F.W. Bateson, Literary History; Non-Subject Par Excellence

8/12/2019 F.W. Bateson, Literary History; Non-Subject Par Excellence

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Literary History: Non-Subject Par ExcellenceAuthor(s): F. W. BatesonSource: New Literary History, Vol. 2, No. 1, A Symposium on Literary History (Autumn,1970), pp. 115-122Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468592 .Accessed: 23/02/2014 04:58

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Literary History: Non-Subject Par Excellence

F. W. Bateson

HY

par excellence? or two reasons: one (the topic owhich this essay s principally evoted), because it glossesover a logical contradiction etween two opposed modes

of thought; two, because literature nd history re both excellentthings n themselves-provided they are considered and practiced)separately. Literary history s merely a by-product, disreputablethough not entirely seless by-product. t can be compared to thePhilosophers' tone. Though the medieval alchemists ever discoveredhow to transmute ead into gold, the science of chemistry s directlydescended from heir ailures. n the same

way literary istory, hougha futile ccupation n itself one of the okes of modern cademic life),has had its own valuable by-products. or one thing, t has sharpenedour chronological ense; Old Style is no longer confused with NewStyle, s Thackeray confused hem n the evening preceding he duelin Esmond. Literary history as also played its part in encouraginghabits of accurate documentation nd a general consciousness f therelativity f critical values; we would never say-as Lytton Stracheydid in a review of BirkbeckHill's edition of The Lives of the Poets in

19o6-that "Johnson's esthetic udgments re almost nvariably ub-tle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recom-mend them-except one: they re never right."

Against these incidental blessings must be set certain incidentalscandals. Literary history as provided an umbrella of respectabilityunder which are still crowded teachers of literature who, have out-grown heir dolescent nthusiasms ithout cquiring a mature criticalsense. It was against these unfortunate misfits hat the New Criticism

IEsmond and Lord Castlewood set out for London on "Monday morning, the

I th of October, in the year I700" (Book I, chap. xiv). In fact the Iith of Octo-ber was a Friday (O.S.). The confusion between their arrival "at night fall" andEsmond's proposal over an hour later that they should have "half an hour's prac-tice before nightfall" eems to reflect muddle about sunset n O.S. and N.S.

2 Books and Characters (London, 1922), p. 68.

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S16 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

led its successful evolution, hough an increasing pecialization hasnow changed the essential ituation. The umbrella now covers pros-

odists, stylisticians, extual critics, analytical bibliographers, t hocgenus omne, as well as literary istorians f the old school. No doubtthese gentlemen must ive, but their need for bread and butter has ob-scured the persistence f a more ntellectual nstinct, o far unfulfilledand perhaps unfulfillable. We need iterary istory. will call our con-dition with Blake, though n a different ontext) "The lost traveller'sdream under the hill." But I must not anticipate my conclusion.

II

We are faced with an initial ogical difficulty. istory s committedby its nature to the exposition of differences etween one temporalevent or period and another. A country n which no such differencescan be distinguished s a country without history. And for a biogra-pher t s necessary orhis subject to be born, o mature, nd ultimatelyto die-three conditions hat necessarily ifferentiate hemselves, venthough he child can sometimes e shown to be the father f the man.Literature, n the other hand, is necessarily esemplastic," o use Cole-

ridge's term. The emphasis n it is on similarities ather han differ-ences; images fuse with concepts, pisodes connect, characters stab-lish interrelationships. n a familiar passage in Aspects of the NovelE. M. Forster nvites us to imagine "all the novelists .. at work to-gether n a circular room" (which he later compares to the Read-ing Room of the British Museum). There, he tells us, we shall findSamuel Richardson sitting y the side of Henry James, H. G. Wellsnext to Dickens, and Virginia Woolf next to Sterne. (The historicalorder is deliberately onfused.) His slogan "History develops, Art

stands still" s, as he half admits, only a slogan, but a point has beenmade.It would seem, therefore, hat there s an inherent ontradiction n

the notion of iterary istory. Like oil and water, iterature nd historywill not mix. However, Forster's examples may seem to refute hisgeneralization. No one would confuse one of Richardson's novelswith one of James's. And the differences etween Virginia Woolf andSterne are surely patent and enormous, hough t may also be agreedthat there are almost no resemblances etween near-contemporarieslike Richardson nd Sterne, r James and Wells.

The point that Forster eems to have missed s that history s es-sentially utward-looking, hereas literature s inward-looking. Thereader of a historical work or a biography finds himself ontinuouslycompelled, or at times coaxed, into leaving the proper subject-matter



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LITERARY HISTORY: NON-SUBJECT Par Excellence I 7of the book he is reading for glimpses nto related historical pisodes. Astudy f a past period enables one to predict, oweverprecariously, he

outcome of what is proceeding omewhere n the world at the time ofreading. With literature, owever, any such speculations will be asign either of incompetent writing or of incompetent eading. Theworld upon which the historian s reporting s the real world aboutwhich his sources of information an never be complete or whollyreliable. The novelist r dramatist uffers rom no such limitatiron; eis omniscient, ven if-like Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde--hlemaypretend for special reasons of his own not to be. In contrast o thehistorian's his success depends upon his ability to impose upon his

readers the illusion of reality-a pseudo-reality hat is nevertheless"like" reality s the vehicle of a metaphor s like ts tenor.A connection, f a frail one, may be proposed between critical udg-

ments upon a work of literature, r a whole corpus of such works, ndthe judgments that a historian offers pon policies, social divisions,technological nfluences, tc. But a literary udgment or critical com-ment must still be distinguished rom he literary xperience as in it-self t really s." Literature being temporal n its essence (Act I pre-cedes Act V), the response o a work of literature must be continuous

throughout ts performance, hether t s private r public. The readeror spectator s inside the aesthetic xperience. What remains n thememory s the merest keleton f the actual subjective xperience, ndthe ultimate critical verdict s a skeleton f that skeleton, ne that isnever wholly reliable because it has been reached outside the actualaesthetic xperience nd so is likely o have been influenced y variousextraneous factors. At best we are left with an aesthetic nucleus thatthe memory as sifted.

IIIIf we turn from the reader to his alter ego the writer, history of asort) must enter the argument. At a certain point in time a work ofliterature omes nto being. BeforeNovember I637 when it was writ-ten Lycidas did not exist; n 1638 it became publicly vailable in JustaEdouardo King. A relationship f some kind must be conceded to bepresent etween he array of names, titles, nd dates that constitutestextbook istory f English iterature nd the act of aesthetic ommuni-cation between author's words and

recipientreader which creates

"literature" the actual literary xperience). The words are essential.Take them away and nothing s left. But the identity f the author ofthe words s a secondary matter. Does it make much difference f CyrilTourneur or Thomas Middleton was responsible or the words thatconstitute he Revenger's Tragedy? And how preciselymust the date



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of its composition e determined o affect ts aesthetic ontent? Anyyear between 6oo and 1630 would be equally plausible f that play is

regarded primarily s an aesthetic onstruct hat s still available to amodern reader. The aesthetic onditional s crucial. In the process ofresponding o the play as literature he modem reader will ignore uchhistorical acts as the difference etween the Jacobean pronunciationof English nd that tandard oday, r the difference etween hepublictheatre n which The Revenger's Tragedy was originally erformed(no lighting, o scenery, o curtain, nd an "apron" stage) and itsmodem equivalent.

Uneasily aware of the irrelevance f historical facts" we tend to

take refuge n grandiose generalities. T. S. Eliot is typical:The poetry f a people takes ts life from the people's speech and inturn gives ife to it; and represents ts highest oint of consciousness,tsgreatest ower nd its most delicate ensibility.3

Similar dicta are scattered through Eliot's critical essays. In the"Baudelaire" (1930), for example, the poet is said to have to "expresswith individual differences he general state of mind-not as a duty,but

simplyecause he cannot

help participatingn it."4 Such

proposi-tions receive ur general ssent. They are at least more reputable hanthose of the Art for Art's Sakecritic. Writers o not ive n ivory owers(if they did they would starve to death). On the contrary, hey aremembers of society, with the obligations, onscious or unconscious,that such membership mplies, nd they re dependent or their wordson the anguage that s current t the moment.

The difficulty s to reconstruct he evidence from which such gen-eralizationsmust depend if they re to carry ny conviction. Literary

history,s we have

seen,s a feeble crutch because of its bias towards

differentiation. hat sperhaps needed s a series f nterlinking aralleldisciplines-political, economic, inguistic, ultural-which might besubsumed under ome such abel as Social Studies. n this way as muchattention might be paid to similarities s to differences.

Literary history s it was practiced until recently oncentrated tsattention n the discovery f new "sources." When I was a graduatestudent at Harvard I remember he indignation with which Lowesrepudiated he imputation: "Gentlemen, am not a source-hunter "And the little man's enormous voice thundered round the room. Itwas a Chaucer class,but I had just read The Road to Xanadu and rec-ollecting hat masterpiece f source-hunting scribbled note to my

3 The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism London, 1933), p. 15.4 Selected Essays (London, 1932), p. 386.



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LITERARY HISTORY: NON-SUBJECT Par Excellence 119

neighbour: "The lady doth protest oomuch, methinks " It may besaid, of course, hat The Road to Xanadu is concernedwith imilarities,the echoes of the travel books Coleridge had been reading before writ-ing "Kubla Khan" and "The Ancient Mariner," and does not qualifyaccordingly s literary istory. This, however, s to ignore the differ-ences of genre and context hat eparate the matter-of-fact ravel-booksand Coleridge's brilliantly antastic oems. The travel-books, n spiteof Coleridge's epetitions f phrase and image from hem, o not explainthe poems. They are not in pari materia-as some of the ballads inPercy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry an certainly e said to be.

And what about chronological rder, hat other dol of the literaryhistorian? R. B. McKerrow's Prolegomena for he Oxford Shakespeare(1939) is specific n this point. He tells us in his preface hat the con-clusion he had reached, after many years work on the Oxford edition(still unpublished), was that "any satisfactory tudy of the works ofShakespeare, or indeed probably of any other author, must take fullaccount of the order n which they were written, nd . . . it is ad-visable actually ostudy hem, o far as possible, n that order."5 Mustit? Is it advisable to read an author's works n the order of their om-position? The recommendation as a certain pecious plausibility. fa work of literature s essentially temporal rtifact, ne in which theauthor nvites outo begin with his first tanza, act, or chapter, t mightseem reasonable to extend the same principle o the whole body of hiswritings. The objection that McKerrow's formula tarts ne off withthe juvenilia, which are often illy as well as immature, may be con-sidered frivolous. This is a risk that the conscientious iterary tudentmust be prepared to run; there may be nuggets even in the earlierversion of Spenser's "Visions of Bellay" that was printed n A Theatrefor Worldlings 1569), though have not detected hem.

But there s a more cogent refutation n wait for McKerrow. It issimply that a writer's uvenilia may not qualify as literature t all.The sensible thing to do surely s to begin with the works that aregenerally onsidered his masterpieces. One begins Spenser with TheFaerie Queene.) Literary history as a "value" element built into it.Since it cannot be the history f all the books ever written, process ofselectionmust be a necessary reliminary. And if the selection s not tobe merely conventional r mechanical, a critical reading is the first

necessity. The test proper to a temporal artifact an be summarizedin a sentence: to qualify s literature he work under consideration mustinvite a reading backwards as well as a reading forwards. In lesstechnical erms, t must be memorable. But, because of his initial pre-

5 P. vi-



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mises, he literary istorian will find t difficult o read anything morethan once, and what he will tend to remember re the non-aesthetic

differences n t.The test of memorability s worth elaborating because it points theway to the semblance of history hat iterature eemsto permit. Whatis read stimulates he imagination-and so it is immediately e-read.And this econd reading s superimposed, s it were, on the first ead-ing. But the two readings-if the first s still fresh n the consciousness-are different n kind. The first eading presumes and indeed re-quires an ignorant nd innocent performer, ne who will not knowwhat is to come next, what is or is not ironical, which of the dramatispersonae o trust nd which to distrust. On a second reading, however,whatever s said will have acquired a somewhat different eaning be-cause its consequences will be known. Iago, for example, who is soplausible on a first cquaintance in the first cene of Othello, whichhe dominates completely-such apparently genuine grievances, uchvitality f expression -has become a very different erson when theplay ends. It is disconcerting ow to return o the first cene, knowingas we do what is to come. (The man is "honest" only n the appear-

ance he knows how to create.) But the words have not changed, onlytheir mplications. And a similar process operates, n different ormsand degrees,with he first nd second reading of any unfamiliar iteraryartifact. Verbal progress nd verbal regress omplement ach other,and the shock of surprise nduced by their uccessful nteraction eavesa special imprint n the memory. And such imprints ccumulate andacquire contexts.

The problem hat critical heory as been tempted o evade is what

mightbe called the

elasticityf the literary rtifact. We tend to begin

and end with the single poem, play, novel, etc.-each to be hung inthe reader's private mental gallery, ach in its separate frame, with atitle nd an author's name attached to it. If the author's name shouldbe missing, literary detective s encouraged to identify im in alearned ournal; if there hould be no proper itle,we invent ne-theLegend of Good Women, for example, or Comus. But this rage forbibliographical idinessmisses a crucial critical point: the encirclingframe may be in the wrong place.

Shakespeare's onnets were published n 16o9 by that "well-wishingadventurer" Thomas Thorpe in a single volume; modern editors fol-low him n treating ll the 154 sonnets s a literary nit nstead of theShakespearian miscellany hey clearly are. A plausible case has evenbeen made recently or dating Sonnet 145 as early as 1582 on the



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LITERARY HISTORY: NON-SUBJECT Par Excellence 121

ground hat t s addressed oAnn Hathaway. 6 The best of the Sonnetscertainly etach themselves rom he various series n which they occur

and survive s singlepoems. Sonnet 73 ("That time of year thou maystin me behold") is typical of such detachment; t is unquestionablypart that s superior o the whole in which t happens to be found. Asimilar superiority o Sonnet 73's other thirteen ines is exhibited bygeneral consent n its fourth ine: "Bare ruined choirs, where ate thesweetbirds ang." Here, then, we have three evels of poeticmerit, achenclosing shorter ut superior nd separable artifact: i) the collec-tion or series s a whole, (ii) Sonnet 73, (iii) 73's fourth ine (whichhas proved one of the most memorable ines n the whole of the Sonnets.Such diminutions re accompanied, of course, by similar expansions.Thus the Sonnets s also a part of three ncreasingly arger iterary nits:(i) the Elizabethan sonnet cycle, ii) English Petrarchanism though"My mistress' yes are nothing ike the sun" is as anti-Petrarchan sanything onne wrote), (iii) the whole corpus of English Renaissancelyric oetry. Other imilarly nclusive nits re, for xample, i) Shakes-peare's complete works, (ii) the Elizabethan court (especially theSouthampton/Essex ircle), (iii) the contemporary apitalist bour-

geoisie.I have selected nine obviously elevant historical lements r aspectsthat contribute n one way or another o the meaning of Shakespeare'sSonnets. Embarrassingly, he larger he unit the lessrelevant t can beproved to be to a sympathetic omprehension f the particular rtifact(such as Sonnet 73)-and correspondingly he better he artifact hemore it resists historical or even a rational interpretation. Bareruined choirs, where ate the sweet birds ang" derives ts memorability

entirelyrom ts detachment from the lines

precedingt. The self-

pitying oet has begun by comparing his condition o the end of theannual cycle (just a few yellow eaves left haking n the cold).

Grammatically, he ruined choirs re simply metaphoric xtensionof the trees' eaflessboughs; it was on such boughs-not in the choirs-that the birds once sang. The line once detached from ts linguisticcontext derives ts pathos, however, from he birds' exclusion from achurch or chapel that is now a ruin. This is not what the sentencesays; it is what the line says, defying what the earlier ines want it tosay. And whether he choirs' ruins are an after-effect f the dissolu-tion of the monasteries r of capitalist sheep-farming s wholly m-material.

6 See G. S. Gurr, Shakespeare's irst Poem,"EC, XXI (1971).



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I have used Shakespeare's brilliant ine to exemplify he paradox in-herent n the concept of iterary istory. The more closelygreat itera-

ture s examined, he remoter ts connections urn out to be with anysort of history. A historical ontext of one sort or another must al-ways be presumed, ut the "facts"-including those of language, his-torical or structural-do not seem to affect he literary bject as in it-self t really s, except perhaps n the preliminary tages of comprehen-sion. As the quality of the literature mproves, he degree of aestheticdetachment ncreases. Its sweet birds inhabit no identifiable uins;their ongs refuse o acknowledge his or that ancestral origin.

CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE,OXFORD

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