Words on Words about Words
PETTINGELL, PHOEBE
Writers & Writing WORDS ON WORDS ABOUT WORDS BY PHOEBE PETTINGELL Since the 1970s literary criticism has been enjoying one of its periodic renaissances. Arguments about feminist and Marxist...
...His strongest analyses demonstrate an unfolding of the complexities, repressions, and "self-induced mystical enhancement" that each poet works into his lines, often unconsciously, to recreate the timbre of human passions...
...Northrop Frye, who " had the effect of upsetting the whole basket of New Critical, Eliotic, "neo-classical' literary values that preceded him, and thus...
...Rosenthal's beloved texts are primarily by those olympians who were canonized bythelateNewCritics: T. S. Eliot, W. B. Yeats, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound...
...Above all, he proclaims fearlessly what traditional criticism has always denied: that each of us really comes to literature to find out more about ourselves, not to derive general esthetic principles or take the Grand Tour of culture...
...The central, and best illustrated, claim of The Poet's Art is that "poetry [is] expression, not discourse...
...Let your verse be a winged living thing," and concluding: Let your verses be sheer good luck Scattered in the crisp gusts of morning wind That arrive breathing mint and thyme...
...There are no texts...
...He manages never to be boring...
...and Geoffrey Hartman, Barbara Johnson and J. Hillis Miller, all of whom have applied deconstructionism to Anglo-American literature...
...The main focus of deconstruction is its insistence that you can never discuss a text without inventing another text, and so on ad infinitum...
...speak out whatever is in our hearts...
...The names of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man are bandied about as symbols of a revolutionary theory that has the power to excite or frighten people who scarcely understand it...
...Not since the decline of the New Criticism in the late 1940s has writing about writing stirred up such interest, or so greatly influenced the way we look at a work of fiction, a poem, and the language of appraisal itself...
...It consists of interviews with nine of the leaders of contemporary schools of explication: Jacques Derrida, the French founder of the deconstructive method...
...Poets are our "great instructors," who "stand willing to show to all and sundry just what part of the world's business goes on within us, amazingly, day after day...
...This cannot be called a fashionable book...
...And he is comic, not only for his outrageous and delightful "misreadings," but for his life-affirming stance...
...There are only ourselves...
...Finer points of theory must, necessarily, be omitted, but one comes away from the book with a vivid picture of each critic's distinctive voice(which has sometimes been obscured by academic prose), and his/her involvement with the ideas of colleagues...
...And all the rest is just literature...
...Imre Salusenszky's Criticism in Society (Methuen, 266 pp., $18.95) takes on the thinkers behind some of today's more contentious literary theories...
...Geoffrey Hartman, a refugee from Nazi Germany, finds the approach appealing because of its anti-ideological implications...
...Deconstruction has unquestionably established itself as a theory blowing in the wind of the Zeitgeist, one that contemporary laborers in the field of literature must come to terms with—as proponents or opponents...
...Bloom's passionate style is the antithesis of most academic writing, with its earnest attempt to sound impersonal...
...Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom and other august academics have been generating voluble, if not always informed, debate with their books...
...The first is the late Paul de Man, with Derrida a leading European deconstructionist...
...Such readers are apt to view poetry as rhetorical, artificial...
...These critics are a gentle and genial bunch...
...Salusinszky, a tutor at the University of Melbourne, has managed to keep his interviews right on target...
...Rosenthal's arguments have been structured to dispel several preconceptions that are never explicitly stated in his volume...
...Salusinszky's interviews make clear, however, that the critic who acts as the greatest catalyst for his peers is Harold Bloom...
...Frank Lentricchia, a follower of Marx and Foucault...
...Bloom does not simply tell us that criticism is a primary art alongside poetry and the novel, he demonstrates it in his own work...
...Still, whatever you may have heard about academic backbiting, love comes through more than rivalry...
...Hoping to circumvent that prejudice, he gleans most of his metaphors from psychology...
...The sole exception is Bloom, a natural scrapper, or, as he would say, an agonist...
...to be deconstructors...
...He communicates in the same way a fine poem does...
...It is more than the social conventions that holds us back...
...A typical sentence begins, "You know I love Harold, but...
...M. L. Rosenthal, while more conventional than most of the current headline-makers, is a poet who doubles as a critic...
...Atypical passagereads: "Thecompletion of a poem is the unfolding of a realization, the satisfying of a need to bring to the surface the inner realities of the psyche—whether richly delightful or of a harsher sand-in-theteeth variety...
...Art is the surfacing of ambiguous and conflicting feelings, in a vocabulary that revivifies them...
...He appears to envision his audience as Uterate, but more comfortable with fictional narrative than with the comparatively elusive organization of a poem...
...Chapters have titles like "Open Secrets," and "'Perilous Aspect': The DarkSideoftheArt...
...As for Bloom, the supreme American democrat, he insists that his students accept "what Emerson is always telling us: which is that every received text—even Shakespeare, even the Bible—is secondary...
...In fact, he argues, it is a lack of words: Our inner life cannot be pinned down by the rational language of "discourse...
...I am a comic critic," Bloom complains, "and all 1 get are serious reviews...
...Getting at the core of a work becomes an act on the order of peeling an onion, except the layers are endless...
...Rosenthal further assumes that the people he is addressing tend to suspect criticism is a form of academic obfuscation, not a clarifying tool...
...Edward Said, the Palestinian exponent of "secular" reading...
...By making him so central, Salusinszky's book leaves no doubt that the critical world is once more in full bloom...
...That, of course, is why he remains such a winsome and imposing character, the strong critic of the latest renaissance...
...Poets whose work springs from a different set of assumptions come out as necessarily weaker in his scheme of things...
...Harold Bloom, champion of Emersonian Self-Reliance in interpreting texts...
...inspired a new surge of Romantic studies...
...the second is Kenneth Burke, a perennial maverick who outlived the New Critics and continues to fascinate theorists of all stripes...
...They are primary...
...Despite the title, this is less a book to explain the process of writing verse than to tell us what we ought to absorb...
...James Dickey comes in for a similar hatchet job on this particular bed of Procrustes...
...They are the text...
...The talk is enlightening and personal, without ever becoming gossipy or trivial...
...Arguments about feminist and Marxist critical methods, even "deconstruction," can be found in middlebrow magazines and theculture sections of newspapers...
...On the other side, Kermode, an Englishman, reacts to deconstructionism the way an Old Vic actor might respond to the Stanislavski method...
...Frye, a Canadian, deplores it as one more dodge to permit critics to welsh on "the essential jobs, " to "really embark on the empirical study of literature...
...Frank Kermode, the last prominent critic of Modernism...
...Two figures not interviewed here receive much attention from those included...
...The Bible or Shakespeare is a commentary on them...
...J. Hillis Miller, trained as a scientist, likes the fact that it challenges us to constantly re-examine our hypotheses...
...For almost three decades we have been exasperated and entertained by his depictions of mortal combat between poets and their precursors, and notably between him and T. S. Eliot...
...To disabuse them, Rosenthal takes as his epigraph Paul Verlaine's stanzas beginning (in the critic's translation), "Music again and always...
...Salusinszky is especially sharp at maneuvering—one is tempted to say "tricking"—his subjects into revealing what most of their works hide: the relationship between their theories and themselves...
...It follows, by her logic, that they are "trained...
...They talk about him almost obsessively, often defining their own views in relation to his positions...
...For Rosenthal, poetry offers us a freedom otherwise denied by life: "Is there a place where grown men and women can be perfectly honest, naive if need be, without reproach or fear or ridicule...
...Where we can...
...A hundred or so pages of this and the claustrophobia of the psychoanalyst's office becomes palpable...
...In ThePoet'sArt (Norton, 160 pp., $14.95) he discusses how a reader should "engage" with "the feeling, unfolding and craft" of a poem so as to develop " an intimate empathy with what is going on" in it...
...For example, Lentricchia (the most concerned with sociological influences) and Bloom (the least) both make much of their "proletarian" origins...
...Indeed, Salusinszky cleverly needles his subjects into expressing their reactions to one another (mostly favorable) and to their reviewers (mostly unfavorable), while drawing out their own basic assumptions about literature...
...According to many schools of thought, the pleasure of poetry involves the reader bringing himself to the point where his mind and the author's imagination meet...
...Barbara Johnson thinks "women are socialized to sec more than one point of view at a time, and certainly to see more than their own point of view...
...It is Rosenthal's intention to facilitate the experience, especially in the case of the poems he most loves...
...John Ashberry, a disciple of Wallace Stevens' Romanticism, is judged deficient as a neometaphysical...
...What they do is what he believes the function of poetry to be...
...Rosenthal means here that a poem—whatever its subject—maps an emotional terrain, not a didactic or ideological one...
...that the most powerful reading of any work is the most personal...
...There's always a double message, there's always a double response...
Vol. 70 • September 1987 • No. 13
