2001-2002 Lecture Series

[00:00:00] BOB BERDAHL:
Good afternoon. I, uh, I’m Bob Berdahl, uh, and it’s my great pleasure to welcome you all today to, uh, the b– the Tanner Lecture for the year two thousand and one. It’s, uh, it’s a wonderful pleasure to see so many folks here.

Uh, I have to tell you that each year, uh, I– one of my responsibilities as, uh, chancellor of the campus is to report to the Tanner Foundation on these lectures, uh, and the attendance is, uh, an important consideration to the Tanner Foundation. And so it’s a, a special pleasure to look out at this, uh, packed room and this large audience, uh, and to, uh, be able to be assured that come next June when I report on this lecture, I can tell them that we had a packed crowd, uh, for this lecture. It’s also a great special privilege to welcome our lecturer, Sir Frank Kermode, as well as our three distinguished commentators, John Guillory, Geoffrey Hartman, uh, Carey Perloff, uh, to the campus for, uh, this very special occasion.

My task here today is simply to give you the background for the Tanner Lectures. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values began at Cambridge University in 1978. And since that time, permanent Tanner Lectureships have been established at Oxford, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and at the Universities of California, Michigan, and Utah.

Uh, and I’ll explain a little bit about the Utah connection here in a minute. The Tanner Lecture, which used to rotate among the campuses of the University of California, now resides permanently at Berkeley, and we’re delighted that this is the permanent home and that we will enjoy the Tanner Lectures here each year. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values are a gift from Obert C. and Grace Tanner, both of whom are of British ancestry and descended from early Mormon pioneers, uh, in the state of Utah.

In fact, Obert Tanner was the ninth son, uh, of his father, who had multiple wives, uh, and who actually, uh, because of polygamy, fled the United States, abandoning his family, uh, when Obert Tanner was a very young man. Uh, and as a consequence of having to work very hard himself, uh, developing strong beliefs in the value of community and hard work and respect for one’s fellow men, Obert Tanner, uh, emerged as a very, very successful, uh, individual. At an early age, he was taught by his mother, he said, to regard universities as one of man’s noblest creations, and it is this belief that really, uh, informed the rest of his life.

He received his law degree from the University of Utah, and then he pursued philosophy at Harvard and Stanford universities. At Stanford, he was appointed to the faculty in religion and also served as the acting chaplain. At the University of Utah, uh, he joined the faculty in, in philosophy in 1946 and remained there as a professor emeritus until his death in 1993.

He was, however, not only an academic. Uh, in 1927, he founded the The O.C. Tanner Company, which manufactured, uh, jewelry and specialized in corporate recognition awards and became the largest firm of this kind in the United States. Uh, he described his company’s history as a search for beauty, uh, and he believed in the company’s work, uh, as a form of recognizing human labor.

Uh, he was very successful in this business, and this allowed Tanner to become a major philanthropist in the state of Utah, causing the governor of Utah at one time to describe him as the state’s most generous benefactor. He was the recipient of many honorary degrees, was decorated by the Queen of England, was was an honorary fellow in the British Academy. In nineteen eighty-eight, he was awarded the National Medal by in the Arts by President Reagan.

Uh, it was as a consequence of his success in business and his interest in the humanities and in human values that he established this lecture series. And as he said, “I hope these lectures will contribute to the intellectual and moral life of mankind. I see them simply as a search for a better understanding of human behavior and human values.

This understanding may be pursued for its own intrinsic worth,” he said, “but it may also eventually have practical consequences for the quality of personal and social life.” Today, in addressing the relationship between the canon and pleasure, between pleasure and pain and imagination, uh, Sir Frank Kermode is addressing themes that are central to the purpose of the Tanner Lectures. Indeed, central to Obert Tanner’s mission to understand better human values and behavior.

We’re indebted to Mr. Tanner and the lecturers and the commentators who are here, and especially, uh, Sir Frank for their invaluable work in making this possible. And now to introduce Sir Frank Kermode, it is my pleasure to turn the podium over to Robert Alter, who, as you all know, is the Class of nineteen thirty-seven Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature. Professor Alter teaches courses in the nineteenth-century European and American novel, in modernism, and on literary aspects of the Bible, and also teaches on modern Hebrew literature.

His publications range from critical biography of a critical biography of Stendhal to literary theory, two recent volumes of biblical translation accompanied by literary commentary. Uh, his most recent book is entitled The Canon and Creativity. Uh, he’s also edited a literary guide to the Bible with Sir Frank Kermode in 1987.

So he’s a very appropriate person to bring to the podium to introduce Sir Frank Kermode. Bob Alter.

(applause)

[00:07:11] ROBERT ALTER:
Thank you very much, Ch-Chancellor Berdahl. Now, uh, since y-you have in the program for this e-event, uh, the titles of some of, uh, Sir Frank Kermode’s principal publications, I’m not going to fatigue you with a long list, a-and his is a very long and also very illustrious list. I, I can’t resist starting on a personal note, whi-which is, uh, how we got to know each other.

From my point of view as a literary person, uh, it was an ideal way to get to know, uh, uh, Frank Kermode. Um, I should say that i-in addition to the more prominent elements of his, uh, publications, uh, Frank Kermode i-is a very distinguished and discerning, uh, reviewer, and he continues to review quite prolifically on both sides of the Atlantic to this day. Those of you who have published books know that, that it’s no wonderful deal to be reviewed.

I mean, my own experience is that either you’re reviewed hostilely, at, at which point you say to yourself that this man’s an idiot or this woman’s an idiot, or, um, alas, you’re reviewed rapturously and you have to say with a certain amount of embarrassment, “This person is an idiot.” So I, I won’t fill in any of the details, but, uh, ex-exactly twenty years ago, I published a book on, uh, biblical narrative, and I was getting antsy after a few weeks. Is the New York Times Book Review going to run a review?

And then lo and behold, there, there was a, an extremely intelligent review that really understood what it was all about by, uh, Frank Kermode. Uh, a few months later, uh, um, Frank Kermode had conceived the idea of putting together a large, uh, volume on, uh, th-that became, uh, the Literary Guide to the Bible. And he had already, uh, done some very interesting things, uh, on the New Testament, and he needed an Old Testament partner and got in touch with me.

Uh, it was an extremely happy collaboration. I, I, have to say that I was a little bit nervous feeling that, that I was, uh, an uncouth American, wet behind the ears, a-a-and all that. But, uh, uh, Frank Burt was an ideal collaborator.

Uh, we, we saw eye to eye. I, uh, I always felt that he treated me with great consideration. And, uh, the, the result was not bad.

A little mixed when y-you get together a bunch of, uh, contributors, but, but on the whole, we were, uh, pleased with what we did. W-when I think of Frank, uh, Frank Kermode’s career, um, I flash back to a, a, a moment when I was visiting the University of Arizona and ha-having lunch in the faculty club, a-and there was a, a youngish Frenchman there, and he sort of growled at me. He said, “I don’t have a field.

A peasant has a field. I am interested in literature.” Well, uh,

[00:10:22] BOB BERDAHL:
Yeah.

[00:10:24] ROBERT ALTER:
Uh, well, one of the, the, the reasons, uh, uh, in addition to the sheer force o-of intelligence, a kind of subtle, unforced intelligence that, that has made Sir Frank Kermode one of the leading critics in the English-speaking world for the last several, uh, decades, is his boundless curiosity, that he i-is not the peasant that’s limited to one field. He has, um, written on Shakespeare both early in his career and recently in a fi– his, his last and I think very fine book, uh, Shakespeare’s Language. Um, he, a-and he’s, he’s written, uh, more broadly on the Renaissance.

Uh, he’s written on, um, uh, the Romantics, uh, he’s written on Wallace Stevens, uh, perhaps one of his… He, he’s, i-is one of those rare people who’s actually published several seminal books. So I, I hesitate to say that his most seminal, one of his most seminal books is a reflection on how narratives end a-a-and what this has to do with the way we construct history, uh, called, uh, The Sense of an Ending, which I think goes back to, to, to, uh, the, the late ’60s.

Uh, he i-is a critic who, I think, fortunately, can’t be easily placed. That is, he was, um, open to the various waves, uh, uh, of, uh, literary theory that began to, to, to hit the rather, uh, uh, crusty bastions o-o-of Anglo-American literary studies in the late sixties. But he, he never, uh, followed any of those schools mechanically or, uh, formulaically.

A- and he was quick to see what were the limitations of these various schools w-w-without really be-be-being, uh, uh, um, um, reactively polemic a-a-against them. I, I think that, uh, uh, he is, uh, a-an eclectic critic in the very best sense o-of the word.

And, uh, what I find both in his early work and in the, the most recent things he’s done, including a splendid paper on the uses of poetry that I heard him give ten days ago, is that he has a sense of why, after all, we read literature, why it makes a difference in in our lives, and I think we will hear something of that this afternoon. It’s a great pleasure and honor for me to present, uh, Sir Frank Kermode.

(applause)

[00:13:28] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
Uh, I want to thank, uh, Robert Alter, um, the name by which I’ve always been encouraged to call him, uh, and to say I look back on that collaboration with just as much, perhaps more pleasure than he does. For one thing, uh, if you divide a book about the Bible into Old Testament and New, the person who draws the Old Testament does eighty percent of the work.

(laughter)

So I reckon that was a pretty shrewd deal, and we didn’t quarrel once about it in the whole course of it. I’m delighted, of course, to have been asked to give these, these lectures, uh, and I pe-perhaps begin by explaining that their titles are shrunken versions of the titles of Wallace Stevens’, uh, uh, sections in his poem, Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction, an old-fashioned poem which I still admire very much after forty-odd years of knowing it. Mm-hmm.

(breath)

You’ll have to forgive me,

(breath)

I’m a little short of breath today.

(breath)

Stevens wrote three sections: It must change, it must give pleasure, and it must be abstract. As I had to leave one of them out, I happily chose the one about the abstraction. Actually, But I believe in Stevens.

Well, I don’t have to believe in Stevens, that’s a ridiculous thing to say. I mean, I be– I think that, uh, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” is an ex-excellent, uh, and r-very rare example of a poem about aesthetics.

And of course, some of it is about pleasure. And I’m not gonna talk about Wallace Stevens. Uh, just as on the whole today, I’m not gonna talk about Shakespeare, although the, the, uh, title of the talk might lead you to think that I was gonna do that.

Uh, somehow or other, in, in the course of its gestation, this talk pushed Shakespeare not quite out, but almost. Uh, I have to do what I can to retrieve him tomorrow. But I would say in the meantime that, uh, when you talk about canon, you are a fortiori talking about Shakespeare.

So everything that I say can, by a little bit of intellectual sleight of hand, be translated into a comment on Shakespeare. But that’s up to you, I’m afraid.

(coughs)

Uh, Robert also mentioned the controversies which we’ve all been engaged in, in one way or another. I think at my age, now that I’ve grown old, I can say that professional life involved, uh, some part in, um, many different controversies. And one of them, as it comes on both sides, was canonicity.

But I don’t see now very much helpful connection between what we talked about in the sixties and what I want to talk about now. There are two– there are two different worlds. I thought of a remark of Chateaubriand in the Mémoires d’Outre-Tombe.

“If I compare the two terrestrial globes,” he says, “the one I knew at the beginning of my life and the one I now behold at the end of it, I no longer recognize the one in the other.” I think I believe now that these globes are not really mutually recognizable or compatible. Uh, you have to choose.

As Wallace Stevens says, “This is not a choose– this is not a choice between, but of.” And I choose the old globe in my own case. It’s defined as the place where serious account is still taken of what happens in art, what happens in sensations sweet, if you like, felt in the blood and felt along the heart?

Sensations still accessible, though doubtless with more difficulty, and as one ages, reduced perhaps to mere sober pleasure. There doesn’t seem to be any point any longer in deploring these differences. Uh, in the course of a generation, we have reached a moment where the discourse, as one says, of the older globe, uh, is cons– is thought by many people to be not only passé, but manifestly wrong, and perhaps even wicked, uh,

(coughs)

since it’d collaborate with various political– sent to collaborate with various political situations, which are regarded as wicked. I have known students, good students too, um, who have regarded the study of literature, uh, as the study of a totally illusory topic. Uh, in, in literature, it no longer be thought to exist, and to study it or pretend to is a sort of atavistic duty imposed by unthinking seniors, and to be got through, as in older times, one had to construe orally a chapter of the Greek New Testament before passing on to real study.

(coughs)

Under the old dispensation, you could choose between different critical methodologies, but what they had in common, I think, it was an assumption that it was possible and right to speak of literary quality and literary value. It was true that one could be taught to read, preferably to read selected texts because they were thought to be good, with a degree of attention warranted the issue of judgments, including the judgment that some works, which might, if you like, be described as canonical works, demanded to be studied by all who claimed the right to instruct others. Under the new dispensation, there are interesting ways of outlawing such preoccupations, disparaging such forms of attention, and replacing them with alternative subjects and methods deriving their force from disciplines apparently more difficult and rewarding, and in their way, more scientific.

I think that’s a point of some importance. The flourishing of the humanities in the post-war universities has largely been on the crumbs that have fallen from the table of the sciences. And the more scientific we can make our work look, the better the universities are pleased.

But if you look at the, at the issue from the other side, you might say by way of daring paradox that literary criticism, a discipline by which in the past we all set so much store, has in the end turned out not to be boring or obvious, but actually too difficult. A failure of successive critical schools and critics of acknowledged intelligence and imagination may be thought to have demonstrated this. On this view, the borrowed languages from linguistics and anthropology, psychoanalysis, and so on, exciting new ways of writing history, they proved not only more attractive, but easier to do.

Unrestricted, usually by specific texts, endowed with new and endlessly expansible lexicon. One can continually be new, which is quite important in institutional terms, rapidly acquiring fascinating fresh-minted technical terms, and one could discuss important matters that lacked any direct relationship to literature as it was formerly understood or misunderstood. There has been much commendable excitement and much, much exuberant thinking as well as much vain talk, and that I think should not be contested.

There’s been a long holiday in the graduate schools anyway, some of them, uh, from what? That sentence was not complete. There’s a bit of an article.

A long holiday from what we were… Uh, I’m not gonna get through it that easily. From, from, uh, primary texts.

Boring, I’m afraid. Uh, there’s been an increase in the intellectual range, which many people think ample compensation for what has been lost during its acquisition. The new, the new is invested with a momentary charisma, but we know what happens to charisma.

It declines if the

(coughs)

institutional. So more new is needed, new charisma generated. Meanwhile, in the graduate schools, there prevail paradigms that tend, in the nature of the case, to be always already, always already, uh, slightly out of date.

(laughter)

It would be foolish to deny that the practice of this new criticism, uh, in the hands of gifted writers has not given real pleasure. But gifted writers are no more numerous in this than in any other discipline, and the pleasure seems most often to derive more from an admiration for the arduousness of what is being done than for any genius that is exposed. But I was reading recently, as I expect many people in this room have, Frederick Crews’ new and timely book, Postmodern Pooh, and what’s so impressive about it is, I think, that passages– as I read the book, I supposed that he was making up the products of his satirical imagination and possibly a bit over the top, were actually straight quotations for which his sober footnotes provided bibliographical warrant.

You ask yourself what could possibly be the intended audience for remarks of this kind? The dissident author wants us to see it as a kind of satyagraha. Uh, but other people, of course, wrote it presumably in full happy consciousness that what they were doing was what they were being employed to do, namely to teach the youth of the nation how to read and think.

I’ll have to go in search of water. Could you… You can stand there?

Right? Good. Uh, I’m sorry.

That’s a slight, slight pause. Well, now, um, the answer to the question of the audience is no doubt simply that the participants, who are numerous, actually do constitute an audience. Uh, the idea now, I think this is important but obvious, the idea of an educated but unspecialized general readership has now pretty well disappeared.

And I think it would be wrong to blame these writers for providing pleasure for their friends, even if they do it by mutual disagreement very often, or by uttering opinions that might seem either absurd or shocking to unsympathetic eavesdroppers. Well, they are the masters now, and the truth is that henceforth we’d all better stick to the contemplation of our own terrestrial globe. So turning to that globe, the older one, I ask– thank you.

I ask whether it affords any comparable pleasure, and if so, what sort of pleasure and to whom? So I must explain what I think pleasure means in this context and what it has to do with canons. Ostensibly, nowadays, a tedious and battered subject, uh, quite unrelated to any idea of pleasure.

There would be very little delight to be had, and very little instruction from an attempt to summarize the so-called canon wars of the past thirty years or so. Everybody knows the arguments, especially the arguments against, for the abolition or modification of canons. Just let me say briefly that the topic of canons, when you consider it without heat, it’s really absurdly simple.

Into the paragraph in which I demonstrate that, I shall contrive to insert some words about pleasure. Canons are lists. Enemies of canons compile lists of anti-canonical books for their students.

These are called theory canons sometimes. Any list of books, any recommended list is a canon. When you put books together in a canon, as, uh, for example, in the Bible.

Well, a rather special example, admittedly, in the Bible. They affect one another. The, uh, this is very clear in all religious canons, but it’s also true of some secular canons.

Works so gathered and influencing one another, which they did much more freely, of course, in the, shall we say, in the Middle Ages and in the, uh, seventeenth century in Herbert, for example, than they do for us. Once you put them together and they influence each other, commentary is needed. Commentary is required.

to point out the relationships, uh, between the items in the canon. It’s possible to argue, in fact necessary to argue, I think, that some of the works in the canon are canonical by chance. That, that merely opens up a new topic, uh, not perhaps enough explored, which is the role of chance in intellectual history generally.

I shouldn’t digress on this topic for more than a moment, but suppose, for example, that Freud had read Saussure as he could perfectly well have done, or if, uh, I. A. Richards had taken any notice of Saussure, whom he had read, or of Wittgenstein, whose– whom he knew quite well personally, might not Richards’ views on language and interpretation have been different? And who can say what might have ensued either from that or a change of direction in Freud’s thought as a consequence of reading Saussure. Nobody ever returns to the fork in the road, which is a quite useless thing to do.

Canons then preserve some items for no reasons that can be made clear. Chance plays its part, and this consideration, instead of, uh, strengthening the case of people who dislike the idea of canon, actually weakens it. They emphasize the tedious monumentality of the canonical books and the suggestion that their survival, though dead, has been brought about by ignorant reverence and selfish institutional or political motive.

Uh, but that’s– you want to take a case of a book which none of you perhaps has read in the last twenty years. the book of– the Epistle of Jude in the New Testament. Nobody knows really why it’s there.

It just happens to be there, and I think it’s a very important item in, in the, in the New Testament to have what appears to be a virtually useless book pre- Uh, preserved by the sheer doggedness of commentators, because you can’t do a commentary on the New Testament without putting it in.

There are one or two others like that. I, I wouldn’t venture to say. I wouldn’t venture to say, uh, are there any in the Old Testament?

That’s something that I’ll leave to Robert Alter. Anyway, the, uh, canon can be then regarded as a rather peculiar, uh, collection, not of monuments, dead monuments, there may be one or two of those, but of things that are constantly alive and changing, neglected at times, picked up at other times. In my youth, uh, c-controversy about canonicity was angry, but relatively simple.

Nobody imagined that canons should be dispensed with, but they wanted to argue as to what should be the, in the canon and what should be out of it. Dr. Leavis, of course, was, uh, very influential in this argument. He wanted, in his own terms, to dislodge Milton and Shelley from the poetic canon and demote them to the rank of apocrypha, so to speak.

It was assumed, it was assumed that decisions of this kind, well, of course, you had the same thing with, uh, sorry, with Yvor Winters. Not the same thing, but similarity in this part of the world. Anyway, it was assumed that decisions of this kind, whether Milton should be in the canon or not, were of great social importance since the whole enterprise of Leavis’s criticism was social in orientation.

But it was also assumed that the, the place of Milton in the canon or Shelley in the canon should be decided in arguments which are aesthetic in character. They were about the defects of Milton’s grand style or the reprehensible vagueness of Shelley. That those more naive concerns drop into the background, when the issue is reinstated by people who identify aesthetics as the instrument of political oppression, an instrument that needs to be, as they put it, demystified.

But if you can’t believe this to be so, you may still have to answer questions as to what entitles some books and not others to be regarded as canonical, and therefore needing to be more or less systematically expounded to all who aspire aspired to literary competence, A phrase which encapsulates another argument. Well, was the eminence of certain books merely a matter of institutional fiat? When vernacular literary studies were introduced, there were many traditionalists who asked why it was necessary to give instruction in books which were written in the student’s own language.

Learning about language, it was believed, involved learning and reading a foreign language. Accepting that challenge, we found ways of demonstrating that to do real literary criticism was tantamount to dealing with a foreign language. There were ways of making it talk, making it talk darkly.

Commentary became more important and more ingenious.

(clears throat)

I don’t think the social issues should be ignored. There would have been no vernacular canon. This is a point that’s not very often brought up, I think.

There would have been no vernacular canon had there not been a new understanding on the part of serious people of the need to make the study of literature available to a mass of people who were denied access to the classical literatures. In London, for example, women, Jews, many other people were excluded, uh, from any kind of tertiary study. This was introduced specifically to, to in– to bring into the world a new body of intelligent and trained readers.

These conceptions may strike us now as naive and incorrect, but it would be snobbish and also incorrect to deny that the aim of these people was to promote reading and to promote and develop the possibilities of pleasure in reading. The argument that you read sometimes now is that it’s always been the business of people, uh, in our profession, the profession in which many of us work, to exclude rather than to include others. The–

To build fences to prevent the full acceptance of books, uh, and poems as bearers, for example, of, of pleasure and not merely, uh, um, a sideline to the, to the distri-distribution of information. There were, of course, many ways of studying poetry that did require a study of history, of philology, of all, all sorts of se- of secondary subjects. But it was assumed, and the scheme would never have worked had it not been assumed, that poetry gave pleasure and that access to its pleasures could be conscientiously and delightfully achieved.

Anybody who remembers, however faintly, the critical enthusiasm,

(clears throat)

as a, as a quite recent past, um, must, as I’ve already hinted, reflect sometimes on the rapidity with which the reputations of the giant race before the flood have died. It’s enough to recall the cel-celebrity and authority, not so long ago, of Northrop Frye, the vast influence, of course, of Brooks and Warren, the claims of the Chicago School, the ingenuities of Burke and Blackmur, and for me, closer to home, the ambitions of Scrutiny. All were passionately defended, all incorporated in programs which were designed not only to improve society, but to produce generations of readers whose spirits had been touched by literature, and especially by poetry, and indeed by the art more generally.

(cough)

(cough)

Probably none of those critics, for whom in our day, from whom in our day we sought guidance as assiduously as people now look for it in Paris, could now claim to be influentiable adherents. They ca– People no longer, I think, call themselves, uh, whatever the adjective from Fry is. It is.

That’s, if I ever knew it, I forgot it. Their voices, their voices lack audibility after the turmoil of the sixties. A multitude of new ways of talking presided over by masters not heard of until that decade then supervened.

Now, one of the approaches, which I want to say a word about, was in fact quite an old one, but news of it had been largely kept from us by the political division of Europe. Formalism of the Russian and Czech varieties was one of the new methods made available, popularized, you might almost say, by Todorov and Jakobson in his exile in this country. His work reinforced, of course, by his sensational adventures as an analyst of poetry, poems by Baudelaire and Shakespeare.

For a time, these very original imports were greeted with enthusiasm. And now, I think they are almost as much a thing of the past as the other critics that I’ve been talking about. The initial appeal may have been, and this may, may be incorrect.

There may be devotees of Russian formalism present?

(laughter)

Some people think there aren’t, but a long– a lot of silent people back there may be sharpening their weapon.

(laughter)

The, the initial appeal of Eastern European formalism may have owed something to its rather rigorously scientific air. Um, but as I was thinking about the role of pleasure in the establishment and maintenance of canons, it struck me that these arduous and rather grim theorists, sometimes rather grim, managed not to exclude from their work considerations of pleasure, uh, or canonicity for that matter. They were unwilling to waste their time on rubbish, which makes them canonists, I suppose.

Jakobson’s formula– formation, Jakobson’s whole formation was modernist in the extreme. He was deeply interested in art. He was a close friend of Mayakovsky, and his pleasures arose most immediately from painters such as Kazimir Malevich and Mikhail Larionov.

But an important aspect of his modernism was his formidable interest in past literatures. He would not have considered it at all strange to combine those two interests. At this point in my ruminations about formalists and pleasure, I recalled a distinction made by the Czech critic Jan Mukarovsky, uh, another genius and learned scholar who certainly did not regard aesthetic pleasure as a taboo subject.

As I understand it, but I’m not quite sure I do understand it, uh, there are many books by Mukarovsky which don’t appear to be available in languages which are available to me. Anyway, he seemed to believe that the poetic object might properly be analyzed with formal severity as an artifact, but that it also had an aesthetic purpose which is distinct from that, uh, uh, condition of existence. You could, that is, do a formal study of the structures of a particular work, uh, and that would be dealing with its, uh, role as artifact.

But the aesthetic, uh, aspect of the work is a different matter because it’s conditioned by the response of, uh, lonely but educated readers, and their response would be to some extent conditioned by the norms and values of the community that they all belong to. And clearly, none of these things would happen if no pleasure was available from the processes. So, The value of, uh, of work is in this way split into what can be done by means of formal description and what can be done by means of the discussion of aesthetic response.

That response, he thinks, will always be conditioned by a further factor, which is the power of the object under consideration to transgress, to depart, to, to depart interestingly and revealingly from the accepted habit of the kind of artifact to which it nevertheless belongs. So this opens up a whole new era, I think, where people can go on being, uh, extremely formal and technical. Uh, a very good instance of a person who does that would be Gérard Genette.

Uh, I think much the most lasting of the, of the French new critics. Uh, he’s not in the script, but he just came into my head at that point. So there are good things.

There are such things that are good. Uh, but the matter of aesthetic response, of course, is what concerns me at the moment. To work in that context, of course, the poem must be new, I’m talking about poems for a moment, must be new in a way that refreshes the perception of a tradition of such works.

That’s to say, if to– uh, if you are to enjoy the, uh, if you, if you’re to have aesthetic pleasure in this way, you have to know what is being transgressed as well as what is transgressing it. Uh, uh, this means that you have to be educated, quite simply. You, you can’t, uh, be a, a Mukarovskyan, I think, without knowing a great deal about, uh, poetry.

Not just the poems you’re talking about, but the poems that lie back in the past. This would not have shocked many classic– would not have shocked Ben Jonson, for example, who also had a relationship of transgression to his classical forebears. Pleasure, then, is associated with transgression, and that, of course, means, as I say, the responsive reader must know what it is that is being transgressed.

And his activities are different from those of the scholar, uh, working in his study as if he was a scientist in a laboratory and doing technical work on artifacts. Mukařovský had also to take into account the effect of time on aesthetic response. He didn’t doubt that this response would change over time or that it would even disappear.

Yet, a view, incidentally, which finds an echo in Wallace Stevens, who really thought that all poems, including his own, were heading for destruction. The response comes from the reader, and so will, naturally, they vary from one epoch to another. An important consideration in the discussion of canonicity, which I’ll come back to tomorrow.

Nowadays, we turn to other sources, uh, of thinking about these matters, to Gadamer, for example, perhaps even Jauss, rather than to Mukařovský, uh, or to interested biblical scholars who often have more sense to say on these matters than literary ones. But for the moment, it’s enough to say the idea of pleasure can be positively associated with change and with changes within canons. Now, this way of talking, I think, has an advantage.

The formalist way of talking has an advantage which is denied the, the, uh, Anglophone variety of formalism, which is now universally deplored because it emphasizes the autotelic qualities of a poem. It does not neglect the relation between the aesthetic effects of individuals and their place in the community. Moreover, the Russian variety or the Eastern variety can allow that pleasure persists in change or even depends on change.

As the character of individual and social responses vary, old and new come to be seen as truly interdependent.

(coughing)

The failure of pleasure breaks both the individual and the social link. Pleasure being in the condition of the individual response on which the other, the social, depends. Failure to change reduces the pleasure that arises– perhaps arises only from modernity.

It is at least in part the consequence of that defamiliarization at first devised by the artificer, but later the work of time. So it’s a necessary, though possibly not an obvious requirement of the canonical, that it should give pleasure. It’s time I now said, tried to say, something about what I mean by pleasure in this context.

It’s an old donnish joke that pleasure is a very worrying subject,

(coughs)

partly no doubt because of its proximity to pain. Plato seems to have thought that pain was a result of disorder in the organism, and that pleasure arose from the restitution of order. Being cold, he says, is painful.

Then getting warm again is pleasure. But there are higher forms of pleasure that do not involve organic processes. The fear of a painful disturbance is itself painful, says Plato, and the expectation of relief from that fear gives pleasure.

That’s all in the Philebus. The argument grows complicated, includes considerations of simultane- Sorry, simultaneous pleasure and pain. For as Plato says, “The pains arise beside the pleasures.”

A man may say he is almost dying of pleasure. However, it can be said simply that Plato thinks of pleasure in general as necessarily related to a painful want or lack. So in a way, it was Freud with his pleasure-unpleasure series, The activities of the ego caused tensions, the raising of which is felt as unpleasure and the lowering as pleasure.

This idea and the related, uh, experience is familiar enough. Uh, um, uh, it makes f-familiar appearances— I’m sorry— in literary criticism, in Kenneth Burke’s once famous essay. Once famous could be attached to all the work of critics before nineteen sixty-eight.

(background chatter and laughter)

Anyway, his once famous essay, “Psychology and Form”, argues that literary form consists in creating need, affirming lack, and then providing compensatory satisfactions. And recently, Peter Brooks,

(breath)

argued that the Freudian Eros, which seeks to combine organic substances into even greater unities, drives plot. There’s a movement toward totalization under the mandate of desire, he says. Thus, a lack is eliminated and pleasure bestowed by the conclusion of the plot.

But this binding force coexists with its opposite, which seeks to undo connections and destroy, to reduce to an inorganic state. So the two instincts interact and are necessarily present everywhere. To follow a plot is then to submit to a self-inflicted pain in the expectation of pleasant relief.

And experience suggests that the relation is of this kind, not only in pathological conditions. Plato gives the example of achieving relief from an itch in Philebus. The closeness of the pair of, uh, pain or discomfort and pleasure is, of course, very familiar from poetry, especially love poetry, and especially perhaps in the Petrarchan mode.

And one remembers Spenser’s allegorical figure of jealousy for whom painful pleasure turns to pleasing pain. A familiar and refined modern view is that of Roland Barthes in Le Plaisir du Texte. I know this is extremely well known, but I think that in its exaggerated way is true, so I’ll repeat the general idea.

Barthes distinguishes between the pleasure of reading and what he almost untranslatably calls jouissance, which means intense pleasure and specifically orgasm. An experience not simply pleasant, but mixed with something perhaps better described, uh, as by him, as disorientation or dismay or dissolution. Not pain, but still all these rather painful alternatives to pain.

The little death we’re talking about. In the text of jouissance, pleasure, language, culture, all go to pieces. The text is absolutely intransitive.

It is the extreme of perversion. It belongs to a context, these are all paraphrases. It belongs to a context essentially different from the context of pleasure and much closer to that of pain, though not identified with it.

The experience in question is said by Barthes to be beyond the scope of descriptive criticism. Such a comment, if it were a successful commentary on, uh, a text of Huysmans, would itself have to be a Huysmans. That puts a new burden on literary critics.

Uh, it would be a desperate plagiarism, amounting in every case to what he calls une grande perte subjective. Quite different from the obsessive repetitions of the text of pleasure, which in its nature requires some form of social participation. As Stephen Heath expresses it, pleasure, this is a simple way of putting it, pleasure arises from a link with cultural enjoyment and identity, whereas jouissance shatters that identity, and by no means can be identified with enjoyment.

So, there’s something in the experience, I think, of a certain canonical poetry that has a family resemblance to that grande perte subjective, which can only, which can not only be felt by the reader, but may also turn out actually to be the subject of the poem. It’s in part this belief in a certain aspect of unique literary experience, this refinement of pleasure of the Freudian series, pleasure, unpleasure, or the Barthesian pairing. All that persuades me that the study of poetry need not be a mere preparation for the study of history or society, and that it gives its own distinct and complex pleasures.

Now I want to talk about a poem. Uh, this poem is not by Shakespeare. It’s an unforgivable oversight, I’m afraid.

Uh, I said he kept retreating in dismay, and while we are having pleasure, he’s probably having his reason somewhere.

(laughter)

Reserving, uh, those remarks, uh, from our Shakespeare for another occasion, I’d now like to say, say something about a poem which has meant a great deal to me in– throughout my life, really. And must have meant a lot to most members of this or to many members of this audience. Uh, I have discussed it before, and, uh, many other people, including Professor Hartman, have discussed it even more fully before, so we will perhaps hear something more about it later.

Wordsworth set very much a store by pleasure. He regarded it as essential to the production of art, though forever fearing the pain of its loss. The interactions of pleasure and its loss are, in fact, as everybody knows, a distinguishing feature of Wordsworth’s poetry, or his best poetry, anyway, and not alone his pleasure and his loss, because Wordsworth was always conscious that he was speaking for everybody or everybody qualified to speak.

He writes, he says, “Under one restriction only,” the necessity of giving immediate pleasure to a human being possessed of the information that may be expected of him.” It’s a rather important qualification. Uh, uh, that is, not in his capacity as a lawyer or a physician and so forth, but simply as a man.

Uh, for-forgive the sexism if this was written in 1800. Wordsworth is keen to distinguish that kind of pleasure from the variety that we derived, as he put it contemptuously, from rope dancing or sherry.

(laughter and coughing)

The pleasures of poetry are philosophical, not merely diverting, and the philosophic mind had to cope with loss and the pains of loss, had to survive in a world where, as he puts it, “a com– a multitude of causes unknown in former times are acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion and reducing it to a state of almost savage torpor.” How much it is the easier then to lose that high pleasure that is felt when a man is, as Wordsworth puts it, rightly pleased with his own passions, pleased with his own passions and volitions. But that state of pleasure can be achieved and maintained only by efforts of great originality, by new and surprising feats of defamiliarization, as the poet insists in his eighteen hundred preface.

The effort was exhausting. The pleasure is always accompanied by or shadowed by fear of its loss. Indeed, loss of power and the fear of that loss are always associated with joy, which is why Wordsworth is so evidently a poet of fear and dismay, as well as of joy.

The conjunction of pleasure and dismay is a well-known feature of the romantic lyric, uh, but it has never, I think, proved very easy to talk about. The experience I’m calling disorientation or dismay is of the family of emotions associated with jouissance in that it is not found apart from pleasure, and yet it is associated, however mildly, with the more or less violent end and abrogation of pleasure. It arises from the destruction, immediate or threatened, of pleasure.

It may be a shadowy presence only, a shade that traverses a dust, a force that traverses a shade. If, uh, Wallace Stevens standing in for Shakespeare, isn’t it? It may, it may, as Barthes maintained, be impossible to describe.

The record of critical comment on Resolution and Independence suggests that this is so. Considered as artifice, the poem may seem to refer to a past it means to subvert. It is new.

It stresses its newness by allusion to the old. It uses rhyme royal, the stanza of Troilus and Criseyde. And also the, uh, but it adds the Spenserian alexandrine in the last line.

All these things are very deliberate. That’s what Chatterton did. And Chatterton was still, for Wordsworth, a representation of that new kind of primitive that goes back to Ossian.

(throat clears)

Very important then, and very deliberate, the choice of stanza. It is a stanza traditionally associated with narrative, and of course, Wordsworth’s poem is a little narrative. Though, as far as I know, it is like no narrative poem before it, except some which Wordsworth wrote himself.

Well, since I’ve mentioned my discontent with what some other people have said on this poem, I suppose I should say what I think its power is. Uh, I differ from many modern Wordsworthians. I don’t think the poem should be treated, uh, largely as a kind of, uh, sociological report on poverty in the Lake District, which is very often the way that people do talk about it.

It’s about poverty. It is about the leech gatherer, a man traveling alone among the mountains and all lonely places, carrying with him his own fortitude and the necessities which an unjust state of society– society has entailed upon him. But it’s also about a more general poverty, a world poverty that the poet, for all his happy endowments, has to share.

The blank fear of a young poet, he says, overwhelmed by the thought of the miserable reverses that have befallen the happiest of men, namely poets. So if it happens to the happiest of men, it can happen to everybody. The plot of the poem, uh, is very straightforward.

Uh, the poem ex– the poet experiences joy in a beautiful morning landscape. He runs with the hare in her mirth. He escapes the melancholy thoughts of the previous night, but suddenly the mood and the landscape change.

It is such a change. Uh, the change… I’m sorry.

It is a, it is as if such a change was the necessary consequence of joy. As high as we have mounted in delight, in our dejection do we sink as low. And the poet is now plunged into dim sadness.

Dim sadness and blind thoughts I knew not, nor could name. He reflects that he has lived in pleasant thought, but though he’s given very much, he’s been given very much, he’s given nothing much in return. However, that regretful emphasis

(coughs)

on his early happiness is less important than the premonition of the eventual cost of his vocation, the loss of that happiness, the loss of that pleasure. We poets in our youth begin in gladness, but thereof comes in the end despondency and madness. The figure of the leech-gatherer now brings together the general idea of poverty and the fear of poverty, Old and infirm, he’s looking for leeches that have now become as scarce as in future poems will become for the poet.

He soon loses his original outline. He seems to bear a more than human weight, but soon he is perceived as dissolving into little more than a cloud, a spectral figure, a double. His voice, though dignified, as Wordsworth’s preface has said the language of such speakers should be, uh, his voice fades as his image fades.

But the moment– for the moment he is no more than a dream, and the poet in his own dream returns to his reflections on mighty poets in their misery dead. So poet and poem are thus deeply troubled by this mis– by the by the unrecorded speech of the old man. He says nothing directly, um, but introduces this strange dreamlike disturbance as if he were an apparition, and as if the poem itself were an apparition, as if the old man was in fact turning into the poem, which, as a poem, was an index of joy, but joy blended with dismay, dismay at the miseries to come.

The poem ends with a sort of acceptance. The old man will be a memory to comfort the poet when his powers and courage will have faded. But that never seemed to me the true end of the poem.

That last line is really, uh, a way of avoiding the pain which is the necessary consequence of the pleasure of the poem itself. In his strangely agitated letter to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth, who didn’t like the poem, Wordsworth insisted that the poem is about a young poet overwhelmed by the thought of the miserable reverses that have befallen the happiest of men, and about the interposition of Providence. The interposition of Providence gave him a measure of resolution and independence and strength to contemplate a future poet, poverty.

Th-this turning point of the poem, uh, not, not the real encounter in which it had its origin, that turning point is certainly the interposition of Providence, that peculiar grace, as it’s called in the poem, that leading from above. These expressions have a strong Calvinist ring, appropriate to Scottish grave livers, as the old man is supposed to be. Such language is above the reach of ordinary men by reason of its spiritual purity, and in this respect, it’s not unlike a poet’s language, although that has different ethical and spiritual foundations.

The claim of poets, by our own spirits are we deified, would be deeply repugnant to grave livers. Yet there is a kind of election. That’s nice.

Excellent. There’s a kind of… Um,

(clears throat)

There are two e-expressions of inspiration here, one secular, one religious. They’re brought close together and contrasted. The old man’s steadfastness is quite unlike the excited action of the poetic spirit, and the contrast hints at the inevitable pain of the secular form of election.

A peculiar grace is a grace vouchsafed freely to a particular person. And here applied to the poet by an intelligible analogy. Grace affords him, by the interposition of providence, this vision of the old man with all its implications, but he still has to consider the cost of the gift.

The gift of achieving that impermanent state of grace, which was signaled by the existence of the poem itself. It’s a state from which one might lapse, and the condition of poetry is a little like that of the poet Cowper, who acknowledges the gift of grace, but dreaded to the point of self-destruction its withdrawal. So what then should be said finally about this apparently rather absurd poem, so, so open, as Lewis Carroll uses to try to parody?

Many interpretations of the poem head straight for biography. Stephen Gill, in his Life of Wordsworth, regards it as a response to Coleridge’s letter to Sarah Hutchinson, later the “Dejection Ode.” Wordsworth is said to be confronting the introspective defeatism of that poem.

Kenneth R. Johnson detects a hard– sorry, a bard, a bard very much worried about his staying power, experiencing a vocational crisis and seeking to avoid excesses of Coleridge, Chatterton and Burns. Whereas Coleridge, at the time of the two poems, was lamenting his broken marriage, Wordsworth had to use—to quote an expression of—just a, of vulgarity and inaccuracy combined, be hard to beat. Wordsworth had resolved his failed past romantic history, which means his affair with Annette Vallon, and was on the point of contentedly marrying Mary Hutchinson.

John Worthen, in his recent composite biography, points out that we can’t even be sure that Wordsworth’s poem was written, uh, um, before or after Coleridge’s. Both poems are part of a protracted brotherly conversation between the poets. Anyway, Worthen, and one does applaud him for this, I think, feels it wasn’t much use advising Coleridge to be like the leech-gatherer considering the state he was in.

However, Coleridge did publish the poem. That’s a curious fact, uh, if biography is worth reading at all, is it worth reading? But Coleridge managed somehow to publish the poem on Wordsworth’s wedding day.

So that does and point out the relevance of some of the things that are said, but it– most of it is tittle-tattle. Uh, ignores the poem itself, although that’s exactly where Wordsworth kept directing our attention. It’s not this, it’s not that.

It is a poem. And it’s no use, Sarah Hutchinson say, saying that when the old man comes in, uh, everything goes wrong. It is not more than very well, he says.

If after the reintroduction of the old man, it is not more than very well, it is very bad. There is no intermediate state. It could only testify to be an interposition of Providence if it was very good.

The eighteen fifteen preface, uh, of Wordsworth explains what the figure of the old man or why the, the figure of the old man and the poem itself needed to be very good. Wordsworth uses it, uses the poem to illustrate the way imagination operates on images in a conjunction by which they modify each other. There’s the stone, the sea beast, and the cloud.

The stone is endowed with something of the power of life to approximate it to the sea beast, and the sea beast stripped of some of its vital qualities to assimilate it to the stone. Which intermediate image is thus treated for the purpose of bringing the original image, that of the stone, to a nearer resemblance to the figure and condition of the aged man. Now, I mention that not because it gives us the author’s reading of the poem, but because it’s an example of how a good literary critic has to go to work, what kind of a struggle he has to take on if he’s to, uh, make a point as persuasive and interesting as that.

As, as contributing so much to pleasure as that. You have to, you have to understand that the pleasure and the pain both derive from a certain kind of mystery in a poem of this sort. whereas Wordsworth is as clear as it’s reasonable to expect in explaining the poem’s internal coalescences and divagations.

If it is not very good, it is not good. In persuading Sarah to like it, he does just mention the circumstances of composition, but his real care is for the poem. Biographical explanations have a little bit of interest, but it’s not the interest of the poem.

They distract the reader, cut off his connection to the power of the poem, its powerfully unheimlich quality, what the poet calls the feeling of spirituality or supernaturalness induced by the old man. The poem identifies itself with a peculiar grace and the possibility of the withdrawal of a peculiar grace, and with the conjunctions and disjunctions of pleasure and dismay. Of course, it’s not simply about rural poverty.

The old man has a more general significance, as all Wordsworth’s Solitaries have, and there one could, of course, say a good deal about those other, uh, Solitaries. I’d rather come close to an end by saying that the best reaction And historically, there’s one I know about to Wordsworth in this mood is that of the poet William Blake. Uh, Blake credited Wordsworth with real imaginative power, and that’s quite a rare, uh, compliment.

The words in the Immortality Ode which impressed Blake concerned those obstinate questionings of sense and outward things, fallings from us, vanishings, blank misgivings of the creature, and so on. The Wordsworth who wrote those lines was the poet who ranked– Blake ranked with the real poets, among whom there is no competition, as he said. The poet whose best work made Blake feel ill, actually physically sick, whose line, “But there’s a tree, of many, one,” threw Blake, as Crabb Robinson says, almost into a hysterical rapture.

The passages that disturbed Blake are all about the loss of the visionary scheme. The way in which the tree and the field speak of something that is gone. Those dismayed monosyllables gave Blake, and can give us, I think, an experience of ecstatic, dismayed pleasure.

David Bromwich’s recent book on Wordsworth, remembers poems like “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” and “Nutting,” and asks why Wordsworth presses upon us such aberrant choices of subject and feeling. It was exactly the question that Sarah Hutchinson asked when she said she could not see why so much absorbed attention was given to the leech-gatherer. Bromwich quotes the advice of Dorothy Wordsworth to Sara: “Never think that he writes for no reason but merely because a thing happened.

And when you feel any poem has to be tedious, ask yourself in what spirit it was written.” Of course, he was rather parti pris, we agree, but still it’s good advice ignored by biographers. That sharp distinction between the poem and its occasion is a very good thing.

Bromwich’s own commentary, uh, echoes rather exactly remarks made about the poem by the now almost forgotten poet Arthur Symons ninety years ago. Symons says that in this poem, Wordsworth has gathered up all its qualities: dignity, homeliness, meditation over man and nature, respectful pity for old age and poverty, detailed observation of natural things, together with an imaginative atmosphere which melts, harmonizes the forms of cloud and rock and pool, and the voices of wind and man in a single composition. I think that’s well said, though Simmons rather oddly, considering his own standing as a decadent, ignores the transgressive unease of the poem.

That unease, dismay, that is equally relevant to his understanding of man and nature and of human life. Well, I won’t dwell on that aspect. Perhaps I’ve done enough already.

I want not to try to make one poem into a canon, but as, as a distinguished representative of a certain kind of member of a certain permissible canon. That would be this poem and some of its congeners in Wordsworth,

(coughing)

who, uh, as I agree with Blake, was in the highest degree imaginative.

(coughing)

One can add works to a canon which set up pleasure in this, uh, fairly complicated sense as a criterion, I think, uh, you would have to posit suitably responsive audiences, as, as Wordsworth did. People who qualify as human beings possessed of that information which may be expected of them, as he says. It would be easy, perhaps, to fill this canon with quite remarkable moments.

Uh, in Shakespeare, for example, uh, you can see how well, uh, this criterion would, uh, apply to Othello or Hamlet or Measure for Measure or Winter’s Tale or, uh, it would, it would write itself. But you could also say, uh, say of Proust, for example. If you think of Proust on Venice, on the coexistence of happiness or happiness deferred with that familiar sense of dismay, even of vastation, that may accompany or follow it.

Of any such work, it may be said, in Stevens’ phrase, that it must give pleasure. But we have to remember the pain of expecting it and also the pain of losing it. All the complexities that stimulate imaginative power and induces to con– to confer on mere objects or mere strings of words, the distinction of being what we call art.

We would hardly do that if the objects, however grim, did not give pleasure. And so we make lists of works that please and dismay, and we call these lists canons if we want to. Then we may feel able to invite others to approve for their own reasons of the list, or to alter it as they wish.

If they decline to do this, if they have an idea of pleasure which is quite different, well and good. They are of the party of Sarah Hutchinson. Canonical literature remains as it is for some such reasons, I’m sure there are many others, and not, I think, because of any collusion, as is so often alleged, with the discourses of power.

The canon among responsible people, uh, will persist, would persist as long as it manages to evoke creative responses of the kind that Mukarovsky, uh, talked about, of the kind that I’ve been trying to talk about. And this requires that members of the canon should, in this enlarged sense of the term, give pleasure.

[01:17:21] ROBERT ALTER:
Well, s-since I, I personally had no responsibility for, uh, assembling the program, I, I would like to, uh, compliment the, the organizing committee, not only for the election o-of, uh, Sir Frank Kermode to deliver the lectures, but for the, uh, uh, splendid panel of respondents, uh, each o-of whom is distinguished in his or her own right, and really e-each of which– each of whom stands at a different point i-in a very, uh, appropriate cultural, uh, spectrum. Uh, Geoffrey Hartman is, um, uh, now professor emeritus of comparative– of English and comparative literature at, uh, Yale. Uh, he, uh, is one of our leading eth-authorities on Romanticism a-and, uh, really established himself as a major figure, uh, in Anglo-American criticism with an early book on, uh, Wordsworth.

Uh, later, he became associated wi-with, um, uh, what some people, uh, with tongue in cheek or, or not, to call, they called L’École de Yale. Uh, uh, that is wh-when, when Yale was the American center of, of, uh, deconstruction, uh, uh, and, uh, uh, raised, uh, a whole series of challenging, uh, i-issues, uh, about the, the, uh, the role of theory in literary studies a-a-and about the language o-of criticism a-and theory. And in recent years, he has been, uh, much involved in, uh, reflections of the Holocaust and a remarkable archival, uh, p-project on the Holocaust that, that, that’s been undertaken a-at Yale.

Uh, he, uh, uh, has brought to the study o-of, uh, comparative literature, particularly a-at Yale, the kind of broad European literary culture that his, uh, uh, great predecessor, René Wellek, f-first gave. And, uh, uh, uh, it’s a pleasure for me to present Professor Geoffrey Hartman.

(applause and cheering)

[01:19:54] GEOFFREY HARTMAN:
I have– I am very glad to be here at Berkeley to take part in honoring Frank Kermode as the Tanner Lecturer. I have only one small problem, since the Queen recognized what a perfect gentle knisht

(laughter)

he is, how to refer to him, and I’ve chosen the the impersonal mode, I hope he’ll forgive me, that is just to refer to him as Frank Kermode or Kermode in what I have to say. Now, I’m close enough to Frank Kermode’s generation to share both its early excitement and later discontent. The excitement came not only from being intimately in touch with the great influx of modernist art, an inexhaustible cornucopia.

during the first half of the twentieth century, but also from the awareness of a gradual revolution within the study of literature that began in England well before the Second World War. The doors of perception were opened, even in the universities. And a heritage, a cultural capital as it is now called, began to be more fully dispersed.

(clears throat)

Works of art, however, continued to be seen as heroic products. While not above the daily battle, they were survivals of an unaging intellect in a world whose frustrated quest for peace often rested on a vision of the strength of imaginative thought. The literary arts would at once fortify and refine the imagination and be more than a personal good, a vicarious compensation for pain and injustice.

Art kept faith alive that there was a place somewhere on earth, and perhaps in every country, as green as Marvell and Blake envisaged. And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green? Matthew Arnold was certainly part of this vision of art, and so, despite his stubborn anti-global demeanor, was Leavis.

The latter’s peculiar blend of localism and evangelism, and the touchstone quality of his procedure helped to foster a new epoch of concentration in the study of literature. Counter-elitist in spirit, like Ruskin’s Fors Clavigera, which encouraged workers to discover England’s vernacular treasures, this renewal movement added literature to the two books of God, expands to the understanding of all in a completion of the Protestant Revolution. What distinguished Leavis from both Ruskin and Arnold was his conviction that the university study of English could counter the pervasive cultural effects of industrial and technological change.

He looked beyond what was moribund in the academy to envisage, and I admit something in me still responds to his call, the university– I’m quoting Leavis now, “the university as a focus of consciousness and human responsibility, and a guarantor of a real performance of the critical function, that critical function which is a creative one.” Even if Leavis’ tantrum of moral signifiers does not quite succeed in creating that critical discourse, it seems a world away from the so-called university in ruins that depresses many today.

Leavis remains, in retrospect, a canny diagnostician who anticipates the difficulty and disenchantment we face half a century later. “The advance of science and technology,” he writes, “means a human future of change so rapid and of such kinds, of tests and challenges so unprecedented, of decisions and possible non-decisions so momentous and insidious in their consequences, that mankind, this is surely clear, will need to be in full intelligent possession of its full humanity.” I mean to suggest, by passing to a matter of diction, how language often fails the moral thinker, even one most concerned with language.

Insofar as Leavis is persuasive, it is because those who read him are steeped in the literature he champions or attacks. Without a memorable and ardently memorized body of words, without a canon of that kind, one’s own words remain abstract counters, a tonic buzz. There must be, to appropriate the title of one of Kermode’s books, an appetite for poetry that, like manna from heaven, satisfies without satiating, as the Church Fathers claimed.

Claimed about manna, of course, not poetry. In Kermode’s own creative criticism, the old is renewed by new forms of attention. Consider only his interest in the literary relevance of an evolving religious hermeneutics.

Modernism was not rejectionist so much as it was transformative. It sought to defamiliarize, to make it new, although Frank Kermode is suitably ironic about the new replacing the new. Its conservative revolution maintains something that indeed is a pleasure, the recognition of a continuity made possible by a canon far less monumental than its maligners have claimed, a canon that is able to change, to be changed.

The idea of pleasure, Kermode says forthrightly, the idea of pleasure can be positively associated with changing canonicity. In that respect, pleasure can even be taught because it is not based on ignorance, but on learning. Change, as we shall see, or change of a non-traumatic kind, is essential to Kermode’s argument, acknowledging the demise of an older type of literary study, yet refusing to see that loss as either just or inevitable.

Against the charge of aestheticism, for instance, or of pursuing the ignis fatuus of literariness in isolation from social process, he points out that changes in the canon have come from two sources: from the need to refresh perception, to get rid of dead deadening cliches in politics or art, which led creative writers as well as formalists like Mukarovsky to associate the aesthetic function with transgression, especially of so-called bourgeois values. Then from the action of time itself, of its subversive, disconcerting compound of chance and mutability that makes reinterpretation a necessity. Camus sees himself somewhat sorrowfully as part of a remnant.

He is caught up in the sense of an ending. At the same time, it is not possible to identify him with this or that school, and he quotes Empson on not letting the critic be distracted by any kind of theory, however morally appealing. While theory is necessary to stretch the mind, and I quote, “However firm your belief in it, you still have to see whether your feelings can be brought to accept the results in the particular case.”

Empsonian reflections like these put a premium on the individual response and are less afraid of eccentricity than of conformity. They take their probity and force from being associated with even solitude, a notion of close reading or practical criticism. Practical in the sense which I.A. Richards’ probe of 1929 put into circulation.

Richards methodically investigated the ability of university students to interpret unidentified literary passages, that is, to interpret them at sight, unsupported by literary historical cliches. His educationist bent proved essential for both Cambridge English and the New Criticism as they influenced literary studies from the thirties through the late sixties. One change that has affected criticism since the time of Richards, Leavis, Empson, and Eliot is a closer scrutiny of the language, and Frank has mentioned that specifically by which the literary work is described.

There is a noticeable proliferation of technical terms. The distance between the rhetoric of criticism, to cite the subtitle of de Man’s first collection of essays, and the rhetoric of the literature it deals with points to the fact that beyond the wish to bring literary study into the human sciences, to rescue it from a chronic impressionism or subjectivism, no meta-language, however seemingly natural, will now escape suspicion. In reaction, of course, a backlash has charged these linguistic, semiotic, deconstructionist perpetrators with precisely a crime against ordinary language, and it deplores their dehumanizing or obfuscating impact on literary education.

I’m not jumping into that debate. But it should be asked, what general cogency beyond being a promesse de bonheur, a reward for a more complex understanding of tradition or acculturation, Does the criterion of pleasure have it? It must give pleasure, Kermode insists in these notes towards a supreme criticism.

Pleasure is a strange word to bear such a strong emphasis. It is surely on the side of Chaucerian solace rather than sentence. Can it really become as sententious as Kermode wishes it to be?

It all depends how such a precept, which has its basis in experience and theory, if poetics constitute a theory, works out in practice. Our oldest definition of poetic art holds that the utile and the dulce should be equally mixed. Sweetness and light is Arnold’s extended version.

A complication is that words, when conscious of the vanity of their mimicry, as in Wallace Stevens, turn into, into, and I’m quoting Stevens now, “Abysmal instruments that make sounds like pips,” that is, not even like pipes, “out of the sweeping meanings we impose.” The word pleasure is problematic. I’m tempted to say abysmal, for several reasons.

First, for its onomatopoeic pallor, then for its inability to carry with it the nimbus of its historical associations. Lastly, as I will eventually argue, because it glides over the abyss. Though literary elaboration has augmented the vocabulary of feeling and affect, pleasure as a critical term remains descriptively poor when thematized this way.

And I realized that, of course, that Kermode complicates it measurably by adding pleasing pain and the whole, uh, problematic of pain. Some tribes, anthropologists tell us, have ever so many descriptors for certain natural phenomena. For us, the connotative and semantic field of pleasure is not large.

Kermode himself notes that we approach something stronger and more explicitly physical in Wordsworth’s celebration of the grand elementary principle of pleasure, and in contemporary thought through the sexual synonym jouissance. Yet any sexualization of pleasure runs a double danger. The first is the danger of making it appear as if the pleasure linked to art were the byproduct of a repression.

A successful repression, Freud surmised, but still a sublimated or cerebral derivative, and therefore anything but disinterested. The second, which Kermode introduces via Roland Barthes’ Le plaisir du texte, is that the intense and often transgressive form of pleasure suggested by jouissance jeopardizes, um, like the negative side of Eros, all identity constructs. Um, Barthes, uh, coins– I don’t know whether he coins the phrase, but he uses the wonderful phrase, “une grande perte subjective.”

While it is clear that this larger emotion resembles the sublime effect that emanates, according to Burke and Kant, from objects of reflection that threaten reflection, can literary pleasure really be separated from the merely pleasant once it migrates from art to Blackmur’s discourse of the amateur? That is his definition of literary criticism, a discourse of the amateur, or even Barthes’, virtuoso conversion of semiotics into a lover’s discourse. The rigor of the formalists, their concentration on a work’s structure to the exclusion of other features came about in good part because literary talk had become too amateurish, agreeable.

Plaire had already been an imperative in the conversational ethos, so important to French society as it developed para-democratic salons that also advanced the status of woman. Often, then, a flirtatious and flattering meaning, not incommode, subsists as an undertone. Cowper’s ‘The Fair commands the song’ is a gallant variant, hinting at subjection rather than freedo-freedom, at pleasing the other rather than oneself.

Even Kant characterizing, like Shaftesbury, the beautiful as the source of a disinterested pleasure, has his difficulty finding a suitable word. The one he choo-chooses, “Wohlgefallen,” bears an involuntary trace of “befell,” of an encounter attended by hopeful expectations, as in Spenser’s, “It chanced,” or “It fortuned,” but which can introduce, of course, in Spenser, a deceptive, a deceptive incident. Borges described aesthetic reality with a mischievous touch of the ominous as the imminence of a revelation not yet produced.

None of these definitions, then, quite catch the distinctive enjoyment elicited by art, including the art of reading. Kermode’s lament for the critical makers is not only that he gets too little delight from them, but also that he cannot feel their delight. Where is the inspiring contagion?

Hopkins is the rise, the roll, the carol of creation. It has not disappeared. It does prevail in other areas, such as the performing arts, and especially the response to popular music, so close to jouissance.

Indeed, the arts now take up an entire section, separate section of the daily New York Times. But in a society of the spectacle, our discipline of close, careful, yet imaginative reading cannot find a performative frame except by means of this or that outrageous thesis, and so remains outside of the classroom, confined to a thin reception. If that is so, the pleasure provided by literary study must find a new high ground.

I respect the challenge Kermode takes up in his concern for canonicity. The fate of reading is increasingly tied to the fate of pleasure. For as the exegetical and critical task becomes more specialized, and the public, as Wordsworth foresaw, more dependent on direct optical or sensory stimulation, who but an inglorious remnant will appreciate the critic’s burden?

Even the pleasure of being righteous is harder to come by. The complaint is just that more than ever a need to instrumentalize literature to convert Stevens’s pipe or in, you know, pipe into trumpet stern deviates our focus, demands that the taint of otium be removed from what we do. We therefore seek to apply terms from other disciplines that claim to be closer to social reality or somehow indispensable.

The basic question that arises is why the change in the study of literature registered and regretted by Kermode is uncanonical. That is not a change on which a renewal of the critical spirit could be based. If the objection is to bad writing, that is hardly a specialty of post-1960s critics.

Silly comments and judgments are found in any period. It would be easy enough to collect a sottisier of Wordsworth’s criticism, for instance, from 1800 to, well, you name the terminus ad quem. Literary study having expanded by democratic leaps and bounds and through a publish or perish requirement, it is no wonder ideological cliches and technical jargon abound.

But this is not to say that the recession of pleasing prose, or generally of a conversational tone in criticism, does not have its reason, nor that a redirection of the object of critical attention cannot be justified. Kermode’s “E pur si muove” frees up canonicity by showing, like Eliot, a dynamic principle of literary renewal at work, and so removes an anti-orthodox prejudice. But it leaves the unfortunate impression that the shift that has indeed occurred, and which Kermode’s apt allusion to Chateaubriand’s memoirs from beyond the grave depicts as a traumatic discontinuity, is based on a mere, if grievous, if grievous misperception.

I cannot map out my u-own understanding of that shift in the few minutes that remain. So I will end with one assertive, over-abbreviated, and perhaps transgressive thought. Transgressive, uh, because it goes perhaps beyond the, the frame of our discussion, and it’s where I t-take my own painful delight in engaging with Kermode’s interpretation of resolution and independence.

Et in Arcadia ego. The post-Panofskian meaning of that phrase has prevailed. When I suggest that an emphasis on pleasure, however sophisticated, however aware of the vacillation of joy and dejection, of delight and dismay, glides over the abyss, I mean without denying a principle of utopian hope linked to art’s green thought in a green shade, that the emphasis should shift from the death of Arcadia to Arcadia as death.

It is the annihilating all that’s made which prompted Trilling to surmise in his essay of nineteen sixty-three on the fate of pleasure that, I quote Trilling, “The old connection between literature and politics has been dissolved.” I suspect that the literary criticism Kermode is doubtful about has tried, perhaps unsuccessfully, to establish a new connection. Trilling was troubled not only by a redemptive nihilism that has always existed in the form of a religious hastening of the end, but also by something less conscious and willful, the eudaimonic nihilism of a progressive politics.

Against the background of the eighteenth-century debate about luxury and the rise of the bourgeoisie, and the contention in particular that, I quote him now, “the dignity of man was to be found in the principle of pleasure,” Trilling sets starkly an anti-consumerist force calling itself spiritual and in total contempt of pleasure, indeed, of worldly society as such. This militant spirituality creates in the modern period not only an opposing self, but anti-heroes who undermine all social values that used to inspire meliorative political action. What could be farther from Spenser’s or Keats’s ‘to enjoy delight with liberty’ than Dostoevsky’s Underground Man?

And I now quote, um, Trilling again, “To know and feel and live and move at the behest of the principle of pleasure — this, for the Underground Man, so far from constituting his native and naked dignity, constitutes his humiliation in bondage.” Trilling does not view such a devaluation of pleasure as merely an event of a particular moment of culture. Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle shows it to be a permanent fact of the psychic life.

Yet Trilling reprehends the blindness of contemporary thinkers who do not see that unpleasure, too, demands to be satisfied by a gratification not within the purview of ordinary democratic progressivism.

(cough)

Modern art’s experiment in the negative transcendence of the human, those are Trilling’s words, is no longer an experiment. What can repair the breach between a moral politics urging progress towards an earthly utopia and the brutalism of much contemporary literature, as well as the reality of daily life when terror strikes and the scars of the spirit are clearly visible. Wordsworth’s asceticism, his minimalist plots and non-opulence of diction, sensitively noted by Kermode, his readiness to draw an image of life rather than death from a solitary old man at pains to harvest leeches from a pool bare to the eye of heaven, reminds us of something ghostly and elementary linked to poverty and unpleasure.

It incites blind thoughts, thoughts perhaps blind to the, uh, blind, blind to the world as well as deeply unclear. Repressed and tempting apocalyptic fantasies in the very poet whose program it is to humanize imagination, to link it more firmly to this goodly universe. Eudaemonic nihilism enters here into the very heart of benevolence and its visionary aspect.

If the figure of the leech-gatherer fades in and out of Wordsworth’s mind, and Kermode has well described that, it is because an uncanny feeling abetted by the idea of a supernatural source of vitality is in danger of taking over. The powerlessness of this grave liver who seems scarcely alive has to become a source of power for the poet, a peculiar, dangerous sort of inspiration. The poem I venture to conclude is about that reversal of powerlessness into power of spirit, rather than about a joy and dismay that can, of course, accompany that process.

Unpower, not the pleasure-unpleasure complex, is the problematic s-subject, is the problematic subject as it is in contemporary moralists like Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot. Kermode’s meditation on loss runs parallel to his understanding of Resolution and Independence, yet chooses to skirt the political impasse that has made literary criticism as well as literature a troubled mirror of our culture. Thank you.

(applause and cheering)

[01:47:32] ROBERT ALTER:
After the t- uh, this e– it’s now evening, this evening’s lecture and tomorrow afternoon, evening’s lecture, on Thursday at the same hour, at four ten, in the same room, Uh, there will be a, um, a seminar i-in which, um, uh, Frank Kermode and all three discussants will have, uh, an opportunity to, um, tangle more directly. I don’t know, uh, uh- Oh, I’m sorry.

I said the technical. Excuse, my, my apologies. It’s gonna be in, in the Townsend Center.

Uh, so, so, um, I, I think, uh, Jeffrey, you should probably reserve y-your response to the response u-until then. And we do have, um, a little under twenty minutes for, um, reactions from the audience. Um, let me– Since the time i-a-a-and your, your, um, reactions can take the form obviously of either a comment or a question, and the question could be addressed t-to, uh, Sir Frank o-or to Professor Hartman.

Um, I, I would only request that e-everyone who speaks up try to be as concise as possible. And I, I, I will, uh, field the questions.

[01:48:57] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Uh, a question to Sir Frank. Uh, the… Is, is the problem with the criticism that you object to the style which you so abhor- -or is it the subject matter?

Is it, is it the content? Because in, in, uh, scientific, uh, uh, um, uh, efforts, there’s technical language which is very difficult to understand to the outsider, and it summarizes very nicely for a more wide audience. Why can’t you have the same thing with literature?

(cough)

[01:49:27] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
That’s, that’s what you get, and if that’s what you want, you’re welcome to it. It’s, uh, uh, it’s, it, it, it’s interesting that you should bring up the parallel of, of scientific prose, because that’s what this aspires to be, of course. As we’ve always done there, it’s not in that sense a novelty.

Um, the study of literature in the, in the universities, once it liberated itself from the classics, uh, always aspired to some kind of scientific status. Uh, as you remember the old days of the philological journals, the Journal of English and American Philology, Modern Philology, this kind of– that kind of philology always had to have that word in the title, because otherwise they weren’t serious. And they– this is why you had to study, uh, i-in my university anyway, you, you, you had to study Anglo-Saxon, and if you were very unlucky, Icelandic, also.

And, uh, this was to get to… get to make sure, as they put it, that you’d been through the mill, that you’d actually had to learn a technique. You even have to learn another language, uh, which you, you know, in the ordinary course of things would certainly not have done. Uh, and this gave you a kind of professional quasi-scientific, uh, evaluation.

Then later on, of course, everyone knows that came the linguistic revolution, with a large input from psychoanalysis also. All these things have some claim to the status of sciences. I imagine, uh, some people think that put, put it much too quietly.

Uh, and the, th-this, this again is seized upon. It’s very, it’s very important that we should be something like scientists. Well, of course, it’s implicit in what I have been saying that we should not aspire to that at all.

That we should aspire to the kind of personal conjunction with poems, with paintings, with whatever it is, which, uh, does not need to be expressed in some kind of pseudo-scientific language. The– of course, it’s true that there are aspects of it, as, as in the instances that Mukařovský gives. There are aspects of it where, in fact, a purely philological or purely structural approach to, uh, the work of– to the artifice is fine, provided that the importance of aesthetic response on the other side is also acknowledged.

I would have thought that the prose that my question has spoke of really belongs to the prose of artifice and not to the prose of aesthetics. But, uh, maybe there’s an occasion, th-there’s a reason to defend them both. Uh, but at the moment, the first kind, of course, dominates all the other kinds.

And one– I’ll just add one more thing, as this is a subject that is, I think, of great interest. If you did a, a rhetorical study, I’m sorry, I would add just one more thing before I run out of breath altogether. The, the, the, um, the, the difficulty is that when you acquire the habits of certain kinds of, uh, of writing about artifice, um, you also acquire a, a new lexicon, which is actually very attractive to you.

You can push these words, and these are not always words which have a grave function in the, in the prose that’s being written. They’re sometimes just habits. There are, there are words.

Think of a word like imbricate, for example. You never, you never read an essay on, uh, on literature that does not contain the word imbricate. We managed without it for centuries.

Now, now, now, we have to have it simply because the person wants to use it. Uh, um, I don’t mean that there should be a list of banned words. I mean that there should be words which are not endlessly and stupidly repeated just for the sake of the noise they make, and that is a feature of much modern critical prose.

(laughter)

Thank you.

[01:53:43] ROBERT ALTER:
But I, I can’t resist adding that, that, uh, it, it dawned on me not too long ago that, that some of the strange language ha-has to do with faulty translation from French. Uh, for example, re-recuperate until about twenty-five years ago was an intransitive verb. Uh, uh, uh, my, my wife-

Yes. But my wife is in the process of recuperating and just having got out of the, the hospital. And then, uh, it, it suddenly dawned on me that récupérer i-is a perfectly ordinary French transitive verb, which means to recover.

Uh, uh, and they were– But, but now it has cachet. But okay, uh, forgive me for, for sticking in a comment.

[01:54:23] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
A very good example there– Robert Pegg, very good.

[01:54:25] ROBERT ALTER:
Yeah. ‘Cause it’s–

(laughter)

Yes.

[01:54:28] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
A few people are beginning to avoid it now.

[01:54:30] ROBERT ALTER:
Avoid it, probably.

[01:54:31] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
My question is, uh, to what extent in the past did literary criticism or was literary criticism useful or beneficial to the people who are producing literature? For example, at the time of Matthew Arnold, and has that useful or beneficial effect, if any, disappeared?

[01:54:50] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
If you’re addressing me– I think Geoffrey could answer this very well.

(laughter)

Um, uh, well, it’s certainly true that Arnold meant it to be so. I think he clearly meant that, uh, um, by, uh, believing you could use the touchstone method, for example, you could actually sort of clean up your intellect, um, not only in respect of poetry. But, uh, he talked, he talked about criticism of life.

He talked about seeing life steadily and all the rest of it. Of course, he thought that, uh, y-you could, uh, improve society by doing good literary criticism, uh, just as Dr. Leavis did. Dr. Leavis had no real hope that we’d return to the wheelwright shop and that we’d go back to that kind of community.

But he went on saying we ought to do it, just as Wordsworth had done in the passage that I read. That we’re more depraved and corrupt than anybody’s ever been before, and we better pull out of it if we possibly can. Uh, anyway, to, to return to Arnold.

Yes, Arnold was also, remem– we remember, a practical— not a politician, but an instrument of the political body. He was an inspector of schools. He, he was a man who believed that you should do things for the public, and one of the things he chose to do was to write, um, not… if he more or less stopped writing poems, but he chose to, to write books like, um, uh, well, like all the essays in criticism, Culture and Anarchy, of course, is a violent attack on–

Well, perhaps violence is the wrong word. Uh, a strong attack on cultural f-faults in the society of the time which could be ruinous if not corrected. Yes, he did think that.

[01:56:41] ROBERT ALTER:
The, the acoustics this way aren’t wonderful, so-

[01:56:44] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
Yeah.

[01:56:44] ROBERT ALTER:
Those of you way back there are gonna have to project very strong. Do, do, do you wanna-

[01:56:50] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
No.

[01:56:51] ROBERT ALTER:
Oh, okay.

[01:56:51] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I’ll try very briefly. The disagreement between the two of you, I think, was whether the Wordsworth poem is about the relationship between pain and pleasure and how close they are, or between innocence and power and how close they are. And you both referred to, or at least Professor Comay did, to Freud and Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which is itself a meditation on the relationship between precisely those two things, pain and pleasure and power and unpower.

So I just want to suggest, without being able to work this out, I c– I couldn’t, even if I had the time, that one needn’t choose between these two things because they’re very closely bound together.

[01:57:31] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
Yeah. That’s very interesting. I, I, I think it was Ezra who actually talked about the, the…

I, I passed ra-rather rapidly over Freud. Um, but I think he did, uh, mention that, uh, book. I think you’re right that, um, well, uh, clearly once you set up some kind of idea that there’s, there’s a transfer of force going on, uh, and we agree about that.

We just don’t agree what the force is. Uh, the, the important thing is that there is a situation in which such a transfer of force is occurring. That’s what makes a poem, not how we actually define what is being, um, transferred.

Well, that’s important too. But the– we, we get a real sense of the kind of galactic quality– I don’t know why I said that. Galactic quality of the poem, uh, the sort of swirling, uh, uh, set of interconnections.

Uh, if we, if we get that, then we can go on. And what we say about the power that is being transferred, the force that’s being transferred, is not going to be the same for everybody. It’s not going to be the same at all times.

What, what both Geoffrey and I said about resolution and independence is something that it probably would not have occurred even to Coleridge to say. And Coleridge was there on the spot, listening carefully, or supposed to be. And, uh, it’s not something I think that–

Well, we do know, Matthew Arnold, we know what Matthew Arnold thought about Wordsworth. He had great love for Wordsworth. He would not have talked about that poem either, as either of us did.

And that’s absolutely essential, that there should be in commentary a quality which will not ig-ignore something as radical as the idea of transfer, uh, but will change the content of the transfer as the age and personal spirit demands. Sorry.

[01:59:31] ROBERT ALTER:
Jeffrey, did you want to comment on that too? Because she raised-

[01:59:34] GEOFFREY HARTMAN:
I don’t know whether Our inspiration, if it is that secular inspiration, will last till Thursday, but we could continue this in, in the seminar form.

[01:59:48] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
I think that’s a good idea. Yeah. Okay.

[01:59:50] GEOFFREY HARTMAN:
It was, it’s a very interesting point that, that was raised. Um, uh, your answer to some extent, um, could be directed towards the previous question of what you call the, the transfer of the translatio studii, uh, i-in that respect, that how do… how does the study of literature, how does criticism as the study of literature, um, influence or contribute-

[02:00:19] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
Mm-hmm. -to

[02:00:21] GEOFFREY HARTMAN:
writing in the sense of creative writing? I think that’s a very interesting question. When you talk about transfer, I think you touch that, that area.

[02:00:30] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
Okay. Let’s make a point- Yeah. -going into it.

[02:00:32] GEOFFREY HARTMAN:
I’d, I’d like just to add one thing. Um, Dante, of course, in the Vita nuova, um, analyzes his own poems, and he does it in, in highly literate, uh, rhetorical categories, uh, showing considerable learning. He has, he has no difficulty or no hesitation, uh, doing that.

Barthes, in the, um, Lover’s Discourse, does the extraordinary thing of taking semiotics, the semiotic categories, and making them into a lover’s discourse. I see that as a parallel, and I see that as that kind of transfer you were talking about. And without the Renaissance, which was basically the revival of learning at the beginning, that transferred itself in turn to a very learned and important literature.

So there are, whether you want to call that criticism or not, um, there are very signal instances in literary history where the movement goes from learning to literature.

[02:01:47] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
This very commentary, mostly. I think we ought to call it rather than criticism.

[02:01:50] GEOFFREY HARTMAN:
Okay. Yeah.

[02:01:51] ROBERT ALTER:
Well, I suspect in the seminar, we’re gonna want to explore more th-these issues of pleasure and power that, that, that were raised so acutely.

[02:02:01] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
Yeah, hi.

[02:02:02] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Um, I wanna add something to that last comment and then make a comment about Pope. Samuel Johnson, Matthew Arnold, T.S. Eliot, William Empson were all critics and poets. Before the present age of specialization, there was a very direct link between criticism and the creative arts because the same person was doing it.

[02:02:24] MODERATOR:
I’ll give this back to you. And before we vote, so I won’t take away Karen- No, no.

[02:02:27] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
My other comment was going to be I agree. I totally agree with Frank Kermode in what I take to be his surprise and why at, at Geoffrey Hartman’s being so down on pleasure.

[02:02:38] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
And I, uh-

(laughter)

No, damn it.

(laughter and coughing)

[02:02:45] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
You’re using the phrase eu-eudaimonic pleasure as if it were something beautiful, but also as if there were things that were higher than pleasure. And I think this mode of thought comes about because of the same quote that had to do with there are higher pleasures than rope dancing and sherry. That is, there’s a mistake made when you start using notions of height in relation to pleasure rather than, I was saying, depth.

You need to know a lot about pop music to really love pop music. You need to know a lot about sherry to get long-term, subtle pleasures out of sherry.

[02:03:17] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
I don’t know what rope dancing is.

(laughter)

What was rope dancing?

[02:03:21] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
(music playing)

I think the notion that something can’t be

(laughter)

serious because it’s fun, because it tickles, the fun sense is off. If you can get very deep moral and aesthetic pleasures that are as important, uh, from shallow things in a way, seemingly shallow things, as you can from things that, that somebody took a hundred years to write.

[02:03:45] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
Well, uh, let me just say that I think when the point was that, so he just said that, um, that poetry ought to be philosophical. So if you’re thinking really that poetry was more philosophical than rope dancing or sherry, you may not agree with that. Um, you may not agree that philosophy is serious about anything, but you’d find some opposition in this room at the moment if you do hold that.

I, I think that, um, And does it really matter, um, whether we talk about height or depth? I mean, they’re both the same thing, aren’t they? Another point to throw in there.

Uh, uh, it’s… Was this related to the first part of your question about Samuel Johnson and Emerson and so on being a poet?

[02:04:31] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
You were– What– Excuse me, what were- Wasn’t it–

[02:04:33] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
Didn’t you back that point?

[02:04:35] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Yes, he did.

[02:04:36] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
Those things, they were unrelated as- No, totally unrelated. I was trying to fit them into the rope dancing and sherry, sharing.

There’s no connection. No. I’m, I’m, I’m not going to respond, I think, to, to it.

May-maybe on, on, on Thursday. I just felt, uh, instinctively I had to, um, deny that I am… I’m neither up on pleasure or down on pleasure, okay?

(laughter)

[02:05:05] ROBERT ALTER:
That’s tantamount to being down on pleasure, I gotta be-

(laughter)

Okay. M- I think we better make this the last question. Okay.

[02:05:14] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
Well, I wanted to ask with, uh, apologies perhaps to the mamas and the papas, where has all the pleasure gone?

(laughter)

I mean, I don’t know whether you can, uh,

(laughter)

surmise that there’s a law of the conservation of pleasure.

(laughter)

Um, but presumably, uh, if this road, uh, Trilling’s road is closed, isn’t it possible, um… I mean, I’m taking from what you said to imply a coarsening, a general coarsening of society following from this.

[02:05:46] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
But— I, I was not saying it. I— well, let me— standing aside from all this.

[02:05:49] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
I see. Well, I take that as, I take that as an… I infer that anyway from what you’re saying.

[02:05:54] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
Well, very good. Yeah.

[02:05:55] AUDIENCE MEMBER:
And I’m wondering, might the, might the lesson or the result not be 20, 30 years from now, uh, that the fact that literary critics began, for a variety of reasons, to write like engineers at a certain point in our history, um, might it end up simply proving, uh, that they didn’t have that much to do with the skills of the common reader anyway? In other words, could there be a more positive result?

[02:06:23] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
Well, I don’t agree with that. I don’t think they write like engineers, though. Engineers don’t introduce formulas in order to show pleasure of being able to use them.

They do something… But that’s the way a lot of modern critical prose is written, uh, as in the case which, uh, Robert Alter so kindly brought up with the absurd abuse of the word recuperate or my even slightly more recherché case, the imbricate

(laughter)

. Uh, so this is a patois that I think people acquire by competition in the graduate school. You know, I do more imbrications than you.

But, um, I find it detestable because it’s kind of, it’s it’s… I don’t mind if they want to write, uh, technically about, uh, about writing, which is what I often say. It’s fine.

But there’s absolutely no reason for these bursts of self-display. And, you know, mantra, I think that’s what we say nowadays.

(laughter)

Mantras which are repeated over and over again. You know, they’re good. I’ll go off the question bar, but I’ve said enough about it. We should all write like you, Ria.

(laughter)

[02:07:30] GEOFFREY HARTMAN:
Can I, um, just add something very quickly? Why, why can’t we have more than one mode?

(music playing)

[02:07:36] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
Well, that’s…

[02:07:37] GEOFFREY HARTMAN:
We can have a technical mode in criticism, and we have the common reader mode. I think most of us, in fact, have that. Um, uh, there are excellent reviewers who, when they write to a different audience, become relatively technical.

Wouldn’t you agree, Frank, that it’s possible to have two different modes?

[02:07:58] ROBERT ALTER:
Okay. Well, I would like again to thank both Frank Kermode and, uh, Geoffrey Hartman and look forward to tomorrow.

(applause and music playing)

[00:00:00] HOST:
I’m delighted to welcome you all to, uh, the, the second of this year’s Tanner lectures delivered by Sir Frank Kermode. Let me just say a, a few words about what the drill is going to be. Um, uh, after, uh, Sir Frank delivers his lecture, uh, there are going to be two responses, of course, shorter ones than, uh, Geoffrey Hartman’s, uh, yesterday by, uh, John Guillory and, uh, Carey Perloff.

Uh, and then I, I hope that those responses will be, uh, concluded by at the very latest six o’clock, and that we’re gonna have a slightly shorter, um, question period. Uh, we’re, we’re gonna try to finish around six fifteen to give all the, uh, participants a, a little bit more breathing space be-before a scheduled social event. And in any case, uh, those of you who have been e-engaged i-in this topic, um, m-many of you will wanna, uh, come and hear the discussion tomorrow in, in which there will be f-fuller responses and changes and lots more time for audience participation.

Uh, um, and, uh, I-I want to I want to remind you that tomorrow’s, uh, location is different from yesterday’s and today’s. It, it will be, uh, i-in, uh, the Townsend Center i-in 220 Stephens Hall, um, just a little bit, uh, up the hill a-as, uh, y-y-you walk in the direction of the, the Campanile. Uh, since I’ve already formally, uh, introduced, uh, Frank Kermode, a, a critic whom I have cherished over many years a-and a, a, a, a friend whom I hold in, in, in very high regard.

I won’t repeat what I said yesterday. Uh, you have in the program a, a few o-of his, uh, uh, many, uh, works mentioned, a-and I won’t impose a bibliography, uh, on you. Um, I would, uh, just like to say that, that, uh, it struck me in hearing yesterday’s lecture that a certain quality of, um, uh, uh, patient examination of a big idea and a, a patient examination of a big idea through, uh, scrutinizing a text

i-is, uh, one of the hallmarks of Frank Kermode’s, uh, literary criticism. I think most of us in the racket have a certain temptation to develop, uh, explosive generalizations, uh, um, high-flying, uh, uh, theories whi-which have, um, a kind of what, i-in the French sense, a certain brilliance, but, but maybe, uh, not a lot more tha-than that. And, uh, i-in tackling the notion of canonicity i-in the way he has done, uh, uh, F-Frank Kermode shows that, that, uh, we have to work slowly and patiently to get to usable, uh, generalizations.

Now, yesterday’s lecture was devoted to pleasure,

[00:03:31] ROBERT:
Uh, pleasure, uh, uh, Frank Kermode is acutely aware, is not a timeless experience, but time-conditioned. And so today he’s going to, uh, talk about, uh, change. And I can’t resist mentioning a third term, which I suspect will be coming into our discussion, uh, to some extent tomorrow.

It’s one that, that, uh, uh, Geoffrey Hartman and then Marcia Cavell i-in the, uh, discussion introduced whi-which is power. So we, we have these three interesting terms: power, pleasure, and change. But today, we will hear about change.

Sir Frank Kermode.

(applause)

[00:04:22] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
I thank you, uh, Robert. This is about change, as, as he said. It starts off with a fragment of a poem.

The great statue of the General Du Puy rested immobile, though neighboring catafalques bore off the residents of its noble Place. There never had been, never could be, such a man. The lawyers disbelieved.

The doctors said that as keen, illustrious ornament, as a setting for geraniums, the General, the very Place Du Puy, in fact, belonged among our more vestigial states of mind. Nothing had happened. because nothing had changed, but the general was rubbish in the end.

There are some who take that poem of Wallace Stevens as an allegory about the canon, um, a set of, of, uh, monuments which have lost their significance. But the statue in this case has not molded. Nothing has happened.

Its greatness is merely monumental and immobile. Nothing has changed except the taste or opinion of the intelligentsia. But this opinion can produce what the poet elsewhere calls a single text, granite monotony.

It’s enough to dismiss the statue as an irrelevant, even a contemptible survival with no power to elicit our attention. It outlives its human neighbors and is probably the worst for doing so. Nobody talks about the statue as a work of art, but that would require a particular form of attention and a tradition of attention, however varied in kind, a tradition that has been broken off.

Without this form of attention, the general is rubbish. Texts, too, must change, or rather we must choose to grant them the blessings of change, for that alone will save them from their only other possible fate, namely to be rubbish in the end. The same fate could attend The Inferno or Antony Cleopatra if our mind but changed its tune.

They would be like the general There are signs that some people would like this to be so, though others sometimes do succeed in redirecting attention to works that have somewhere in the course of history lost interest, lost the attention of auditors and viewers. Reception history informs us. It’s a subject, incidentally, that might well, uh, benefit from more study.

That even Dante, Botticelli, Caravaggio, Bach, Monteverdi, all those artists have endured long periods of oblivion until the conversation changed and they were revived. Some hope it will continue to say new things about them, that the giant will go on living because living in change, rather than die for the lack of it. Indeed, outside the universities, this group, I think, is still large and remains sure that although it must change, the work can still, as it changes, give pleasure.

One consequence of canonicity is that whether the canon is formed by theological fiat or pedagogical authority, or indeed by chance, every member of it fully exists only in the company of the others. One member nourishes and qualifies another, so that as well as benefiting from the life-preserving attentions of commentary, each member thrives on the propinquity of all. So in a sense, all become part of one larger book and are changed in the process.

It’s in that sense that we need to insist with Schleiermacher, who really began this kind of inquiry, with Schleiermacher that acts of interpretation have regard to wholes and not to parts. A book inside a canon is a different book from what it would be outside it. This is obviously true of the Bible, interrelations between the parts of which have been traced, invented, and explained by centuries of commentators.

Left out of the canon, books may disappear entirely, like the Gospels that didn’t get in, like the Song of Songs that might have disappeared or almost excluded from the Hebrew Bible, but was rescued in the nick of time, we are told, and so saved not only for the Jewish Bible, but for the Christian Bible, and became the source of great volumes of subsequent poetry and commentary. Or as John Barton of Oxford has put it, “Had Ecclesiastes been excluded from the Hebrew Bible, as it might very well have been, uh, uh, then had turned up after two millennia of neglect as one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as it might have done, it would be a different book, even though the two texts were virtually the same.” There are other instances of that kind which will occur to anybody.

For obviously, the Old Testament, uh, in the perspective of Christian thought is not the same book as the Jewish Bible. It is so in substance, but Christian commentary has totally transformed it for the purposes of a different faith, a, a new covenant, a new deal, if you like, ensuring a drastic retrospective rewriting that actually, and mysteriously, demanded no textual alterations. All this reinforces the proposition that there is an element of chance in canonicity, as well as an element of change, and many examples could be brought to testify to the truth of this.

We ourselves are the makers of canons. We attend closely to texts and to context, but there may be among those texts some that we choose not to attend to and which remain there merely by inertia. Other works may have some claim to be treated as canonical, but are not so.

Many authors have been rescued from neglect, but there must be many more who have had no such luck. A few plays of Sophocles were saved by an Alex-Alexandrian grammarian who could only take seven in his scroll. Traherne, the English poet, I suppose I’ll have to say Welsh poet, in case there’s any Welsh people around here, an English poet.

The English poet, uh, Traherne, lost for almost three centuries, turned up at random on a London bookstall early in the twentieth century. And he benefited from the revival of interest in early seventeenth-century poetry that was gaining s-strength at that very moment. There’s no intrinsic preservative.

Somebody at some point must have thought, “This is actually rather a good thing,” and somehow the history of of success must begin. The person who makes the discovery need not be a professional scholar, and very often isn’t. The rediscovery of Botticelli, which I have written about at length elsewhere, was effected by persuasive amateurs, and in fact, it was quite often based on paintings which were not by Botticelli at all.

But once retrieved, these works were kept alive by conversation and eventually supported by serious scholarship. The retrieval of forgotten music, stimulated no doubt by the compact disc, goes on still. Such revivals mark changes in the understanding of the audience and complementary changes in performance.

The other day, my interest was caught by a new recording of Handel’s opera, Rinaldo. Back in 1940, I was writing about this opera in a never-to-be-published thesis about Aaron Hill. Aaron Hill was a poet, a very bad poet, a theater manager, projector, entrepreneur of various sorts, friend of the novelist Richardson, and an unwanted friend of the poet Pope.

(laughter)

Hill was responsible for introducing Handel to write this opera– for inducing Handel, I’m sorry, to write this opera. Uh, the first of his many English operas. We call them English operas because they’re performed in England, but of course they were, uh, the libretti were in Italian.

Hill himself sketched the libretto, which was hastily translated into Italian by a man called Rossi. Uh, he seems to have written it more or less overnight. And Handel brought from Italy quantities of music that had never been heard in London, and therefore were reusable in this opera.

So the collaborators were able to post-paste together a great many things in quite a short time. They had elaborate staging, uh, because that the, the, the theater had the necessary machinery. The leading–

and that was all very absurd, uh, um, in the eyes of some. So was the fact that the leading role was sung by a castrato, um, uh, which had not been known in England before. We’re talking about 1711.

The result was apparently even more, more chaotic than the circumstances and the novelty of the genre might suggest. Nevertheless, the opera was a great success, despite the sardonic notices it got from Joseph Addison. Addison said, “An opera may be allowed to be extravagantly lavish in its decorations, as its only design is to gratify the senses and keep up an indolent attention in the audience.

Common sense, however, requires that there should be nothing in the scenes and machines which may appear childish and absurd.” Well, he disliked practically everything that went on in the opera, including the real sparrows, which were meant to inhabit the pasteboard groves on the stage, but flew about the theater putting the candles out, while their singing was imitated by a consort of flageolets, uh, which in the view of Addison and others, uh, made it certain that there was nothing whatever to be said for Italian opera. It had boring plots, ridiculous amorous conventions, un-English language, and English music.

Outrageous to common sense. Nevertheless, the opera packed them in. But then Rinaldo disappeared from our eyes and ears for centuries, remembered only when cited as the source of an aria, Lascia ch’io pianga.

Sixty years ago, when I was writing my juvenile, uh, piece, it was inconceivable that I or anybody else would ever see Rinaldo, and equally inconceivable, virtually, that we would ever hear it. Uh, Now you can choose between two elaborate CD versions of it. The scene in which the flageolet and its consorts imitate birdsong is particularly admired.

The taste of Addison has been overthrown. The story of the opera It’s impossible to remember, but it is now recognized as providing scope for some impressive and powerfully pleasing music of a kind that we had to our cost ignored for a very long time, over two centuries, while the attention of our grandfathers and mothers were, uh, gripped by the solemnities of Messiah and Israel and Egypt. Meanwhile, a huge stack of opera, uh, exists and still not been fully explored.

But they’re full of what seemed to us great delights. I sort of recently saw the opera Rodelinda, which has some of the most perfect, uh, music. It was incredible that it has been more or less ignored for centuries.

How do we explain these changes? Well, we have developed a modern familiarity with the Baroque. We have singers and musicians who know how to perform it.

We can accommodate those heroic and pathetic gestures. We don’t mind the long recitatives and the da capo areas, arias. We’ve, we’ve got used to them all.

We’ve discovered how to listen to this music. It’s a different skill from listening to Mozart or Verdi or Wagner. The change is fueled by more generous notions in ourselves, I think.

Nothing has happened to the operas except that they have fallen into the hands of understanding editors. They’re no longer rubbish like the general. We have made this music modern by acts of historical understanding.

We have changed it and released its power to please. So a canon can expand, but of course, a withdrawal of attention can in the same way contract it. Changes in the canon obviously reflect changes in ourselves and in our culture.

It is a register of how our historical self-understandings have formed and changed. At the simplest level, we know about the differences between our own understandings of old texts and the understandings of our predecessors, or even of those contemporaries in disagreement with us because of generational differences or contrary political presumptions. We may attribute our grasp of the issue to our superior understanding generally, yet it is just that assumption that we are likely to say we feel an urgent need to question if we want to rid ourselves of the historically embedded prejudices that are the main support of our conviction that we are historically privileged.

(laughter)

Issues of this sort first seemed important in the sphere of religion. Everybody knows Schleiermacher’s g– slogan, “The task is to understand the text as well,” sorry, “understa-understand the text at first as well as, and then better than, its author.” To achieve such an understanding, one was recommended to study the field of language shared by the author and the original public.

The effort called for is philological, and its ambition is, of course, utopian. Later students saw a need to incorporate in the relationship what the inquirer’s own historical situation, that he couldn’t move in, as it were, uh, like a massive, impassive presence into a past situation without introducing something of himself. As Gerald Bruns says in his excellent book on hermeneutics, What we have now to ask is the question of what it is that happens when we try to make sense of something.

What it is that happens when we try to make sense of something. The moment of interpretation is now fixed in the present. The emphasis shifts mo-once more to the historical context of the interpreter, of his powers, and the desires of his community.

And so we see us, uh, we see ourselves, uh, ad-adopting the position of Gadamer, who could say that there Verstehen is less knowing what the text means in itself than it is knowing how we stand in respect to it in the situation in which we find ourselves. So it follows, as he says, that we understand differently if we understand at all. That might be the slogan of modern interpretive technique.

We understand differently if we understand at all. An interpretation that merely repeats an earlier interpretation must be false. And this is another way of ensuring change in the canon.

Pre-understandings are an important issue. Of course, they vary. Gadamer, to the annoyance of some, calls them not pre-understandings, but prejudices.

A hermeneutically trained mind, he says, must be from the start sensitive to the text’s quality of newness. But this kind of sensitivity involves neither neutrality in the matter of the object, nor the extinction of oneself, but the conscious assimilation of one’s own fore-meanings and prejudices. The important thing is to be aware of one’s own bias, so that the text may present itself in all its newness, and thus be able to assert its own truth against one’s own fore-meanings.

Uh, of course, it isn’t easy to be aware of one’s own bias, but that does seem, in certain ways, to be a very reasonable, uh, ac– description of the encounter between a new, a modern sensibility and something that’s old, but which must have– which must be made modern to be useful. It’s our job to create the newness, but that’s the great reward for this hermeneutical effort that he’s talking about. Our way of doing it may be described as appropriative, meaning only that we have to do something quite drastic sometimes to a canonical text to make it ours, to make it modern.

The, uh, quarrel, which I haven’t got time to go into now, between certain theologians on the, on this subject is deeply interesting and central to the issue. So I’ll just mention that the protagonists in the quarrel are the Yale theologian Brevard Childs and the Oxford theologian, uh, James Barr, whi-which is, uh, a perfect model, I think, of a fierce but polite scholarly contention going on over the years, uh, and

(cough)

really being fought to a draw, you might say,

(cough)

Um, but there’s an account of it, uh, uh, in a, in a in a, in a book called The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, which I contributed a chapter describing this argument between Childs and Barr. So I’m– I’ll mention it not as an ad, but if anybody int- interested in it, it’s in this book edited by McConnell, F. McConnell, called The Bible and the Narrative Tradition, and it came out of a conference at Santa Barbara, actually, New York, nineteen eighty-six. There, it’s the only ad in the entire paper.

But that’s really to save me going into a long biblical argument about original languages, communities. Uh, and the, the real difference between the Schleiermacherian view that what you’ve got to do is to get back even behind the texts of the Old Testament to what they are about, which would be the Barr view, and the Childs view that these things must be considered, uh, as, uh, constituted by and constituting a canon which is mutually im– mutually reflective and mutually important. So a great deal depends on, on the prejudice that you bring to the issue.

But one of these doctrines is certainly in favor of change. The, the development, the constant change and development of the canon means constant adaptation on the part of those who and try to understand its inner relations and so on. Uh, uh, whereas of course, the view, the other view, the Barr view really is that to distribute the canon into individual documents and study their historical bearings and origins.

However, that’s enough about the biblical canons. The fact is that there’s a strong view in favor of change as a necessary condition of canons, and, uh, the other view is really to annihilate canons altogether and treat the individual, uh, uh, elements of them as separate works and separate problems. Well, let me turn now to a source of change that interests me rather more at present.

One thing is clear from the, uh, history of literary criticism, I think, and that is the existence of a discernible consensus as to what is worth talking about, whether favorably or not. Topics like modernism, for example, are endlessly discussed. Certain works associated with it are still thought worth intensive study, uh, sometimes approving, sometimes not.

But modernism is sinking into the past, and new groups of topics have supervened. The question as to how these changes come about is a very interesting one, but I, I want to speak more about a personal element in our responses to individual poems or parts of poems, which may one day… which one may possess or be possessed by providers of pleasure and dismay. And most people who care about literature have in their heads some poems or parts of poems, and they have them there all the time.

It’s hard, though not perhaps quite impossible, to believe that anybody would want to spend a working life in a university department of literature without having such reserves. But it is a question of how communicable the private experience of such works can be. Somebody mentioned, um, usefully Matthew Arnold in the discussion yesterday, and I say a word about him now as the deviser of those famous touchstones.

Devised with some notion of making a private experience, uh, work as a set of civilized literary norms acceptable to an educated public.

(coughs)

If you look back at the passage in which Arnold discusses the touchstones in the study of poetry, you can’t help seeing how far he falls short of his aim. Um, his aim is to have always in mind, he says, “Lines and expressions of the great masters, and to apply, apply them as touchstones to other poetry.” We might expect to find in his selection of touchstones, uh, we might expect if, as we as we look at them, to see that they belong to a past stage of our culture.

Uh, bearing in mind the fact that the change is necessary, one would hardly expect them to have eternal validity. But what’s remarkable about them, I think, and still relevant, is that all Arnold needed for his personal purposes was a line of poetry here or there, or even half a line. Uh, it’s the address of Zeus to the horses of Peleus in the seventeenth Iliad or that of Achilles to Priam in the twenty-fourth.

There are three scraps of Dante, two scraps of Shakespeare, the ship boy upon some high and giddy mast, and absent thee from felicity a while, and some fragments of Paradise Lost. If we are thoroughly pen-penetrated by their powers, says Arnold, we shall find that we have acquired a sense enabling us, whenever poetry is laid before us, to feel the degree in which a high poetical quality is present or wanting there. Well, we might not disagree that the choices are in their way good bits of poetry.

But, but we will not claim, I think, that they have for us the power that they evidently had for Arnold, and it’s not easy to understand that power. He says, uh, in defense of the passages, that they are true and serious. That’s what his explanation amounts to.

But that does seem a rather piffling thing to say about, uh, Ugolino’s line, for example, in the Inferno: “Io non piangeva, sì dentro impetrai.” The line meaning that I did not weep, but instead I turn inside to stone, which serves perhaps, f-if you know the passage, as a reminder of the next words in it. The children, Ugolin-Ugolino’s children, they did weep, They asked him what was the matter, whereupon Ugolino still did not weep.

Tears were turned back to torment the weeper. In short, this fragment is intended to summon the context of great pathos of ever-increasing and irremediable pain. The words of Beatrice to Virgil in the second canto of the Inferno are certainly impressive and scary, but she says, coming, come down to see Dante and Virgil, near the beginning of their, their journey, as they’re in a wretched place, she says, “La vostra miseria non mi tange,” “Your wretchedness does not affect me.

I am made so by God in His grace that he doesn’t touch me.” The misery of privation here is not specifically Virgil’s or Dante’s, as I say, but the place where they stand, to which Beatrice descends to help them. Yet on its own, the remark seems to contrast their wretchedness with her happiness.

Dante had a certain kind of theological pitilessness which appeals to some temperaments. On the gate of hell, he inscribes the message that the maker of hell was the high maker, the divine power, la somma sapienza, e ‘l primo amore. The creator of this place of eternal suffering is not only wise, but loving.

There’s a touch of this quasi-divine indifference in the radiant immunity of Beatrice. The contrast between divine content and human misery seems to have had some appeal for Arnold, as we see from looking at the touchstones. Indeed, abandonment to or acceptance of suffering seems to be very characteristic of the poet.

The horses of Peleus are weeping at the death of Priam, who was once capable of joy. Milton’s Satan is defiant but battered. Ceres’ search for her daughter cost her all that pain to seek her through the world.

These passages share a somber or stoic quality. Beatrice is there because of her exemption from pain, uh, uh, although in fact it’s often contrasted with the, uh, with others who are not so exempted.

(coughs)

It’s hard to see how a large community of readers would find the same intensity of interest in these passages. They are very private. All have to do with sorrow.

Their pleasure arises from their painfulness. It has been pointed out that the selected Homeric passages all come from the Iliad, and they’re not particularly characteristic even of that poem. But the forces that stirred beneath the surface of Arnold’s life, says a good commentator, Warren Anderson, the forces that stirred beneath the surface of Arnold’s life find their counterpart in the battle for Troy, the athletic and magnificent figures moving towards death.

Arnold loved the Homer of the Iliad and loved the Homer of the Odyssey with its more varied and romantic story much less. It has a final coming home. It provided no touchstone.

It seems that the touchstone passages had peculiar connotations of pleasure and pain for Arnold, but they cannot be for all time and for everybody. They cannot bear the broad cultural significance he claimed for them. If a culture is involved, it is the culture of the Victorian professional class, especially men educated at Rugby and Oxford.

So Eli– um, Arnold’s touchstones don’t work. We, we wouldn’t expect them to. T. S. Eliot’s nearest approach to Arnold in a later century, uh, also one who deplored the contemporary cultural situation, and he had his own touchstones.

He didn’t explicitly call them that or recommend them for general use. Yet although they are in various ways extremely personal, they do, I think, uh, they have– they do enjoy more success still in literary circles than Matthew Arnold’s. One reason is that they lack the strong ethical coloring of Arnold’s selections, and they’re more unexpected, uh, uh, or were more in-unexpected at the time of their first exposure.

The influence that Eliot has in this, has in all respects, waned, not least because modes of study now in fashion have very little interest in the experience of poetry, uh, which is no longer thought to have much academic or even much cultural relevance. But this was not a view that Eliot would have found it possible to endorse. Yet for the student of poetry, Eliot’s touchstones are worth more than a moment’s attention.

A favorite source is again Dante, but a different Dante. We think of Shakespeare as the source of so many familiar quotations that we sometimes hardly remember their connection with him. And Dante has something of the same familiarity in Italy, except that people seem more aware of the place of these famous lines in the poem as a whole than we are.

As by a little anecdote, if I may. By a memorable chance, I once sat with Lionel and Diana Trilling at a Christmas Eve dinner in Palermo at the table of a Sicilian tour guide in the company of our host’s sons and daughters and their spouses, most of whom were schoolteachers, and invited to celebrate Dante. Lyle and I– Lionel and I dug into our memories and produced mostly lines that had Eliot’s endorsement.

The Paolo and Francesco episode in the fifth of the Inferno, with its extraordinary tender sensuality, remarkable, uh, sensuality. In fact, “la bocca mi baciò tutto tremante.” The verse adopted and quoted by Eliot in The Waste Land, and sort of more famous here in his English than in his Italian version.

“Ricorditi di- di- di me, che son la pia.” “Siena mi fé, disfecemi Maremma.”

Uh, all these are f- are familiar to educated people, I think largely, almost entirely because of Eliot. Or the story of the vanquished hero now in hell, who ran for the green cloth in the race at Verona and lost the race, but seemed like one who had, seemed like one who had won. Other images came to mind and circulated round the table.

The old tailor peering at his needle, the advice of the doomed Ulysses to his men on the brink of their last voyage. “Consider your inheritance. You were not made to live like beasts, but to pursue virtue and knowledge.”

That does sound a bit more Arnoldian, actually. Anyway, we dug these memories out, but our mumblings were drowned by the chorus around the table. Everybody at that table knew all these and many, many more such, uh, uh,

(laughter)

verses of Dante without thinking of them as touchstones or ethical guidelines, though some of them have an ethical or religious tone. Not deliberately memorized, but part of the pleasures of their basic education, and we were most impressed. Among the array of fragments, the ones that meant so much to Eliot were roughly passages that dealt with destruction, ruin, damnation, and the pains of purgatory.

For Eliot, these were not simply ethical guidelines. In fact, they weren’t that at all. He did warm to their connotations of bold sin, as he discussed in his essay on Baudelaire, uh, bold sin and inevitable punishment.

Part of Dante’s moral appeal to him was surely a certain theological or moral pitilessness, that eternal torment was ordained by love and wisdom, that Beatrice was beautifully immune to the pain of the living. These were paradoxes that gave him grim pleasure. Eliot had a special interest in what he ca– might be called, no, he didn’t call it, sexual dismay, and his favorite lines from Dante often bear its mark.

It’s useful to bear in mind what he once said about the reader’s need to surrender to poetry. This is from a private letter, not anything, anything he ever, uh, wrote about explicitly, I don’t think, uh, in public. “You don’t,” he says, “you don’t really criticize any author to whom you have not surrendered yourself.

Even just the bewildering minute counts. You have to give yourself up and then recover yourself, and the third moment is having something to say before you’ve wholly forgotten both surrender and recovery. Of course, the self recovered is never the same as the self before it was given.”

” Now, he believed the surrender to be central to the experience of poetry. Everybody remembers the lines in The Waste Land, “My friend, blood shaking my heart. The awful daring of a moment’s surrender, which an age of prudence can never retract.

By this, and this only, we have existed.” And we may also recall those lines from The Revenger’s Tragedy, which I think were made famous by Eliot and repeatedly cited by him. “Does the silkworm expend her yellow labors for thee?

For thee does she undo herself? Are lordships sold to maintain ladyships for the poor benefit of a bewitching minute?” Vindici in the play is here addressing the skull of his lover.

These famous lines, as I say, became famous when Eliot said they ought to be. I’ve given the text of the most recent edition for the poor benefit of a bewitching minute. But Eliot preferred for the poor benefit of a bewildering minute, a reading which he found, uh, and which entirely lacks authority, as far as I can make out, in a Victorian edition.

Now, in changing it, in finding bewildering and accepting it, he made the right choice, I think. He modernized– He made this a better line. He made this a more remarkable passage.

He modernized it by changing a reading in it, in fact. Because bewildering introduces into the sexual figure just that element of loss and dismay of which I have been speaking. Bewitching is the kind of cheaper, lower-level word you feel here.

The whole speech of Vindice is compact of sexual dismay, a kind of ornate sexual disgust. Even the silkworm who makes the wom- makes the clothes of women is undone in doing so. Uh, she expends her yellow labors for thee, for thee, for the skeleton, for the se- for the sex, which is represented by this, this, uh, s-skull.

Returning to those lines in his study of Massinger, Eliot gives reasons for his admiration. He finds here, this is quite a famous expression, that perpetual slight alteration of language, words perpetually juxtaposed in new and sudden combinations, meanings perpetually eingeschachtelt into meanings which evidences a very high development of the senses, a development of the English language which we have perhaps never equaled. Sensation became word, and word sensation.

The lines demonstrate a felt identity between sexual and poetic jouissance, if you like, and in substituting bewildering for bewitching, we have a change, an updating of the passage to include a darker, more decadent notion of the force of poetry as well as of the nature of sex. Here, the late 19th century revival of interest in the Jacobean dramatists has made possible not only new canonical inclusions, but also their juxtaposition in the mind with modern poetry, with the likes of Baudelaire, for example. In a later essay, Eliot dec-decided that the synonym, s-sorry, the cynic-cynicism, the loathing and disgust of humanity expressed consummately in The Revenger’s Tragedy are immature in the respect that they exceed the object.

(clears throat)

Their objective equivalents are characters which seem merely to be spectres projected from the poet’s inner world of nightmare, some horror beyond words. In that essay, he’s struggling to justify his view that Tourneur’s immaturity could nevertheless have produced a play that expresses, as he says, “An intense and unique and horrible vision of life to which mature men and women can respond.” And it’s not without interest that he makes a passing allusion to that other and inferior play intri– attributed to Tourneur, The Atheist’s Tragedy, and singles out the line, “To spend our substance on a minute’s pleasure,” which is on the same theme as the silkworm passage in the more famous play.

The association then of high poetry, and he certainly thought this poetry to be high, its concomitant dismay, and its subsequent disgust. This, uh, association persists in his– in Eliot’s other essays on the Jacobean dramatist. Massinger has masterly construction, but is anemic.

Lacking a nervous system comparable with Middleton’s or Tourneur’s or Ford’s, he inaugurates a period of verse in which the sensibility begins to be dissociated, the period of Milton, characterized by a decay of the senses. Milton did not make that surrender to pleasure and dismay, which is so strong in Tourneur and Middleton. The lines which De Flores in The Changeling refuses Beatrice Joanna’s plea, “Can you weep fate from its determined purpose?

“So soon may you weep me,” are lines of which Shakespeare and Sophocles might have been proud, says Eliot. But it may be that it was the looseness of the situation, uh, rather than the language that appeals so strongly to him here. Uh, he says that it has– it represents an eternal tragedy as permanent as Oedipus or Antony and Cleopatra.

And yet the story, as you remember, is the story of an ugly seducer endowed with absolute power, sexual power over a woman. Uh, the sexual situation in the play, in fact, clearly has a bearing on the selection of these touchstones. It’s of interest that when Eliot wanted to reinforce his view of Middleton as a great poet, he chose the final speech of Beatrice-Joanna in the play, which contains the marvelous lines, marvelous lines, because I say that because I suppose they’re part of my touchstones.

“I am that of your blood was taken from you for your better health.” But Eliot interestingly misquotes those lines. “I, that am of your blood and taken from you for your better health,” he says.

Much weaker. That means, uh, simply a reference to the fact that they’re, they’re, they’re of the family, that they share the same blood. Whereas what Beatrice Joanna is really saying is, is comparing, uh, the act that must be done to a medical bloodletting.

I am that of your blood, and that part of that which must be taken from you. Not I am that of your blood. Well, you see the difference, and it’s, uh, a case where, by misquotation this time, I think, uh, well, Eliot has lost the sense of a line which he nevertheless inordinately admires.

That’s always very curious, I think, that there are lines which can do that. Uh, you might value them, and you discover long afterwards you’ve been slightly misquoting them. And, and the fact that this, of course, these are all coming straight out of his head, not out of, not out of a book.

This happens to Eliot amazingly again when he changes the, the words of De Flores in the final scene of The Changeling, when De Flores says, “I loved this woman in spite of her heart.” He quotes it as, “I loved this woman in spite of my heart,” which is a very interesting change indeed, I think. Uh, once again, the, the touchstone of the, the, the chosen line has been subtly altered to suit a, a different point of view.

My point is to illustrate the process of surrender and incorporation that these alterations suggest. The text changes as the reader changes. A very good reader gives– makes very good changes in the text.

It’s not too much to say that they’re related to the orgasmic potential of the lines that induced the surrender in the first place. These authors had to have, were made to have, something of the modernity of Baudelaire, the exemplary modern poet for Eliot, the p-poet who said that the unique and supreme pleasure of love lies in the certainty of doing ill. He was at least able to understand that the sexual act as evil is more dignified, less boring, than as a natural, cheery automatism of the modern world.

So Eliot elevated Turner and Middleton to modernity, an essential step to their preservation. The passages that succeeded in inducing surrender are few and distinguished from others that might seem to have claim to the exclusion in this personal canon. Sorry.

And Eliot liked to combine his admiration for Shakespeare with a few limiting judgments. Shakespeare is not as good a technician as Webster. Sometimes he fails if you confront him with Dante.

He can be used to put down Middleton– I mean, down Milton or Tennyson, but in Hemingway’s expression, he can’t quite go the distance with Dante. In the Dante essay of nineteen twenty-nine, Eliot explicitly compares the figure equally admired by Arnold and by Yeats of the old tailor peering at his needle’s cruna, uh– of Octavius to the dead body of Cleopatra at the end of Antony and Cleopatra.

It’s where Octavius says, “She looks like sleep, as she would catch another Antony in her strong toil of grace.” I can’t imagine that, uh, anybody would deny that these lines have a baffling splendor. But Eliot says that Dante’s metaphor of the, of the old tailor makes you see something more definitely.

Shakespeare’s has an outline which is less definite, though it does add to what you see a reminder of Cleopatra’s world-changing fascination. And he goes on to argue that Dante’s, uh, rational necessity– Dante observes rational necessity, and Shakespeare does not. But if you look at the whole– sorry, if you look at the whole speech of Octavius, uh, in this context, and you see that it begins not with these lines, but with some rather clinical observations.

He looks at the corpse of Cleopatra, “O noble weakness,” or and his women and her women. “O noble weakness.” If they had swallowed poison, that would appear here by external swelling, but she looks like sleep, uh, and so on.

Well, that does rather change it, I think. Uh, the– there’s a brilliant moment of surprise when the, the diagnostic search for symptoms, uh, which m-might seem characteristic of the speaker, uh, suddenly gives way to this glory. It’s only in a rather guarded way that Eliot is willing to make such a surrender.

But he does return to that speech in his “Massinger” essay, and then again in the Clark Lectures that he gave at Cambridge in 1926, where he here contrasts those lines, he looks like sleep, and so on, with Dante’s lines about Brunetto Latini, the lines I mentioned before, “He seemed to be like one of those who wins, not like him who loses.” And here again, Shakespeare’s lines are much admired because they show an image absolutely woven into the fabric of the thought, yet they still lack the rational necessity of Dante’s lines. That’s a very curious judgment.

if you think that the, the, the lines on Brunetto Latini are beautiful and strange, where they– there’s the detail of the white, uh, uh, scarf or cloth, whatever it is.

(laughter)

A good lo– A good deal of detail is not actually immediately necessary to the figure of the hero who looks victorious in defeat. Still, uh, it’s all included under rational necessity. because it’s by Dante.

Rational necessity is something that you can use usually to put Shakespeare down with his, his lack of it. But Eliot always wanted Dante to win all contests, and it’s plain that both of these passages are deep in his imagination, and it’s worth remarking that both of them have to do with the topics of punishment and pain. Brunetto and Cleopatra are both sinners on the grandest possible scale, yet both have the air of having won.

You can recall other moments in Shakespeare’s play which are equally dazzling. For example, when Cleopatra, once again for a moment, this great fairy and the day of the world, greets the returning Antony as Lord of Lords. “Infinite, oh, infinite virtue, com’st thou smiling from the world’s great snare uncaught.”” Lines to which most of us surrender, I think, as Auden himself grudgingly admits in his lecture on the play, which to him was the greatest of the plays.

Uh, when he calls these lines, he says, “Well, they are marvelous. Yet somehow the marvel comes from the splendor of exaltation in the shadow of certain defeat.” The moralizing Auden goes on to say, “Cleopatra’s strong toil of grace is the world itself, and in one way it catches, in one way or another, it catches us all, even if the snare can be thought of as grace.”

Well, Auden introduces religion, Eliot introduces history. They have surrendered to this passage and are now recovered and trying to think of something to say. Coleridge, who also greatly admired the play, fo-founded the expression.

happy valiancy to describe its style in such great moments. But that explains no better than anybody else the network of responses that invited submission, recovery, and comment. Often what we find to say amounts to no more than an expression of astonishment, which is of little use unless it induces an equivalent submission in our hearers.

Dull though our remarks may be, they can do this. They can become part of a conversation that prevents such lines from becoming rubbish in the end. It’s hard to believe that that could ever happen.

I noticed, for example, I.A. Richards discuss, trying to discuss this passage in his book, uh, on metaphor, Philosophy of Rhetoric, in which he says, “Where in terms of what entries in what possible dictionary do the meanings of toil and grace here come to rest?” And then he says, “I’m writing about rhetoric, not about poetry, so I don’t have to answer that question.” And I think we’re all likely to find ourselves in a similar position.

I’ve been circling around my themes of pleasure and change and canon. Uh, I haven’t said very much about Shakespeare, but I hope it will seem that that final, uh, pa– that is one of the great moments that could be paralleled perhaps with others, and it does have a bearing on everything that I’ve been talking about. As I said, I’ve been going around these themes of pleasure and change and canonicity.

The passages I’ve discussed often have had an element of perversity, and that’s not surprising. They have to administer shock. They leap out of context, disrupt it, cause a kind of delight mingled with dismay.

They often, perhaps always, defy rational necessity, if only in the most obvious sense. Cleopatra is enormously seductive, but in illustrating that fact for the last time, there was no rational necessity for Octavian’s sudden glory. That is true enough.

It may be, as Eliot believed, that it is an essential of good poetry that it should, at least on occasion, have an almost prosaic quality, that it should be devoid of invitations to emotional surrender, that it should not be aiming at the achievement of one epiphany after another. There must, in other words, be that plaisir that depends on continuities, poetic and social. But it’s only from that base that jouissance becomes a possibility.

Octavius Caesar, a prosaic figure, examines the body of the queen and then issues the great invitation to surrender in pleasure and dismay. It is, after all, a pattern of experience familiar from ordinary life, interrupted by moments that are distinguished from the ordinary run of things, and which occupy an, as it were, intemporal place in our minds, a canon of memories that may be pleasant and may be dismaying.

(cough)

They could have clearly distinguished from rational necessities as great poems are from the prose that surrounds them. What is important may be, according to the predilections of each of us, quite a small thing, a line or two, half a line. It might be compared in another art to that patch, little patch of yellow wall in Vermeer’s View of Delft that brought Proust’s Bergotte to his final and total surrender.

However, before you could be forced to surrender, by a little yellow patch, there had to be a whole painting. There had to be a sober view. There had to be something containing the patch, and the painting had had to be made beautiful by the informed knowledge of those who contemplated it.

Proust was already a young man in his early twenties when people began, after two centuries of neglect, to look seriously at the paintings of Vermeer. These paintings then began to give pleasure, and to Bergotte, they gave something like jouissance.

[01:00:16] ROBERT:
Repertory theaters in the United States. She, she’s been, uh, in charge of the ACT since, uh, nineteen ninety-two and, uh, given it a, um, a new dynamism, uh, putting on plays that that go from the, um, from Greek tragedy to, uh, Tom Stoppard, uh, and beyond. Um, I, I learned last night in conversation w-with, uh, uh, Carey Perloff that she actually came to the stage through the study of classics.

That is, uh, she was a, a student at Stanford and Oxford of, um, uh, Greek and Latin literature, and particularly interested in Greek things and even Greek archaeological things. And from, uh, putting on a couple of Greek plays, she started down the slippery slope i-i-into the glorious world o-of theater. It seems to me an inspired choice by the organizing committee to invite Carey Perloff to be one of the correspondents, because she’s really Out there in the trenches, a-as someone who has to, in the most concrete and practical way, and she’s done it with great imaginative skill, um, translate the, uh, the museum relics o-of, uh, w-what

the, the, the academic world thinks of a-as the canon into living pieces that actual contemporary audiences can respond to. So I’m sure, like me, all of you are eager to hear what she has to say. Carey Perloff.

[01:01:59] CAREY PERLOFF:
On Antigone at my theater in a way that I will never forget, so I’m, um, I’m, I’m here to repay Robert for, um, for that gift to me. Um, and also I’m thrilled to be, uh, here in, in tribute to Frank Kermode, whose work I have relished for many years, and whose book, Shakespeare’s Language, I made all of my MFA students in acting buy last year, so I hope you noticed the royalties. Um, because, uh, unlike many, um, forms of criticism, I think it is absolutely fair to say that, that, uh, Sir Frank’s work is, um, eminently, uh, usable and vigorously so for, uh, people in the profession, in my profession.

Um, and, uh, I th-I think that’s a, a rare gift and a very valuable thing. Um, I’m, I’m here as a total outsider to this discourse, and I sat there d-panicked yesterday that everybody had their formal typed response statements because, uh, so I thought I’d better go home and type something. Um, but, um, uh, I am not an academic, much to the dismay of my academic, uh, parents, so, um, but I am a practitioner, uh, uh, um, of, of theater and, and I guess to some degree therefore, uh, uh, I am constantly wrestling with this notion of canon.

Uh, particularly because I have to answer to my beloved board of directors, whom I know wishes I stayed more within what they sometimes might believe is the canon than when I do Euripides and Gorky and odd pieces of literature that I try to reintroduce into the canon. So, um, uh, much of what’s happened yesterday and today really stimulated me, and I, I thought I’d throw out a few things because I come at this question from such a radically different position, um, that I would throw out a, a kind of different view of this notion of, um, the change in canon. Um, if nothing else, um, just to, just stimulate a a little discussion.

Um, it interested me, uh, among other things that, um, in asserting, uh, in, in his, his beautiful talk just now on, on change in the canon that, um, and in giving examples of ways in which work enters and, uh, falls away from the canon, that, um, there was an assumption that it was, uh, almost impossible except for in the most general terms about changes in modern taste to understand why that might happen. And I think there, uh, you— for instance, Sir Frank says there is a quote, “No intrinsic preservative,” but somebody at some point must have thought these were good things, and so begins the hi-history of their success.” And I would ask, who is that somebody?

Uh, he asserts, quote– Again, I quote, “This person not be a professional scholar, uh, and could be, for example, an, an amateur as those, uh, uh, who rediscovered the work of Botticelli.” I, I would argue, uh, uh, in the face of so many distinguished critics in the room, that it isn’t actually the, um, academe that makes canons or critics that make canons, but artists who make canons, and that theatrical–

Uh, that not just theatrical, but that aesthetic canons change when the artistic imperatives to receive them change, um, and when artists become interested in, uh, particular works from the past that serve as their touchstones for, uh, the recreation and the creation of new, um, artistic creations. Uh, if one could define criticism in some way as, as a sophisticated, rigorous response to a work of art, then perhaps one could also argue that the most– that the highest form of criticism is the creation of an important new work of art. And certainly Eliot, whom we’ve heard, um, spoken of in great detail today, or Matthew Arnold, or many of the other sort of luminous poets who were also critics, have been held up as examples of that, um, of writers whose work has been, um, uh, profoundly moved forward by their critical relationship to important works of the past, and who have also insisted upon, uh, a re-examination of works that the rest of us might not have otherwise, um, gone back to.

Uh, in almost every case, I, I would say, in which that I can think of, particularly in my field, but I, I, I think in, in, in poetry and fiction as well, in which there’s a marked shift in canon or a renewed interest in the so-called cano- uh, non-canonical writers or composers, let us say, or visual artists, the impetus has very often come from particular artists, um, in, in the context of their own work. Uh, while life may inspire the content of art to some degree, I firmly believe that art grows out of other art, and that the form that art, um, that art takes, um, is, uh, a, a, if we look at that very closely, um, in its relationship to, to works of the past, the, uh, the, that kind of tissue of connectivity, um, uh, becomes much more, um, interesting and, uh, less subjective, and I think we s-would spend less time, uh, grieving for those works which, uh, in, in the short term fall away, uh, only to be discovered later by other creative artists. Um, it’s interesting, and, a-a-and my first encounter with this, which the w-w-with the way in which actually a brilliant poet could, um, change the face of a canon was during my time as a classicist, um, which was most of my training.

I have no formal training as– in, in the theater either. I, I wanted to be an archaeologist all of my life. And, uh, one of the things I most vividly remember as a Latinist was how dismissive the field was in its reverence for a certain kind of philological approach of, of what were called the decadent Roman narratives.

Um, but I had an extraordinary professor at Stanford, uh, the late Jack Winkler, who insisted, um, upon an examination of these texts, and I came to one of them, which I think is one of the great Roman novels, Petronius’s The Satyricon, through T.S. Eliot, through this very poem we’ve been talking about a great deal this afternoon, through The Waste Land. Um, as you may remember, uh, the Satyricon is woven st-right through The Waste Land. All of the imagery of death by water, I think, in many ways, uh, is deeply connected to S– to Petronius’s world.

But the most obvious is the famous question to the Sibyl of Cumae, when asked what she wants, and she says, “I want to die.” And that comes from, uh, right at the sort of heartbeat, the center of, uh, of The Satyricon. Uh, I was fascinated by, uh, Eliot’s appropriation of that, and when I finally had an ex- the chance to, through his, um, this wonderful expression that Sir Frank used of the the necessity of newness, um, in order to keep the canon alive, I, I was able to actually read the Satyricon through that lens of Eliot.

And of course, it becomes this extraordinarily fractured modernist text filled with colloquialisms, with jargon, uh, with, with public, with private speech interlaced with, um, elegant lyric, many of the characteristics of “The Waste Land.” Now, of course, the delicious thing which is always true of reappropriating works from the past and putting them back into the canon is that we re-reappropriate them in the ruined state in which we find them, like the Belvedere Torso, which we would hate to ever see with arms on again, um, or the Parthenon, which we would despair of if it were painted the way the Greeks had painted it. We like our ruins the way we inherit them, and certainly we’ve inherited the Satyricon as a fractured text, and therefore it becomes modernist, and therefore it becomes a very useful part of, um, our canon.

But I noticed that, that in being able to read that material through the lens of a great modernist poet, classicists, and it wasn’t just through Eliot, but in part, um, began, uh, you know, to crack open the acceptable range of, uh, Latin material that was, uh, taught to willing undergraduates at Stanford. Um, and that canon has really changed. I mean, in looking at classical literature, it’s even more surprising in many ways than looking at the last three hundred years of English literature, what is now being taught in the classics curriculum, which I think is really thrilling and has everything to do with the kinds of, uh, literature that, that contemporary artists are interested in.

And, uh, to cite another example, I was very fascinated by this notion of, um, the return of, uh, the Baroque composer, which is indisputably true, and I absolutely share Sir Frank’s, uh, delight. Uh, but I, I, I think, um, I would question his, uh, analysis of why that is happening. Um, I, I would argue it isn’t because Handel has, quote, “fallen into the hands of understanding editors,” or that, quote, “we have discovered how to listen to this music through acts of historical understanding,” Um, that Handel has returned.

Um, or that it’s because of the, the birth of, of the CD industry, which, you know, I would that it were so, and that most CD producers only wanted to produce interesting and unusual music, and that most symphony orchestras wanted to. But we all know that mostly Mozart is what sells, and that Verdi and Puccini sell, um, far more than the Baroque. And yet, in recent years, interesting, important opera companies have been programming, exactly as you say, um, extraordinary, uh, not just Handel, but, uh, you know, Monteverdi and Gluck and, um, really interesting overlooked, uh, works.

[01:11:18] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
Why is this?

[01:11:19] CAREY PERLOFF:
I, I, I would argue it’s because the artists themselves are demanding it. Um, important stage directors like Peter Sellars, Mark Lamos, Stephen Wadsworth are finding enormous contemporary muscle in Baroque music and making a persuasive case for it on stage. And how did their attention get turned to this music?

You then have to go back and look at what are the most important composers in this country interested in today. Um, I had the great privilege of touring Europe for six months with Steve Reich, one of our g-great American composers, with a new opera that he wrote called The Cave. And, um, the audition process for the singers of that opera were, were, it, it was the most Byzantine thing I’d ever experienced because what Steve was looking for was a kind of muscular vocal energy, which was percussive and instrumental and had no vibrato.

Now, this is not the tradition of bel canto that we experience in, in, um, singers who mostly sing Verdi, Puccini, Wagner. But it is the k- The quality of singing that goes with the kind of vocal writing of Baroque music.

So for Steve Reich, the necessity, the demand for the return of that canon, of that material was because it was the trigger, the, one of the central things, um, uh, to his own creative exploration as a contemporary American composer. And these things are, are not unrelated. So the fact that now we have singers like Lorraine Hunt, whom I hope many of you have heard at Zellerbach doing, uh, stunning work on John Adams’, uh, music, for instance, um, were trained in the Baroque repertoire, and as it fed back and fed into contemporary music.

Um, these things are not coincidental. And, uh, and, uh, I, I, I think that continuum is actually, um, it’s very exciting. Artists call upon other artists to make their cases, to rebel against, uh, this is their surrender and recover.

Um, and in doing so, they find new forms, and as they do, the canon shifts. Now, every artist’s touchstones are different, and I love this sort of look at the Arnoldian touchstones and, and T.S. Eliot’s touchstones. Um, uh, it is clear that, to me anyway, in looking at the theatrical canon and what comes and goes, that when, um, pieces of literature or major authors cease to have currency, um, when they cease to be touchstones for contemporary artists, they fall off the radar screen.

And I don’t think this is the end of the world. They exist on microfilm and in libraries, and, um, they will be reclaimed. Uh, it seems to me that when material, um, that we consider i-important and canonical in the academy ceases to be at the forefront of discourse, it may not be because the culture is philistine and people aren’t reading, but actually because other things become– have greater currency and become more, um, it provide a more muscular, uh, trigger for new creative expression.

Uh, we, we had a very, uh, vigorous debate yesterday, uh, about the meaning of the word pleasure and its relationship to power, and I hope we’ll really get into this tomorrow, so I’m gonna leave that temporarily, although I had a lot of thoughts about that, but I, I, except to say this. Um, since we never came to exactly a formal definition of, of how the term pleasure might be used in relationship to literature, uh, I would venture to say, uh, um, in my subjective view, that, um, pleasure in relationship to a work of art is directly proportional to the creative activity it awakens in the viewer or in the reader. Um, this, uh, is in some ways connected to that, um, sc- to Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization, that great art makes you see anew.

It awakens your senses to the world around you in a vigorously unthought way. Um, and the pleasure of awakening is actually, uh, for a creative artist, an incredibly muscular one that, um, that triggers very tangible results. Uh, for example, uh, Harold Pinter’s encounter in 1954 with the very early work of Samuel Beckett, this is Watt and Molloy, um, before Godot, um, triggered such an extreme form of what I would call pleasure, uh, combined with a certain degree of pain, I would say, that it launched a writing career that in many ways one could view as a direct response to that encounter.

He found in, in the fierceness of Beckett’s formal discipline, in the aggressive and beautiful lack of sentiment, in the vaudevillian humor of Beckett’s dualities and characters, a-a room for all of his later work. And he said, “This is such a great—” This is a private letter of his, but I thought it was such a great quote of Pinter’s from 1954: “The more he grinds my nose in the shit, the more I am grateful to him.” Now, this is surely a different kind of pleasure from that afforded by Wordsworth, let us say.

Um, but I think it’s a, it’s a fertile and creative pleasure that has been seminal, certainly to late 20th-century drama. Pinter said, “I’ll buy his goods, hook, line, and sinker because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely.” He brings forth a body of beauty.

His work is beautiful.” Now, you don’t know how… I mean, you mu- we must all remember what a radical and extraordinary thing that was to say in nineteen fifty-four when the critical community, the academic community, and God knows the drama critics were vilifying, uh, this writer as, as meaningless and uninteresting and boring, and I, I, I firmly believe that Pinter– that Beckett would never have really, uh, well, not never, uh, would have taken much longer to enter the– what we now consider the canon, had not a writer like Pinter championed him.

And it’s certainly true in this country of the work of Pinter in relationship to David Mamet. It’s, it’s David Mamet more than almost anyone else who persuaded Americans who have a chronic fear of ambiguity and irony to enjoy the work of Harold Pinter, and that is really through the lens of David Mamet, who’s easier for us to swallow because he’s Amer– He’s American, and he’s more recognizable. So I think artists, um, uh, have served a, a, fantastically useful vanguard, uh, function, um, in terms of, uh, canon change.

Um, there are many, many e-e-examples of this. It’s intriguing to me that the poet A. E. Housman, um, is being read and discussed today, um, not just in academe, but yes, God forbid, by the general reader, which I still do believe is out there, uh, to some degree. Um, in part because Tom Stoppard wrote a play called The Invention of Love, um, which reexamined, um, in quite extraordinary ways, not only the, the private life and the sexual life and the career of Housman, but, um, his poetry and his work in relationship in particular to, to Oscar Wilde.

Uh, and therefore, um, that poet, who I think in many ways had fallen off the radar screen in terms of canonicity, um, uh, returned at least for a brief spell. And, and that was, uh, an interesting gift, I think, of one writer to another. I just wanted to segue to one other point, um, which is very interesting to me.

We keep going back when we talk about, um, canon-making and when we talk about touchstones to these great modernist writers who had a broad and vigorous interest in international literature. And yet, it seems to me that one of the, uh, one of the things that has caused kind of canonical inertia is the insistence, um, in American universities and British universities that, that the canon always be divided into national language groups. Um, and again, I think this is actually, uh, not a useful thing because artists, uh, most often work across national barriers.

Again, one can’t imagine reading Pinter without knowing Kafka, but I’ve never encountered a course in Pinter. I hope someone who will correct me if I’m wrong, that actually includes Kafka in the curriculum because Pinter is an English playwright and Kafka is in the German department. Um, uh, it seems to me that that artificial distinction, which is certainly not one that Eliot would have made, and all of the references quoted here presume a reading knowledge of many foreign languages, which, you know, I, I, we cannot presume today, and which even universities like this distinguished university, I think, have placed so far less emphasis on, um, uh, international literatures than we might, um, we wonder why at times the literature we’re interested in seems marginal.

But there’s an enormous and complex, um, interplay happening across national boundaries amongst, um, uh, artists who are, um, engaged in both, I would say, the making of canons and in the creation of new work. It would never occur to us to segregate Italian and Russian futurism in painting or to segregate the work of Arvo Pärt from Steve Reich because they come from radically different cultures, because we understand, um, the way in which their work is, uh, is connected in both a formal and a spiritual, and certainly in terms of its content. Um, but, uh, I have consistently found, and this is something I find as a producer of theater, um, uh, in my own theater, having to defend, um, an interest in an international literature, um, uh, which, uh, to American minds seems somewhat other and somewhat, uh, perhaps, um, not part of what, of our canon.

Uh, I’m working right now on Schiller’s Don Carlos, which I’m hoping we’ll do next, next year at ACT. And of course, you know, when you try to translate Schiller, you realize that there isn’t a scene in that play that isn’t taken from Hamlet. It’s–

So if you don’t know Hamlet, Don Carlos presumably is r-a rather mysterious document. Um, but by the same token, you know, it’s, it’s what’s so, uh, kind of wonderful is the way that Shakespeare remade Schiller to the degree that many Germans, you know, I think still think that Shakespeare really was written in German. Um, uh, uh, uh, that is, um, you know, that, that, um, uh, kind of, uh, necessary, uh, aesthetic interplay is something that I, I, I believe really needs fighting for.

And I think the lack of it is what has desiccated our cultural discourse and has desiccated our, um, uh, the, the broadness with which our theatrical landscape should be, uh, populated. And finally, uh, since Professor Hartman spoke so beautifully about Et in, uh, Arcadia ego and talked about, uh, Arcadia both as the locus of pleasure and the locus of death, I, I went back late last night to look for a passage from Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, um, which was in my mind all day yesterday as we were talking about this notion of canonicity and our frequent unhappiness at those things which had fallen out of the canon, um, and, uh, questions of why certain things are jettisoned and certain things are, are maintained. And I, I found it late last night, and I just thought I’d end with this because it, it, it seemed some way germane.

Um, this is this– the brilliant young girl, Thomasina, who’s the mathematician, who is in despair at this very question of the loss of beautiful texts in the canon. And she doesn’t use that term, but, uh, that’s what she’s in despair about. And, uh, she says to her, um, her f- her friend and tutor and s-er, almost lover, Septimus, “Oh, Septimus, can you bear it?

All the lost plays of the Athenians, 200 at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, thousands of poems. Aristotle’s own library brought to Egypt by the noodle,” he means Cleopatra. She means Cleopatra’s ancestors.

“How can we sleep for grief?” Then Septimus replies, “By counting our stock.” Seven plays from Aeschylus, seven from Sophocles, nineteen from Euripides, my lady.

You should no more grieve for the rest than for a buckle lost from your first shoe or for your lesson book, which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms. And what we let fall will be picked up by those behind.

The procession is very long, and life is very short. We die on the march. But there is nothing outside the march, so nothing can be lost to it.

The missing plays of Sophocles will turn up piece by piece or be written again in another language.

(applause)

[01:24:05] ROBERT:
Well, it’s very welcome to, to have that, uh, u-upbeat version of the, uh, ongoing energy of the, the contemporary cultural scene. And Kara, uh, to, to make you happy, in the c-course I’m teaching this semester, I teach Kafka’s America with the Book of Exodus. Oh. Not with Pinter, but—

(laughter)

John, uh, Guillory is a professor of English at, uh, New York University a-and, uh, currently chairing the Department o-of, uh, English there. He has, uh, he was trained at Yale and has taught at Yale, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and of course now NYU. When I, when I thought about all the prestigious universities of the Northeast that he’s taught at, uh, uh, I was wondering why Princeton was missing from the list.

Uh, probably you missed the stop at, at, at Princeton Junction and went on to Baltimore. Oh, you did? All right.

All right. I’m s– See, there, there you ha– You touched all bases. Now, uh, a-a-actually, uh, John, uh, Guillory has touched all bases i-i-in another way because h-his, uh, work a-as a, a scholar critic has, uh, addressed, um, uh, a number of different angles, uh, of th- that, uh, are, are relevant to this issue of canonicity with which we’re concerned.

And, uh, his– he began, as did our, our, uh, uh, featured speaker, uh, Frank Kermode, in the, uh, Renaissance with, with a book called Poetic Authority: Spenser, Milton, and Literary History. He has, uh, since published, uh, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literar-, of Literary Canon Formation, which, which is dead on to our topic, and most recently, uh, just last year, a book called What Is Left of Theory. He’s been, uh, astutely concerned with, uh, the, the, uh, the politics of l-literary theory a-a-and the literary pr-profession and the sociology of these activities as well, and I think that, that his perspective will be very welcome.

Thank you.

(applause)

[01:26:32] JOHN GUILLORY:
Thank you, Robert, for your, uh, kind introduction. Uh, I should also, uh, like to thank the Tanner Committee for honoring me with the daunting task of responding to Sir Frank Kermode’s lectures and also to Professor Kermode himself. Uh, and I should say I have, uh, I also have Jeffrey’s problem of, uh, how to refer, uh, to our honored, uh, lecturer, uh, Uh, and I know I’m going to stumble over Sir Frank Kermode, so I’m gonna use the American equivalent honorific, Professor.

um, Professor Kermode. Uh, I’d also like to thank Professor Kermode himself for provoking me in his subtle remarks to think once more, yet once more, about the literary canon, a tedious and battered subject though it is, as he says in his first lecture. It’s been especially challenging to formulate my responses to these lectures, not only because I share a fairly large area of agreement with Professor Kermode about the matters I think we both consider to be most deeply important, but also because his lectures belong to a body of work which will, I believe, continue to be of interest to scholars in the future, great interest to scholars in the future, just, despite what he may think, um, when so much criticism, both past and present, is undeniably, uh, and deservedly perishable.

Uh, let me begin then by noting briefly the area of my agreement with Professor Kermode before suggesting some of the ways in which I would depart, uh, from some of the terms of his analysis. Uh, I do agree that literary criticism is a curiously troubled discipline today, and that part of its trouble is directly related to the ambivalence, uh, ambivalence academic literary critics seem to express toward the object of their discipline. Uh, this ambivalence typically takes two forms.

First, the disinclination to regard works of literature as the necessary or constitutive object of literary criticism Uh, and second, an even stronger aversion to a way of talking about literature in which the pleasure of the literary work is acknowledged as its chief reason for being, and correlatively, that communication, the communication of that pleasure is at least one of the main purposes of criticism. There is, in my view, and I take it Professor Kermode’s as well, uh, something symptomatic of dysfunction in the pervasive embarrassment with the subject of pleasure, uh, and the ease with which pleasure has been neutralized as the merely contingent effect of reception. Subject, in other words, to the irremediably relativizing effect of historical change.

Uh, it’s something of a relief, however, that Professor Kermode does not give us the usual exercised in revanchist rhetoric, but an impressively measured reflection on the fate of pleasure in the literary work from the perspective of his long career. In a moment, I’d like to suggest that the tone of his lectures participates integrally in the argument he has to make about pleasure, since he conceives aesthetic pleasure in its highest form as necessarily intermingled with the prospect or experience of loss. But of that in a moment.

Uh, here at the outset of my remarks, I’d like to remind us of certain continuities that have persisted across the two dispensations of which he spoke, or two terrestrial globes, the latter of which has presumably seen the demise of the literary object as it was formerly defined as the object which always gives pleasure while always changing. This latter dispensation is defined, to be sure, by a turn toward historical, social, and above all political concerns. But Professor Kermode only glances at the general character of this dispensation without resorting to naming names or denouncing particular position statements.

The effect is at once to confer a greater seriousness upon his argument, but also perhaps to underestimate how much continuity there is in the history of criticism, even into the present. The turn to the political is one way critics have of doing what they’ve always done, which is to neutralize pleasure on behalf of more socially acceptable, or as the case may be, more socially transgressive agendas. This tendency of criticism was remarked very shrewdly by Joseph Schumpeter long ago in 1942, long before our recent political turn, and from the vantage of his discipline, political economy, which was then competing successfully with literary criticism for dominance of the public sphere.

Schumpeter traces the origin of the adversarial or politicized intellectual to the humanist scholar of the sixteenth century, and I quote from, uh, Schumpeter’s, uh, essay in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, um, his, his great book. I love quoting, uh, sociologists and political economists about, uh, humanist disciplines because they usually are so disturbing to us, um,

(laughter)

What they say. I quote, “The humanists were primarily philologists,” but they quickly expanded into the fields of manners, politics, religion, and philosophy. This was not alone due to the contents of the classic works which they interpreted along with their grammar.

From the criticism of a text to the criticism of a society, the way is shorter than it seems.” Close quote. Um, we might take Thomas More as the great first model for the politicized humanist intellectual, um, and the way was very short for him, uh, from philology to social criticism and thence to the executioner’s block.

Um, something of the risk that, that path, uh, um, uh, entails, um, perhaps not so much for us anymore, but certainly, uh, for moments in the history of criticism. Uh, Schumpeter, in fact, was only too happy to dismiss the literarily trained critic of society as simply obsolete. But literary critics have never consented, uh, to be dismissed so, uh, readily.

Between the periods spanning from Carlyle to Eliot, Richards, Leavis, and then again since the 1980s, a host of literary critics have found the short way to social criticism or what I would call authoritarian cultural criticism, what was once called kulturkritik. By authoritarian, I mean that literary critics base their critique of society on the authority of culture as a supposed higher realm of human practice than the social, the economic, or the political. Our new cultural critics are very much in this long line, and they share with their predecessors the same problematic tendency to neutralize the pleasure of the literary work on behalf of its moral or political utility, that is, to reduce the literary work to an occasion for confirming or contesting the belief systems supposed to be expressed in the work.

This very long-standing tendency of criticism toward a certain puritanical relation to pleasure, even sometimes paradoxically in the case of those critics who, e-who, extol transgressive pleasures, and these pleasures are often impo-imposed upon us as a grim duty, um, puts a certain pressure on the process of canon formation, which it may not be possible finally to resist. That is to say, canon formation has always proceeded with an entirely inadequate account of evaluation, one which in the end usually invokes what Professor Kermode calls, following Gadamer, prejudices. The most interesting critics since Kant have wrestled with just this problem and sometimes attempted to resolve it by isolating the experience of aesthetic pleasure and extolling it in the work of art as a higher pleasure, distinct either in kind or degree from the pleasures rendered by other human experiences.

I’m myself on record as affirming the specificity of aesthetic pleasure, its difference from other kinds of pleasures, but I would like to argue here for a position which I believe departs from Professor Kermode’s in not claiming for this pleasure a higher status, and therefore not claiming for the domain of culture the higher authority upon which cultural criticism was and continues to be based. And I’m talking here, um, what I think lies in the deep social background of the canon debate. The most singular and unmistakable symptom of authoritarian cultural criticism was, until recently, the reduction of literature to the instance of poetry.

And this is very marked to me when cultural critics up to a certain moment, um, in the history of criticism, uh, really get going, uh, uh, down the short way to the criticism of society. It is usually by way of the reduction of, uh, culture and then the work of art and then literature to the instance of, of poetry. Uh, this reduction is very much present in the claims Matthew Arnold makes for poetry and recurs in the even greater claims made by I.A. Richards for a conception of the poetic art as that which orders or organizes all human affects.

“Only poetry,” said Richards famously, “is capable of saving us.” It’s a rather spectacular irony of the most recent versions of cultural criticism that such a claim is no longer routed through poetry. But these two facts are, in my view, causally connected.

The inflated claims made for poetry are directly related to the decline of poetry as a vital art form in the modern world, um, at least in the American context. At present now, a very minor subculture in a vast domain of various forms of cultural p-production. And I don’t mean by this simply to, uh, um, demean or devalue, uh, those who write poetry or those who are, who are still reading it, um, that is what is written, uh, today, but just to remark that uh, that poetry occupies the same, uh, um, kind of, uh, niche position, uh, that many, many other, um, uh, non-mass cultural arts occupy in our society.

One way to understand recent criticism’s retreat from poetry is as a strategic relocation for the authoritarian claims of cultural criticism, a relocation, of course, to the domain of mass culture. This strategy has given us cultural studies, uh, or trouble with a capital T for the literary canon. My point is that cultural studies is very much in the line of Carlyle, Arnold, Eliot, Richards, um, in the dir-in, in the direct line of these figures in claiming that the domain of culture is the most appropriate ground upon which to erect a criticism of society as a whole.

This strategy has been, in my view, a mistake, not so much because it has moved away from literature, Or whatever one thinks a-about that or how re-however regrettable one might think that, but because it has simply transferred to another domain, uh, of culture the claims historically made for the work of art. The inflation of the claims made for art has recently been sec-subjected to a searching and persuasive critique by Jean Remi– uh, Jean-Marie Schaeffer in his book, Art of the Modern Age. Uh, and in lieu of rehearsing his argument at any length, I’d simply like to appropriate the main point he makes, which is that the fortunes of the aesthetic and of aesthetic pleasure have been made to rest too entirely, too entirely on the certified forms of high art: poetry, painting, sculpture, music, architecture.

It was as a result of this philosophical overburdening of high art that aesthetic pleasure became so vulnerable to moralistic or political neutralization. The effect of monumentalization to which Professor Kermode draws our attention in quoting from Stevens’ Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction, itself an example, however beautiful, of this philosophical overburdening of art. And s- and Stevens’, uh, poem, um, uh, which I, I, I love, um, I should say, and I think is a great poem, is also rhetorically pompous, um, which is something I think one, one can’t deny about the poem.

The claims that it makes for poetry, um, are so great that, um, as the supreme fiction. Um, uh, the, uh, effect of monumentalization to which Professor Pramod draws our attention in quoting from Stevens’ Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction can be understood immediately, I think, in this context. The monumentalized work of art overshoots the effect of pleasure altogether and makes a demand upon the recipient for a reverent response, regardless of whether pleasure is experienced or not.

A monument of this sort makes a demand without answering a need. It would certainly be better, ultimately, for the work of art if the specificity of aesthetic pleasure generally were decoupled from the claims made for the high work of art So I’m going to try to in-insist upon the distinction that Jean-Marie Schaeffer insists upon so well, I think, in his book, between the aesthetic domain generally and the, uh, and the work of art as a, as a, a, a conception, uh, that emerged in modernity.

Um, the great problem of the high arts in the twentieth century has proven again and again to be the expansion of the aesthetic domain of culture, the co-presence of myriad works of mass culture, cultural works, along with works of high art, so-called. Uh, without opening this door too widely, I would like to endorse Schaeffer’s conclusion that aesthetic pleasure must be conceived not so much as a higher pleasure, but as a specific kind of pleasure, one of many kinds of pleasurable human practices. The reduction of art to the instance of poetry, which was the symptom of its overburdening, might be countered then by an emphasis on poiesis, on human making in general, as it constitutes so much of our everyday lives.

The restriction of aesthetic pleasure to the certified work of art, um, has been a philosophical error, even if many great works of art have been founded on this error. Um, works, of course, don’t have to be based on correct philosophical opinions in order to be good or great. In any case, I believe it’s far too late historically to claim for the works of high art effects either of religious transcendence, the salvational effects, which few would venture to advocate openly today, though many would still advocate tacitly, or of philosophical profundity, the work of art as embodiment of truths that can be expressed in in– best expressed in philosophical terms.

The aesthetic domain is potentially ubiquitous, and it should be. Our speech, our manners, our bearing, our dress, our houses, our furnishings, our public spaces and private entertainments should all be beautiful, should deliver their measure of aesthetic pleasure. See, I’m up on pleasure.

Um, the failure of this view of aesthetic pleasure to achieve anything like consensus, um, was perfectly obvious most recently in the huffy response of Jonathan Franzen to the warm embrace of Oprah Winfrey, um, who did not understand, it would seem, that Franzen’s novel belonged solidly, as he declared, in the high art tradition. That is to say, it was intended to deliver the kind of aesthetic pleasure which distinguished it from the pleasures of other similar sorts of objects which only looked like novels or poems or plays, but which were not really art at all because the quality of their pleasure was not complex enough, or, shall we say, philosophical. Only a certain kind of pleasure on this view entitles a work to the epithet aesthetic, and therefore presumably entitles a work to enter briefly or permanently the canon.

This brings me to two final points I should like to make about the argument of Professor Kermode’s lectures, and here I must contend more openly, if also as cautiously as I can, with the notion of aesthetic pleasure that he recommends to us, at least that I think he is recommending to us, but perhaps he will qualify this recommendation, um, or my understanding of it. Um, this notion is distinguished by an admixture or, or as he says, c- by co- by connotations of pain and pleasure, um, or what he calls most interestingly, uh, dismay. Uh, is there indeed a particular kind of aesthetic pleasure to be found in certain works which qualifies them as true works of art eligible for canonicity and ipso facto as higher pleasures, um, higher, for example, than the pleasures of sherry or rope dancing discussed yesterday?

Um, I’d like to get at this question very crudely by remarking my own puzzlement at the allusion to Stevens’ notes toward a supreme fiction, uh, in our two lectures. Uh, one hopes that there might be a f- a forthcoming lecture corresponding to the missing section of Stevens’ poem, “It Must Be Abstract.” Um, this would be the third lecture in the series because Professor Kermode reverses the order in which, uh, Stevens, uh, writes his sections.

Um, Ste- for Stevens, it’s ab- It must be ab- Ab- Abstract.

It must change. It must give pleasure. So, uh, we’ve gotten pleasure, change.

Now we’re waiting for ab-abstraction. Um, abstraction as the quality of the supreme– as a quality of the supreme fiction, um, which is itself a kind of philosophical concept for the cultural claims of poetry, is missing from Professor Kermode’s lectures, except perhaps implicitly as a possible analog for the programmatic negation of pleasure to be found in our latter-day politicized or cultural critics, what makes their response to literature seem so arid and academic. But abstraction is also present in the lectures as perhaps another name for the experience of the loss of pleasure or the possibility of its loss, which is imputed to the specifically higher pleasure of canonical works of art.

There are two problems here which might be sorted out by means, I think, of the missing term, abstraction. At first, there is the problem of the relation between the kind of pleasure that belongs specifically to the experience of the artwork or the poem, and the equally particular pleasure that belongs to the work that literary critics do in research and writing about literature or cultural works generally, if that’s what they do now. These are not the same experiences exactly, but one is presumably the ground of the other.

In the case of academic criticism, it may be that the pleasure of argument or research sometimes takes off, as it were, from the ground of the experience of the literary work. When that happens, it becomes possible to forget the being of the literary work as aesthetic, and thus to reduce it to the mere occasion of other kinds of pleasure or to the neutralization of pleasure altogether. Um, this, I would admit, is a general tendency of academic criticism today.

The notion that literary works can be understood as transparently revealing social or historical reality is the unfortunate expression of this tendency against which Professor Kermode vehemently, and I think rightly, protests. This is a problem which can only be addressed, it would seem, by renewed attention to the properties of literary works as aesthetic artifacts, which means taking account theoretically, um, for, uh, for all of their aims, including the aim of giving pleasure. Uh, in other words, it’s a mistake about an object of study not to acknowledge what kind of object it is that you’re studying.

And an aesthetic object is a different kind of object than, say, germs. Um, biologists take an, a great deal of pr-pleasure, by their own testimony, in the study of germs. Um, but if they love germs, it’s rather differently than the way in which we presumably love, uh, poems or plays.

Um, and also presumably, they don’t enjoy having the flu.

(laughter)

Um, the remedy Professor Kermode proposes, however, for redirecting our attention to the specificity of the aesthetic object, leaves temporarily behind his own considerable work on issues of literary form and offers instead an interesting and, to me, puzzling return to the notion of the touchstone derived, of course, from Arnold’s eighteen sixty essay, The Study of Poetry. It’s clear enough that what Professor Kermode wants is a model for the initial experience of pleasure in the literary work, and at the same time, an explanation for why this experience can be considered a higher pleasure that is ultimately a justification for canonical status. Quite carefully, he asserts that he– that it isn’t so much that the same works always produce the same aesthetic effect, but that whatever works are at any moment canonical can be said to produce this effect.

Hence, the canon accommodates change while always providing us with a specific higher pleasure. Surely the most interesting conjecture to emerge from these fertile meditations is that it might be possible to give a psychological account, as it were, of the touchstone experience. Yet I’d like to suggest that this psychology is underdeveloped in this account because th- its hypothesis, its, its, uh, initial hypothesis of a pleasure which is intermixed with loss and dismay is itself contaminated by the narrative of the decline of literary criticism, a narrative that constitutes the framing assumption of the lectures.

It’s, it’s easy to see, at least it seems to me, that for Professor Kermode, what is potentially lost in the examples from Wordsworth, Eliot, and Dante is literature itself, poetry itself, that is Wordsworth, Eliot, and Dante. The loss that shadows the aesthetic experience is the loss that currently threatens the profession of literary study, the loss of its proper object. This accounts for the fact that the touchstones end up having a surprisingly similar meaning, regardless of from whence they are derived.

This homogeneity is particularly troubling in the case of Professor Kermode’s citation of Eliot’s touchstones, uh, which powerfully analogize sexual and aesthetic pleasure. This analogy gains its power by imputing to sexual experience a complexity that also, in a way, diminishes the range of joys sexuality is capable of bestowing upon us in the real world, or at least I hope, is capable of bestowing upon us in the real world. Eliot’s touchstones, Eliot’s touchstones implicitly identify the complex pleasure of the work of art to the complexity inhering for him in the experience of sexual surrender, the notion that sexual experience was all the more noble in the pre-modern world because it was fallen and evil and damning.

But against Eliot’s notion of sexuality, if not also of aesthetic pleasure, um, I would like to quote William Empson’s, uh, um, tart comment, specifically in response to Eliot’s expression of revulsion at Milton’s representation of unfallen sexual pleasure in Paradise Lost. And you may remember, uh, um, Eliot famously said in Milton I that he could, he could get no pleasure from Milton’s representation of the naked Adam and Eve, uh, in the garden. Unlike Blake, who reputedly, uh, sat in his garden stark naked with his wife reading the very same passages from which, uh, Eliot got no pleasure.

Um, but here is William Empson, uh, in his, his wonderful Milton’s God, still unassimilated in Milton criticism, uh, in response to Eliot. Quote, “So long as you gave Mr. Eliot images of someone being tortured, his nerves were at peace. But, but if you gave him an image of two people making each other happy, he screamed.”

My point in, in including Empson is not to dismiss the notion of the, of a touchstone altogether. Um, I think, in fact, it’s, it’s one of, one of the more interesting, uh, ideas to emerge or re-emerge, uh, in the lecture, and I’m o-obviously fascinated with it. Um, but to draw attention to the contradiction, uh, in the notion of the touchstone, which is everywhere evident, I think, in, in Professor Kermode’s analysis of it.

Eliot’s touchstones are obviously highly idiosyncratic, um, precisely because they express his very personal individual relation to sexuality. Uh, his touchstones are little idiosyncratic canons, just what canons are not supposed to be. Um, to, to prec-precisely in striving to be, uh, nomothetic, and I’m using Windelband’s, uh, famous distinction between the idiographic and the, and the nomothetic.

Um, the nomothetic to give a rule for determining or establishing something, precisely in striving to be nomothetic, to give a rule for determining canonicity, um, Eliot’s touchstones collapse back into the domain of the utterly idiosyncratic, even of individual pathology, depending upon how unsympathetic one feels towards Eliot’s sensibility. Um, this little exercise in reading the touchstones, which really only builds on what Professor Kermode, uh, already observed about them in his lectures, is intended to remind us of how difficult it is to generalize any principle from the experience of, of aesthetic pleasure that would then ground a principle of evaluation or canonicity. We are simply a long way from being able to do this, just as I think we are a long way from giving any kind of account, um, of aesthetic pleasure that would be, um, an intellectually credible account.

My response to this uncertainty would be to retreat, at least temporarily, from attempting to make the connection between the quality of a pleasure and of, of aesthetic pleasure and canonicity, and further to withdraw the claim that aesthetic pleasures are, in any defensible sense, higher pleasures. The tendency to argue for the higher pleasures of the aesthetic is just what sets us down the road toward the inflation of the work of art. The inflated claims for the great work of art, for canonical work, usually come at the expense of the aesthetic dimension itself in its myriad forms, not just high art, not just poetry.

The same error accounts for the derogation of supposedly simpler human pleasures on behalf of propping up, a derogation that is on behalf, I think, of propping up the work of art against any potentially competing pleasures. In conclusion, I would say that I would rather argue for the diversity of human pleasures than for their hierarchization, and I would like to believe that the greatest works of the human spirit can better be preserved by preserving a lively sense of the full range of human pleasures. It would be nice to think that aesthetic pleasures are the highest kind.

It would certainly be good for the business I’m in, but the most I’m willing to claim is that human being, human being, would be sadly incomplete without aesthetic pleasure. Yet these pleasures are no more nor less necessary to our humanness than the pleasures of sex, food, conversation, and even sherry and rope dancing. It’s only by such generosity, encompassing, I hope, the whole range of human pleasures, which is otherwise everywhere to be found in the work of Professor Kermode, and this has certainly been my impression of his work over the years, that works of art will escape the neglect or neutralization of their pleasures or the effect of monumentalization, which is always the risk of their elevation to the canon.

Thank you.

(applause and cheering)

[01:58:04] ROBERT:
Well, uh, John Guillory has, uh, laid out a number of e-extremely interesting probing challenges to some of the assumptions of, uh, Frank Kermode’s, uh, lectures. And we clearly are not going to have time to explore these in very– any kind of detail right now. We ha– only have about five minutes left of this session.

Um, we will have, um, a full-length discussion session tomorrow afternoon. I wanna remind everybody at 4:15 in the Townsend Center, 220 Stephens Hall. Now, Frank, do you want to take these five minutes now to res-re-uh, uh, respond briefly?

[01:58:50] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
If they’re going to be wasted, I might as well use them.

[01:58:53] ROBERT:
Okay.

[01:58:55] SIR FRANK KERMODE:
I didn’t, I didn’t mean that if you went on speaking it’d be wasted.

(laughter)