letter are not worded as they are by acddent).

It is this refusal to recognise the place of power and authority in all human affairs that strikes me as one of the most contemptible and dangerous aspects of the writings of certain of our 'theorists'; and it seems to me to be less self-deception, which in some circumstances is to an extent forgivable, than blatant dishonesty.

And it is also surely unwise to underestimate the power and influence of the academy (a power and influence that can certainly be for the good) by dividing it off from 'the real world'. Its power and influence are in the end as much exerdsed in the real world as is any other kind of authority, if perhaps less obviously, and talk about 'ivory towers' serves only to disguise this fact. In the arts, the academy is exerdsing more influence than it ever has done, and certainly not always to the good. For example, an extremely gifted American director of Shakespeare (among many other dramatists) was recently decrying to me the pernicious influence the academy is having on productions of Shakespeare in the States, young and impressionable directors being anxious to give to their productions an aura of academic respectability… and we know what ideas have academic respectability nowadays. (It is an interesting question as to how much a style or fashion is born of fear, and not out of any genuine belief.) For anyone who has a genuine interest in the arts, as opposed to chat about them, the matter is not trivial.

T.J.G. HARRIS
Tokyo


Durable Song

Sir,
My grandfather was a ledger clerk who walked six miles from Forest Gate to the city and back every weekday for 50 years at the same firm. I failed Eng. Lit. 'O' level at school, left school at sixteen, didn't go to university, and make signs for my living, and my 'retrospective solace' is MacDiarmid's: 'What I want… (is) a poetry with cosmic and dynamic features of magnitude and limitlessness suitable to the human soul', and without this dimension, I can't (and neither can Drew Milne) intervene constructively in the present (and neither can poetry).

James Keery (in PN Review 102) says of Drew Milne (writing in Parataxis) that he 'identifies the true cost of neglect to poets and potential reader alike'. Does he? To agree that posterity will have a clearer overview than either poets or editors now, of the hubbub and of poetry in it, is not 'in opposition to strategies of intervention in the present'. What Mr Milne does is to confuse the acknowledgement that posterity exists with his objection to people he supposes actually write for it. No one does, or 'contemporaneity' would be 'mortgaged to aesthetic ambition'.

What some do, is to project hope forward and represent contemporary things in the light of that perspective. This is thought to be writing for posterity only by those who rant against traditions and enduring values, believing that because some have been so, they must all be imposed subjective constructs. The ranter advocates that since &39;… It was difficult to sing in the face/of the object' we should '… accept what is/As good',. because'… the distant fails the clairvoyant eye'. Finally asking that we '… see the very thing and nothing else.!… without evasion by a single metaphor' (Wallace Stevens). He (and we, in his perspective) are without hope, for he denies that the very words we connote are constituted in a resonance within of what is without.

Being embittered and disenfranchised of a commonly shared reality, let's not invent a pseudo-science of objectivity in the hope that a common reality will appear, for if the subject disappears (together with authorship) so also does the possibility of an objective world. Instead, let intellectuals who hope to rid the world of arrogant subjectivity look to their own: get out of their ivory towers and test their terms and perspectives in the real world of discourse against those of other trades; for the lesson of contemporary physics is that descriptions of all phenomena depend on context and perspective. Truth inheres in things (and people) as they stand in relation.

It was Witold Gombrowicz who said (in Le Monde Dimanche 29 November 1981): '(Poetry) is no longer the sensibility of the common man, but that of other poets, a sensibility of the professional; and among professionals, (poets) create a language as inaccessible as certain dialects of technology… so that one might define the professional poet as one who does not express himself because he expresses verse.'

It is not for nothing that George Steiner (as quoted in PN Review 102 'News & Notes') refers to 'the status of English as the planetary tongue, as the only working 'Esperanto' of science, trade and commerce'. Poets writing in English either invest this world with the human perspective it lacks or they serve its instrumental purposes. The things themselves have only the perspective language gives them; scientific language excludes the relational truths of their utility as objects in a human context in order to define their discrete characteristics. Poetry is not science in that sense; but since science is increasingly concerned with relational theory the possibility is that the contents of poetry and of science will increasingly accord, science cannot but acknowledge the realities of human engagement with, and dependence on, this planet; in doing so it must 'envisage a future whose solace is retrospective'. Should poetry do less, the future will unfold as the extrapolation of presently-supposed realities. To look forward, is not to oppose 'intervention in the present' but to envisage a perspective. 'The peroration' (Ashbery) is the prerogative of power and vested interests only when poetry fails the language.

As for the 'unacknowledged accents of power', these arose, precisely, from social division, and no theory Will cleanse poetry of these accents if community fails to establish an adequately representative continuum in the language. The struggle to achieve a community within the social fabric is indissodable from the struggle to achieve a continuum within the language. This continuum is not the prerogative of any class, and the inner life which generates it is beyond all formulas, whether of materialism without God, or of spiritual otherworldliness. Without that foresight and perspective which Milne mistakenly equates with the interests of privilege and power, poetry merely serves the interests of the status quo. I am sick of being told that the language of poetry cannot be elevated: I hear elevated language from working class people every day which shames much common academic and journalistic usage. Poetry is song, not cant.

DAVID KUHRT
London N8


Risk

Sir,
I have followed with interest the discussion of literary theory in recent numbers of PN Review, and agree with its gist that the notions of truth in argument and value in art need to be reinstated if we are to have meaningful criticism. I think it's unfortunate, though, that Donald Davie's lecture, transcribed in PNR 103, confuses the two. The Felida Hemans poem he cites is not bad because it's 'a lie' as he claims, but because it's boring. If we are to judge art by its truthfulness we shall have to say that documentary films are better than features, that the author of Beowulf misled his audience by irresponsible tales of imaginary monsters, and that novels set in far-off countries or remote periods cannot be assessed until we have taken time out to study the appropriate geography or history. No doubt Davie would argue that he is talking about a more general kind of truth and falsehood, one that allows Hamlet to be a portrait of the human condition rather than the historical Danish court; and no doubt Mrs Hemans would have argued that her poem was true in precisely this sense, that it reflected the essential beauty and harmony of England, something not measurable by historians and sociologists. If truth isn't measurable, this disagreement cannot be resolved, while the kind of truth that can be measured has little relevance to art.

Davie is so eager to get on to this shaky ground that he passes quickly over any suggestion that the poem can be judged in terms of artistic value. 'Hemans' versification and diction are thoroughly competent', he notes, as if these were the only imaginable criteria. And yet a critic of Davie's brilliance could easily have demonstrated how the poem, by refusing to set up any conflict in its themes or images, leaves itself with nothing to resolve in its ending, and is reduced to the tedium of saying the same thing over and over in different ways, In that respect, it's more like a hymn than a poem, and its admirers must have valued it as an expression of faith rather than for the tension one gets from the best poetry. The second axiom of Wallace Stevens's 'Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction' is 'It must change', but this poem is afraid to risk it.

MATTHEW FRANCIS
Winchester


Stress

Sir,
I'm trying to work out whether John Peck himself or a typo turned the Tartar city Chístopol (the open field?) into Christópol (i.e. Christopolis), with the second syllable stressed rather than the first. Perhaps it sounds better. Names are awkward when Tsvetaeva in English can sound like Sveta Eva. How clear is it that El´buga (second syllable again) sort of rhymes with H´bbakuk unless you accept the Authorised Version's stress? Or doesn't this matter? Are the words just on the page?

MEVA MARON
Bracknell

P.S. Thanks for the Denise Riley piece - what a change from the moans of Tallis & Co! (Not that I'm a Terry Eagleton fan - oh no! - but I quite like some French theory when it's not in impossible English translation!)