The Secular Wood

The Secular Wood Literary Criticism in the Public Sphere James Ley Doctor of Philosophy University of Western Sydney 2012 The work presented in this thesis is, to the best of my knowledge and belief, original except as acknowledged in the text. I hereby declare that I have not submitted this material, either in full or in part, for a degree at this or any other institution. ................................................................................... James Ley February 2012 The Secular Wood Literary Criticism in the Public Sphere Contents Abstract………………………………………………………………………………….1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………2 1. A Degree of Insanity ! Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)………………………………………………12 2. Fire from the Flint ! William Hazlitt (1778-1830)………………………………………………44 3. A Thyesteän Banquet of Clap-Trap ! Matthew Arnold (1822-1888)……………………………………………..80 4. The Principles of Modern Heresy ! T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)……………………………………………………….116 5. ‘I do like the West and wish it would stop declining’ ! Lionel Trilling (1905-1975)………………………………………………..157 6. The Secular Wood ! James Wood (1965- )……………………………………………………….202 Bibliography..……………………………………………………………………….244 Abstract The thesis considers the work of six prominent literary critics, all of whom have written for large non-specialist audiences: Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, Lionel Trilling and James Wood. The subjects have been chosen because each occupies a distinct historical moment and addresses himself to a distinct critical milieu. Collectively, however, their lives span 300 years of cultural history. " The thesis addresses the various ways in which the six critics construct their public personae, the kinds of arguments they use, and their core principles and philosophies. It considers how they have positioned themselves in relation to the modern tradition of descriptive criticism and the prevailing tendencies of their particular historical period. The thesis proposes that, by virtue of being public critics, they must deal with the problem of presenting themselves as individual voices within the public sphere and must address, through literary criticism and the essay form more generally, the issues of individualism and the social implications of the democratising, secularising, liberalising forces of modernity. This follows from the fact that, as critics, they are necessarily concerned with the status of individual judgement and individual responsiveness. " The thesis is composed of six essay-chapters, one on each critic. Each essay is an attempt to ground these large, somewhat abstract questions in specific instances that give them tangibility. They are also written in such a way that they might be profitably be read by a non-specialist. The style of the thesis is an extension of my own practice as a public critic and is intended to reflect the familiar style in which its subjects wrote. 1 The Secular Wood Literary Criticism in the Public Sphere Introduction T.S. Eliot declared that criticism is as inevitable as breathing. Like so many of his unequivocal pronouncements, the line is instantly memorable. Its rhetorical force derives partly from the confidence with which it is asserted, but also from its appearance of almost bland self-evidence. One instantly knows what he means. The claim of inevitability would seem to rest on the unremarkable assumption that we all respond, on some level, to the cultural artefacts we encounter over the course of our lives. These responses naturally involve us in a process of evaluation and interpretation, even if we do not bother to formulate them beyond the recognition of an instinctive sense of like or dislike, even if we never feel compelled to share our impressions with another person. Find something meaningful or moving, engaging or irrelevant, beautiful or ugly, and one is beginning to act as a critic. " Understood in this way, criticism does indeed seem to be a universal, even definitive, human activity. Yet the inclusiveness of such a definition renders it problematic in a way that limits its usefulness. If criticism is inevitable, if it is simply the normal process of analysis and judgement by which we arrive at our personal opinions, the critic is not in a position to claim any distinct cultural function or identity. The many attempts that have 2 been made throughout the modern era to define the function of literary criticism, to align its practice with some higher purpose or to justify its existence as an independent intellectual discipline, can be understood, at least in part, as responses to this uneasy sense that the critic seems to have no stable, clearly defined purpose ! that the cultural position of the critic is self-created and must therefore be constantly scrutinised and reconceived. One of the most evident of the various cultural anxieties that have shadowed the practice of literary criticism throughout its modern history is a nagging sense of doubt about its necessity. What purpose does the critic serve? Do we really need an intermediary between reader and text? Are we not perfectly capable of making sense of the work for ourselves? ‘One of the historical vulnerabilities of literature, as a subject for study,’ Martin Amis has observed, ‘is that it has never seemed difficult enough. This may come as news to the buckled figure of the book-reviewer, and to the literary critic, but it’s true. Hence the various attempts to elevate it, complicate it, systematise it. Interacting with literature is easy. Anyone can join in, because words (unlike palettes and pianos) lead a double life: we all have a competence.’1 % One response to the uncertain cultural status of the literary critic is to claim expertise, to position oneself as the person who is more knowledgable, insightful, cogent, sensitive and articulate than the average reader. Eliot often makes a show of downplaying the intellectual ambitions of his criticism, but he is, in fact, a master of this critical strategy. Everyone is a critic, according to Eliot; the problem is that almost everyone is a bad critic. In his early critical writings, in particular, he surveys a world awash with naive and sentimental responses to literature. He chides critics who have not read well enough or widely enough, who have failed to see the big picture, whose philosophies are inadequate or unsound, whose definitions lack clarity and precision. He deplores criticism that is merely subjective and piecemeal when it should always strive to be objective and comprehensive. % In practice, Eliot never quite lived up to his own critical ideal of comprehensive objectivity. It is doubtful anyone could. But as a means of establishing his critical authority his stance proved 1 Martin Amis, The War Against Cliche: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000 (London: Jonathan Cape, 2001) xiii-xiv. 3 remarkably effective. His success, to be fair, was the result of more than just self-confidence and a talent for rhetorical assertion. Eliot really was more knowledgeable and insightful about poetry than many other critics before or since; he really did have original things to say on the subject (I am less inclined to credit him with sensitivity and cogency, particularly with regard to his social and political views). Many of the critical ideas he proposed found a receptive audience because he developed shrewd and incisive ways to articulate crucial aspects of the emerging aesthetic of literary modernism. % But Eliot’s donnish air of superiority has dated badly and, as a result, it allows us to recognise that putting on such airs is something of an occupational hazard for the critic. For to criticise something is inevitably to assume a position of intellectual mastery, to o!er one’s interpretation as a form of meta-discourse. As any number of literary theorists have pointed out, criticism cannot be regarded as an innocent activity. The act of interpretation, even when undertaken in the best of faith, is an exercise in selectivity; it involves an element of appropriation, in which the critic overwrites the work in his own idiom and, in doing so, adapts it to suit his own purposes. The problem that arises, then, is not simply the heresy of paraphrase but the question of the critic’s underlying agenda, the intellectual position he is seeking, perhaps rather sneakily, to advance. % Eliot’s pretence of reluctant superiority is apt to seem unsatisfactory to contemporary readers because its dated quality highlights the ambiguous, even contradictory, cultural position that the literary critic occupies. He appears to affirm the democratic universality of the critical impulse, to demonstrate and thus validate the authority of the individual judgement. But he also presumes to act as a rather stern cultural policeman. As the person who takes it upon himself to sort out the confusions of others and to correct, rather wearily, their errors of taste, he cannot help but appear suspiciously aristocratic. % This awkwardness is not unique to Eliot, but it is exaggerated in his criticism, partly because his views are indeed aristocratic, but also because of the way he plays up to the role of gentleman critic. He a!ects to be both amateur and expert. He is the perfect example of a literary critic who advocates critical rigour without actually being rigorous, whose arguments are casual and 4 impressionistic but are presented as rational and authoritative. He claims for himself the high moral ground of disinterestedness, insisting that his social and political views are not implicated in the value judgements he makes about literary works, yet his criticism clearly has a wider agenda. The self-conscious way in which he identifies with the English critical tradition, his appropriation of many of its mannerisms and commonplaces (his line about the inevitability of criticism is a reformulation of John Dryden’s observation that to breathe is to judge and Samuel Johnson’s maxim that judgement is forced on us by experience), throws the internal contradictions of that tradition into sharp relief because he claims to be philosophically opposed to its liberal-humanist orientation.

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