Poetics, Dogmatics and Parabolics
HYMAN, STANLEY EDGAR
WRITERS & WRITING Poetics, Dogmatics and Parabolics By Stanley Edgar Hyman "As readers, most of us, to some degree, are like those urchins who pencil mustaches on the faces of girls in...
...What has happened is that new butts have joined that fleshly bishop: the lying, greedy psychoanalyst...
...At other times the tone is clearly in earnest, as when he writes of devotional poetry: "Is there not something a little odd, to say the least, about making an admirable public object out of one's feelings of guilt and penitence before God...
...Thus we get only the criticism of Auden's Christian period, the work of a dignified man of letters past 40...
...The weaknesses of The Dyer's Hand are the obverse of all these strengths...
...He interrupts an essay on Henry IV to write an essay-within-the-essay on the relationship of corpulence to alcoholism...
...Of a patient cured by psychoanalysis: "And immediately come seven devils, and the last state of that man is worse than the first...
...Or the assertion that "Primitive cultures have little sense of humor...
...Don Quixote is othodox...
...Or Auden puts his assertions in language incapable of either proof or disproof, as in the remark that "our profounder amusement" in watching a clown is derived from our appreciation of the skill underlying his appearance of clumsiness...
...Like his former tutor Nevill Coghill, to whom the book is dedicated, Auden reads Measure for Measure as a Christian parable of redemption, but with the important reservation that, "to my mind, the parable does not quite work...
...If Lycidas is read in this way, as if it were a poem by Edward Lear," Auden writes, "then it seems to me one of the most beautiful poems in the English language...
...At his most attractive and useful, Auden the critic takes us back to Auden the poet...
...As to the murderer's end, of the three alternatives-execution, suicide, and madness-the first is preferable...
...Auden has included none of his essays before 1946, depriving us of his Freudo-Marxist criticism as well as of such triumphs over the narrowly social criteria of the '30s as "John Skelton" (1935) and "The Public v. the Late Mr...
...The emphasis on brilliance and paradox tends to break the essays into strings of aphorisms, and Auden has in fact literally cut a number of them down to strings of aphorisms...
...The essays touch repeatedly on the themes of the poetry, from the fairytale youngest son of the early verse to the questionable salvation of poets in the late verse...
...Or a distinction between "boring" and "a bore" that offers Verdi, Degas and Shakespeare as examples of the former, Beethoven, Michelangelo and Dostoevski as examples of the latter, and gives as its final clarifying example: "The absolutely not boring but absolute bore: God...
...it never pretended to be giving poetry readings...
...The Guilty Vicarage," an inductive study of the detective story, is almost equally impressive...
...Auden is not only knowledgeable...
...In its subtle conveyance of a high estimate of literature in a low image, in the underspin that "to some degree" puts on "most of us," in the fastidious "urchins," in the general impudence of its wit, it could only be the work of Wystan Hugh Auden...
...In "Writing," explaining that by the time Goethe had converted his contemporaries to Wertherism he had "gotten the poison out of his system," Auden indirectly defends his own departure from Marxism and his retitling of his Marxist poems as jokes...
...The weakness of Christian literary criticism is Christianity's inherent dualism, and it continually drives Auden into oversimple antitheses...
...Sometimes the prose reminds us of the early "Journal of an Airman" in The Orators, as when Auden writes: "A task for the existentialist theologian: to preach a sermon on the topic The Sleep of Christ...
...In the last analysis, the saint cannot be presented aesthetically...
...Parabolically" (Auden uses the archaic adjective and adverb), Falstaff "is a comic symbol for the supernatural order of Charity," a "charity that loves all neighbors without distinction...
...William Butler Yeats" (1939...
...Falstaff's neglect of the public interest in favor of private concerns," Auden adds, "is an image for the justice of charity which treats each person, not as a cipher, but as a unique person.' At the end of the essay, Falstaff is equated with the second person of God, also "condemned as a Bad Companion for mankind...
...Here are a few: "Most writers are either Alices or Mabels" (the terms come from Alice in Wonderland), with lists of names...
...It confronts the reader on the second page of Auden's first collection of critical essays, The Dyer's Hand (Random House, 528 pp., $7.50), and it promises galaxies of fireworks to come...
...As he formerly used Marx and Freud, Auden now uses Christianity as a critical tool...
...he is sometimes wise...
...In its denial of nature The Tempest is Manichaean...
...Pushed too far, Aristotelian induction becomes absurd dogmatism: "A young woman, dressed as a boy, can never produce a convincing image of a boy...
...he turns an article about Othello into a discourse on practical joking...
...his account of Byron's Don Juan wanders off to explore the nature of friendship...
...WRITERS & WRITING Poetics, Dogmatics and Parabolics By Stanley Edgar Hyman "As readers, most of us, to some degree, are like those urchins who pencil mustaches on the faces of girls in advertisements...
...Our dream pictures of the Happy Place where suffering and evil are unknown are of two kinds, the Edens and the New Jerusalems.' What we are given, in fact, is often a profound halftruth...
...Since music is in essence immediate," he announces, "it follows that the words of a song cannot be poetry...
...those depths are clearly beyond us...
...On both topics he is sometimes profound and sometimes silly, but he is never boring or a bore...
...The Dyer's Hand makes it clear that Auden, like Shaw, is not really interested in any writer but Shakespeare and himself...
...for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive...
...This wisdom often gets disguised as a joke: "The Oracle claimed to make prophecies and give good advice about the future...
...Auden is telling us something important and serious in both cases, but a voice breaks in to remind us that Lycidas is oddly not by Edward Lear, that the words of many songs are poetry...
...In Auden's stylish and witty prose there are occasional infelicities: "neither will trust one further than he can throw a grand piano...
...What are we to make of the instruction that "one should only read Kafka when one is in a eupeptic state of physical and mental health and, in consequence, tempted to dismiss any scrupulous heart-searching as a morbid fuss...
...Only one writer in our time could have written that sentence...
...Harried by the pests of poetry, he shows a trace of petulance: "No cashier writes a letter to the press complaining about the incomprehensibility of Modern Mathematics and comparing it unfavorably with the good old days when mathematicians were content to paper irregularly shaped rooms and fill bathtubs without closing the waste pipe...
...There is one terrible essay, a general discussion of Shakespeare called "The Globe," which makes distinctions between Shakespearian tragedy and comedy that collapse on application, denies any possibility of empathy in Greek tragedy while accepting that it arouses pity and fear, and quotes with a measure of approval D. H. Lawrence's moronic poem against Shakespeare...
...Any attempt to dispute the statement, to insist that no, we laugh at the clumsiness itself, walks into the trap of that "profounder...
...The traditional theological heresies are used for critical perspectives...
...The best essay in The Dyer's Hand is "The Prince's Dog," an ambitious reading of Henry IV as a Christian parable...
...In turning what he calls a "fat, cowardly tosspot" into a figuration of the Christ, Auden shows a boldness in Chestertonian paradox that would have petrified Chesterton...
...In a fine essay, "Translating Opera Libretti," written in collaboration with Chester Kallman, Auden writes technically of metrics: "When a composer sets verses to a slow tempo, verse dactyls and anapaests turn into molossoi, its trochees and iambs into spondees...
...His combination of an extraordinarily well-stocked mind with a natural digressiveness makes reading Auden always an adventure...
...The old irreverence has not quite disappeared, we realize, brought up sharply by: "It is morally less confusing to be goosed by a traveling salesman than by a bishop...
...The voice is the voice of Aristotle: "If there is more than one murder, the subsequent victims should be more innocent than the initial victim...
...The Magic Flute is overoptimistic and Pelagian...
...In that range from the small technical to the largest ideological, and particularly in the autobiographical Inaugural Lecture at Oxford, "Making, Knowing and Judging," these essays constantly enlighten us about Auden the poet...
...the forwardlooking Utopian, sometimes named Hitler...
...Poetry is seen as the limited creative act possible in a world both fallen and redeemable...
...take them all with a strong dose of salt" (does he mean "salts...
...Occasionally seriousness breaks through so violently that Auden writes in a voice foreign to him, as in the sudden announcement: "Today, there is only one genuine world-wide revolutionary issue, racial equality...
...In other essays, Auden is sometimes equally silly...
...He even interprets the master-servant relationship in Around the World in Eighty Days and the Jeeves books as a parable in the comic mode of Agape, Holy Love...
...How odd that the message finally delivered in Aristotle's voice should be Kierkegaard's: "The job of detective is to restore the state of grace in which the aesthetic and the ethical are as one...
...But how mean and funny that august gentleman is...
...A typical stanza: "Lear, the old buffer, you wonder his daughters/didn't treat him rougher,/the old chough, the old chuffer...
...Every poem involves some degree of collaboration between Ariel and Prospero...
...My sociological friends would ask on how many observations those generalizations were based...
...The ear tends to be lazy, craves the familiar, and is shocked by the unexpected: the eye, on the other hand, tends to be impatient, craves the novel and is bored by repetition...
Vol. 45 • November 1962 • No. 24
