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An Agenda for Critics: Judgment
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As
Reviewed By: |
An Agenda for Critics: Judgment
|
The
task of the critic is judgment. I hope to unravel the complexities of
judgment, as it applies to works of literature, and specifically to
poetry. Those who imagine judgment to be a simple matter need only perform
a small exercise to convince themselves otherwise. In
the fourth act of Macbeth,
Malcolm and Macduff meet in England before launching an assault on
Macbeth’s forces. Wishing to test Macduff’s loyalty to the idea of a
virtuous king and, by extension, a virtuous state, Malcolm, who would be
king if Macbeth is removed, proceeds to describe himself as a moral
monster, a man of such unbridled lust and greed that no wives or lands
would be safe in his realm. He goes on: .
. . the king-becoming graces, As
justice, verity, temperance, stableness, Bounty,
perseverance, mercy, lowliness, Devotion,
patience, courage, fortitude, I
have no relish of them, but abound In
the division of each several crime, Acting
it many ways. Suitably
appalled, Macduff recoils and avows that such a person is not fit to live,
much less to be king; whereupon Malcolm, convinced at last of Macduff’s
honor and patriotism, unsays the calumnies upon himself, allowing Macduff
to recognize him as a man of virtue, a fitting heir to the throne. Several
kinds of judgment are occurring simultaneously in this scene. Malcolm and
Macduff are of course sizing one another up with the aid of Malcolm’s
ploy. Shakespeare is offering a judgment of a proper state and a diseased
or debased one, as well as a judgment of each man’s character. Following
Shakespeare’s lead, the viewer or reader is also forming judgments of
the characters of these two individuals. Because he stands somewhat
outside the drama at the same time he is caught up in it, he is also able
to judge the credibility of the scene, the likelihood that Malcolm (or a
character fitting the viewer’s developing sense of Malcolm) would behave
as he does here. As well, he judges Shakespeare’s grasp of reality, his
dramatic and rhetorical adroitness at this point in the play, and,
ultimately, the overall effectiveness of the play and the extent to which
this scene contributes to it. Not
only are multiple judgments involved, each is quite complex in itself. We
might question, for example, how Shakespeare could expect us to believe
either that Macduff would be taken in by such a wholesale inventory of
crimes or that Malcolm would imagine he might be. But then we might
reflect that Malcolm is portrayed as a young, relatively innocent man,
someone whose first conception of immorality is sexual license, who then
imagines the deadly sin next after lust, namely avarice, and who finally,
in desperation to convince, heaps upon Macduff the entire catalogue of
moral horrors his green experience offers to him. (Those horrors are, to
be precise, merely the negatives of the “king-becoming graces” that
come to Malcolm’s mind when he thinks of morality.) And Macduff might
indeed, on sober reflection, doubt the veracity of the sordid catalogue,
but he is facing a grave emergency, he sees his country in peril, fears
(rightly, as it turns out) for the safety of his family, and thus needs to
make a snap decision. All this races through our heads as the play streams
past us. This
exercise—involving considerations of character, verisimilitude,
technical fluency, and ability to convince—offers a particularly vivid
illustration of the sorts of decisions that confront any perceptive reader
facing a text. The issues are most acute when the text is unfamiliar, but
as we have seen, even a well known passage can revive many of the same
problems, causing us to consider them anew. Much of this judgment is ad
hoc, made almost unconsciously and articulated, if ever, only because one
must write a review, teach a course, or respond to a friend’s question,
“What did you think of that?” Nevertheless,
in order to have a common platform for discussion it is desirable to
systemize the process. The rapid and intuitive judgments an experienced
reader makes can, for example, be expressed as a series of questions,
though it must be stressed that both the form of the questions and the
order of their presentation, as set down here, are an artifact of this
analytic essay and in no way a faithful depiction of the critic’s mental
sequence. Still, such an exercise has the virtue of making explicit what
may be obscure even to the critic himself and of allowing us to determine
which questions subsume others and which are illuminated by commentary in
the rich but unreliable lore of extant critical writing. Is
it comprehensible? The
question precedes all others and is in our time surprisingly complex. A
poem can elude understanding because the reader does not recognize what it
is about, or—less often—because the writer is not in control of his
material; but the obscurity can sometimes be deliberate, as when a writer
attempts to convey the emotional impact of a situation without describing
the situation itself. So the critic’s first responsibility is not to
determine the writer’s intention—a futile quest most of the time—but
to make sense of the poem. Doing so involves a combination of sympathy and
skepticism. The reader must be alive to the possible meanings inherent in
the text, yet not so credulous that any random association comes, for him,
to represent what the poem is about. A
passage in Hart Crane’s “For the Marriage of Faustus and Helen” may
illustrate the point: The
mind is brushed by sparrow wings; Numbers,
rebuffed by asphalt, crowd The
margins of the day, accent the curbs, Conveying
divers dawns on every corner After
the poem was published, numerous conscientious readers found this passage
extremely obscure. They were troubled by the word “numbers,” which
some took to be mathematical abstractions and others felt must be people.
Neither interpretation shed much light on the passage, and only some time
later, when it was pointed out that “numbers” referred to the sparrows
in the first line, did the meaning of the passage, and the imagery it
conveys, become clear. For
a contemporary example, consider this passage from a poem by Jorie Graham: Then,
sugary at first, then monstrous, cuneiform, as
if a microscopic chain had rattled once- bony
lightning - invisible inscription - the
call is returned - or no, another call, almost identical, is
cast - like a hoofmark on the upper registers - across
the housetops . . . Readers
are likely to find this passage obscure. It seems to refer to a sound,
that is, a call. But of what sort? Its quality or character is not
clarified by the attributes given in the first three lines, nor by those
in the final two. The six lines, in short, convey minimal information with
a great deal of distraction or static. Such
problems of comprehension may either cripple or, paradoxically, sometimes
enhance a poem’s reputation with readers. One could argue that the
incoherence of large parts of Pound’s Cantos has had both effects. Is
it true? This
question is rarely asked, and indeed it might seem either antithetical or
irrelevant to poetry. Ever since Plato banned poets from the Republic as
purveyors of lies, it has been taken for granted that poets and scholars
inhabit different countries, notwithstanding the highly visible presence
today of poets on the faculties of our universities. But even though many
kinds of statements in poems do indeed require the reader to accept that
they are valid (e.g. Larkin’s assertion “Smiles are for youth.
For old age come / Death’s terror and delirium.”), let us for
simplicity concede that truth in this pure sense often lies outside the
critic’s scope. Still, there are related but less sweeping questions,
such as those enumerated below, with which the reader must contend in
making a judgment about a poem. a) Is it convincing? This
question is often posed, but it can mean many things, depending on the
poem and the critic. It might ask whether the poem presents, in the
reader’s eyes, a balanced and mature view of the world. It might arise
from a suspicion that the poem is merely an exercise in rhetoric,
unsupported by an emotionally authentic base. Or it might be a way of
questioning the underlying philosophy the poem seems to espouse—one for
example that takes a simplistic view of human conduct or the complexity of
human life. The
question might stem, as well, from doubts whether the poem embraces enough
of the world. Cleanth Brooks writes that an insufficiently inclusive
approach will result in a “trivial and anemic” poem, whereas, “By
contrast, poems that achieve their basic unity through the poet’s
ability to include the heterogeneous and the diverse are mature and
tough-minded. They wear well.” We might, of course, question what Brooks
means by these confidently arrayed terms, and whether they will come to
our aid when we first confront an unfamiliar poem, but there is little
doubt that some such questions pass through every serious reader’s mind;
we feel the poem must bring to us something of our sense of the
diversity—even messiness—of experience. When
we ask if a poem is convincing, we might also be asking if it is
rhetorically effective. This is a question each poet must confront in the
early stages of composition. A good idea is not enough. Neither is an
excellent phrase or even an excellent line. The poem must cohere as a
rhetorical act, whether through use of an established and recognized form,
such as a sonnet or a passage of blank verse, or by impressing on its
reader a sense of form achieved through the artful manipulation of
sound, syntax, word repetition, rhythm, and other means at the poet’s
disposal. In matters of rhetoric, as in other areas of judgment, there is
not a universally recognized standard, though critics will point to
certain touchstones that are likely to elicit more or less agreement from
their peers. b) Is it
interesting? A
poem could offer a convincing sense of reality, perhaps, and yet strike
the reader as obvious and trivial. Readers will discard it if it appears
simply to restate matters already well explored. It must in some sense be
new. Until recently, the prevailing belief was that a poem written in a
traditional form could not be new, and this belief helped to estrange many
poets from formal techniques. One result of the return to form that we are
witnessing at the moment is the widening awareness that a poem must be new
in other respects than the merely formal. Seeing that many free verse
poems had nothing else of novelty about them, poets had to look more
deeply at what constitutes a new thing to say, a novel and illuminating
perception. And those who managed to find something perhaps unexpressed
till now must still decide whether even then it was worth expressing. This
is a question the present moment can almost never answer with certainty. A
poet can only state his or her best case, then hope that posterity will
judge favorably. Nevertheless, a critic, as a fallible stand-in for
posterity, can often be a useful guide. Even a good critic will inevitably
strike some false positives and some false negatives, but the former
should be few, and the latter fewer still. One’s
sense of what is new connects powerfully with one’s knowledge of what
has already been explored—that is, with what T.S. Eliot calls the
tradition. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” Eliot assigns to
the poet the daunting task of becoming familiar with the entire poetic
canon, which for him would include everything written in English, as well
as the major classical works of Europe from Homer onward. Perhaps now we
should add works of Europe’s far-flung colonies as well as Africa,
India, China, and Japan. I
am being only partly facetious. Wide knowledge of the tradition in which
one writes is essential, and some knowledge of world literature is
certainly an asset to any poet. On the other hand, being of a particular
time and in a particular place goes a long way toward ensuring that one
will write from a unique perspective, and in a style and idiom unlike
those of the past. Age and a distinct personality also confer some
advantages, as Paul Valéry noted: .
. . les morts n’ont point de ces retours étranges. Ils
reviennent peut-être en de faibles esprits; Mais
le tien, mais le mien, jamais ne sont repris Que
d’un vivant retour de leur soif de vendanges. [Surely] the dead are spared
these strange returns. They come again perhaps to
weaker lives; But yours and mine are not to be reborn Except
when thirst for vintage wine revives. And
yet the strongest spirits are so in part because they have assimilated
large amounts of their native tradition. Not every poet is a scholar, and
for better or worse very few true scholars are poets. The education of a
poet does indeed involve imbibing as much of the available literature as
possible, but this is done not only to know what has already been said but
also to learn how it has been said, and how it might be. c) Is it revelatory? There
is a degree beyond the state of being merely interesting. Often a poem
will intrigue on a first encounter, but the effect does not last. The poem
displays, perhaps, a clever bit of wordplay or an esoteric fact like the
use of saffron as a pigment in sixteenth-century oil paint, but once this
curiosity has been absorbed it has no more to tell us. The sophisticated
reader is looking for more—a new perspective, a way of seeing things
that brings hitherto unrelated ideas into alignment. And—here’s the
rub—he or she wants to experience the frisson,
the thrill of discovery, on each occasion. Oddly enough, this is possible.
The effect of a poem does not depend merely on an encounter with new
information, else one would simply turn to prose. The successful poem
recreates, on each reading, the illusion that its complex elements, which
include not just information but the sound and manner and order of their
conveyance, are being witnessed for the first time. And the reader, or
listener, goes along with the pretext. But for the trick to work, the poem
must be comprised of many small delights, whose sequence builds to a
climax and which, taken together, have a numinous quality surpassing that
of any particular detail. I
do not wish to suggest, by using words like “illusion” and
“trick,” that the poet is merely a manipulator, following recipes laid
out long ago by Edgar Allan Poe. If his work is insincere and not deeply
felt, its duplicity will soon be discovered. But poets do not merely
channel an imagined muse; they (the successful ones anyway) are also
self-conscious craftsmen, and mastery of their craft entails understanding
of the rhetorical and other structural principles that will produce the
strongest effect on the reader. A superior critic will recognize the
contributions of craft as well as those of intuition and inspiration. He
may be able to say which is which, but if the poet has done her job well,
he may not. d) Is it just? This
is the most nearly ethical question the reader is likely to raise. It
means, “Does the poem fit my sense of honorable human behavior or
attitudes?” And that question in turn gives rise to others: “Are the
emotions appropriate?” and “Are the portrayals accurate?” On such
questions sweeping judgments sometimes depend, such as Czeslaw Milosz’s
declaration, “I don’t like [Philip Larkin’s] poetry.” He was
referring particularly to “Aubade,” a poem that has disturbed others
as well, including Seamus Heaney, but has also been hailed as a
masterpiece. Rebelling against attempts to cloak criticism in a spurious
objectivity, Milosz complained, “I’m afraid we have completely lost
the habit of applying moral criteria to art.” We
have lost this habit through some conscious choices. In a pluralistic
society that has for some time been stepping deliberately away from fealty
to an over-arching moral authority, the notion that one poem, or one
opinion, carries more truth and virtue than another has come to be seen as
somewhat quaint, if not untenable. Our very language, in which our
discussions of taste are couched, has been transformed. As Louis Menand
notes in a recent article on Lionel Trilling, “Most people don’t use
the language of approval and disapproval in their responses to art; they
use the language of entertainment. They enjoy some things and don’t
enjoy other things . . . . This seems to me to give literary criticism a
lot less moral work to do.” Be
that as it may, less sweeping but perhaps more influential judgments are
conveyed every day, as teachers work to educate the taste of their
students, suggesting that certain poems may on scrutiny be found
sentimental, superficial, or false to reality—poems the students may
initially have been quite taken with—while drawing attention to others
the students may have overlooked. To a large extent the education of the
whole person, during the teens and into the twenties, takes place through
exposure to—and commentary upon—works of literature. Questions of
depth, dignity, and appropriateness, with their ethical implications, are
an inevitable part of this process. Note
that here the critic is judging a judgment, not just a technique or a
facility. The initial determination that the subject merited a poem of a
certain type and in a certain style belonged to the poet. The poem is the
evidence of that determination, but it is a complex sort of evidence. For,
especially if the poem is flawed, it can be difficult for the reader to
determine whether the initial idea was impeccable and the realization
inadequate, or the other way around. In fact, most likely neither was the
case. Critics who are also poets will recognize that the process of
writing is also a process of discovering the true nature of one’s
subject, that the idea and the manner of its statement (the dancer and the
dance) are impossible to tease apart. That is why the poet’s judgment,
or realization, of his or her subject is an often lengthy process of
writing and refining the poem, and why the critic’s commentary on that
poem, especially when it is acute, is in many ways a commentary on the
writer’s sensibility and his life. A flawed poem, then, may be evidence
of technical limitations, but it may also reveal the poet’s failure (or
inability) to sufficiently explore the implications of his subject. There
are, to be sure, several other criteria that might be applied in this act
of judgment, though I shall not treat them further here. They are criteria
based on radically different ways of looking at a poem. Rather than a
completed artifact, for example, a poem might be treated as a process—an
act either of composition or of speech. Indeed there are poems that are
designed for the microphone rather than the page, and some of them are
much more impressive when heard or witnessed in the act of semi-improvised
delivery than when read. From another point of view, a poem might be
judged from a predominantly socio-political rather than a literary point
of view. In this case critics may ask what the poem says about the social
position and attitudes of the person who wrote it, or what implied
commentary it offers on the society of its time. And it is even possible
to write and think of poems with little regard for their overt semantic
content, paying attention instead exclusively to issues of rhythm and
sound, or of arrangement on the page. To
summarize, the judgment of a poem is a complex act that depends on the
critic’s sense of the world, his experience with other literature, his
sensitivity to language (regarding both discriminations of meaning and the
sounds of speech), and his sense of the appropriateness of the statement
to the matter at hand. All these matters admit of much variation and
disagreement among individuals. Rare in our time are those who openly
espouse a hierarchy of taste or confess a belief that certain poets or
critics possess a refinement of judgment to which all others should defer.
But amid all the lip service to an egalitarian republic of literature
there remains a reverence for certain critics, certain writers,
and—occasionally—certain anthologies perceived to speak with greatest
authority for the highest ideals of contemporary poetry. An
observer viewing this landscape at any one time might conclude that the
republic is in fact governed by a noble house of peers, chosen by an
obscure process but widely acknowledged despite periodic revolts and
continual skirmishes in the provinces. But a longer historical view
reveals that few tastemakers dominate for long, and that as a result the
canon changes significantly from one generation to the next. Such a view
should instill a certain diffidence in even the most self-confident
critic. To recognize the extent to which critics of previous generations
were bound to the prejudices of their times is, perhaps, to begin a
process of searching out and reconsidering one’s own unscrutinized
assumptions. To find the points well taken in the otherwise offensive
arguments of those on the other side of the culture wars of the moment may
lead to an enlargement of one’s mental horizons. The
great majority of critics, unwilling to claim divine inspiration for their
views, must base them on, essentially, three fundaments. The first is the
critic’s own sensibility—his ear, his sensitivity to language and its
nuances, his ability to follow the associative, logical, or symbolic links
implicit in a poem, coupled with a conviction, based on experience, of
what truly matters. The second is his familiarity with the poet’s
contemporaries and with the thought of his fellow critics. It is with
reference to them that he will be best able to judge the originality of
the new work he encounters. Finally, the “tradition,” whether as Eliot
invoked it or as the critic himself understands it, establishes the most
reliable point of reference—or point of departure. In a sense all
writing is a process of pushing back. But if the critic knows what the
poet is pushing back against, he can make a far more sensitive evaluation,
on more than one level, of the work in question.
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