Cultural Cohesion (59 page)

As of this writing, I have just discovered the poetry of Stephen Edgar, who has spent decades in Hobart writing poems that have hardly made him famous even in Melbourne. In the best sense, his work is too polyphonic in its own right to betray a primary influence, but I doubt if it would have its bewitchingly exact joinery if the post-war American formal masters had not taught the lessons by example. The lessons go back through the entire tradition of those English lyrics that compound their emotional, observational and intellectual force with the enchantment of their construction. At least as old as Marvell's dew-drop or the rare birth of his love, the effect is of a dexterity of technique that offers solace without declining into an emollient.

Anthony Burgess once suggested, in
Nothing Like the Sun
, that Shakespeare found the inspiration for the enchanted language of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
by watching a slow execution at Tyburn. The devastation in Europe drove Wilbur to write “First Snow in Alsace” and “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra.” Poems like that still seem to me the best way of dealing with the poisonous memories left to us by the Nazis. Another possible poetic response to the knowledge that millions of people have been gassed is to gas yourself, but whether a poet offers proof of sincerity by doing so is a question that Wilbur's post-war lyrics ask penetratingly by their mere existence.

2003

37

THESE STAGGERING
QUESTIONS

Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits
of Pluralism
by Wayne Booth

Previous books by Wayne C. Booth, especially
The Rhetoric of Fiction
, have been well received in the academic world. Since it first made its appearance in the early 1960s,
The Rhetoric of Fiction
has gone on to establish itself as a standard work—a touchstone of sanity. Probably the same thing will happen to the book under review.
Critical Understanding
is such a civilized treatise that I felt guilty about being bored stiff by it.

I had better say at the outset that I didn't find
The Rhetoric of Fiction
too thrilling either. A prodigious range of learning is expressed in hearteningly straightforward prose, but the effect is to leave you wondering what special use there is in presenting the student with yet another codified list of rhetorical devices. Separated from the works of fiction in which Professor Booth has so ably detected them, these devices are lifeless except as things to be memorized for the passing of examinations. There is also a strong chance that any student who spends much time studying rhetorical devices will not read the works of fiction, or will read them with his attention unnaturally focussed on technical concerns.

Worrying about what students might do is the kind of activity which such books—even when they are as well done as Professor Booth's—inevitably arouse. But any student who could get seriously interested in
Critical Understanding
would have to be potty or else old before his time. You can't help wondering why it is thought to be good that the study of literature should so tax the patience. After all, literature doesn't. Boring you rigid is just what literature sets out not to do.

It could be said that abstract speculation about literature is an activity impossible to stop, so that we should give thanks to see a few pertinent books cropping up among the impertinent ones. It could be said, to the contrary, that the whole business should be allowed to sink under its own weight. By now the latter argument looks the more attractive, if for no other reason than that life is very short. But for the moment let us assume that good books like this are justified in their existence by the corrective they offer to bad books like this. Let us be grateful for Booth's civilized manner and powers of assimilation. The question then arises about whether his argument makes any sense in its own terms.

Critical Understanding
purports to help us think coherently about “the immensely confusing world of contemporary literary criticism.” There is nothing immensely, or even mildly, confusing about the world of contemporary literary criticism. The world of contemporary literary criticism does not exist. There is only criticism—an activity which goes on. It goes on in various ways; ways which it suits Professor Booth's book to call “modes”; “modes” which he thinks are hard to reconcile with one another, so that a world of confusion is generated, to which we need a guide. He is a very patient guide, but in the long run it is usually not wise to thank someone for offering to clarify an obfuscation which he is in fact helping to create.

Critical “modes” have no independent existence worth bothering about. They are not like the various branches of science—an analogy Professor Booth seems always to be making in some form or other, even while strenuously claiming to eschew it. The various branches of science are impersonal in the sense that anybody qualified can pursue them. But a critical “mode” is never anything except an emphasis, usually a false one. It is an expression of the critic's personality. The critical personality is the irreducible entity in criticism just as the artistic personality is the irreducible entity in art. Critical “modes” can be reconciled with one another only by taking the personality out of them. Since there is no way of doing this without depriving them of content, they remain irreconcilable. You can call it confusion if you like, but to worry about it is a waste of time.

Professor Booth has all the time in the world. There is not room in this article or indeed in the whole paper to demonstrate by quotation his strolling expansiveness of argument. To summarize his line of thought is like trying to scoop air into a heap. But as far as I understand
Critical Understanding
, it offers pluralism as the solution to the alleged problem of reconciling the various critical “modes.” Three versions of pluralism are examined, belonging respectively to Ronald S. Crane, Kenneth Burke and M. H. Abrams. Professor Booth does his best, at terrific length, to reconcile these three different pluralisms with each other, but finally they don't seem able to settle down together except within the even bigger and better pluralism which is Professor Booth's own.

In Professor Booth's amiably loquacious style of discourse very little goes without saying, but if anything were to, it would be that pluralism is better than monism. Professor Booth defines his terms with both rigour and subtlety. Trying to convey his definitions in a sentence or two, one is bound to play fast and loose. But as far as I can tell, a monist believes in his own “mode” and can't see the point of anybody else's. The pluralist might favour a “mode” of his own but he is able to admit that the other fellow's “mode” might have something in it. I keep putting quotation marks around “mode,” not just because of my uncertainty as to what a “mode” is, but because of strong doubts about whether there is any such thing. I suspect a critical “mode” is a critical method. If it is, then it is necessary to insist once again that there is really no such thing. There is just criticism, an activity to which various critics contribute. It is neither monism nor pluralism to say this: it is just realism. A critic's method might help him to find things out but we don't wait for his method to collapse before deciding that he is talking rubbish. Nor is it our method that detects faults in his method. We reason about his reasoning, and that's it.

Professor Booth's pluralism has a plural nature of its own, alas. When he means by pluralism that there is a multiplicity of valid critical modes or methods and that some of these might be irreconcilable, I am afraid he does not mean much. When he means by pluralism that the only real critical mode or method, criticism, is pursued in different ways and areas by various critics, he means something, even if not a lot. The latter interpretation of the word, however, would not yield up a long book, or even a long article. The first interpretation has the advantage of providing limitless opportunities to burble on. It offers all the dangerous excitement of the Uncertainty Principle.

Professor Booth is an accredited pundit and I am not, so he knows at least as well as I do that the theory of Relativity in physics lends no support to the concept of relativism in metaphysics. No relativist could have come up with Relativity. Einsteinian physics are no excuse for treating reality as a piece of elastic. Nor is the Uncertainty Principle any excuse for thinking that a proposition can hover between true and false. Einstein didn't like the Uncertainty Principle very much, believing that the Old One does not play dice. Unable to arrive at a Unified Field theory which would reconcile his own theories with other theories which seemed equally powerful, he was constrained to see his own proofs within a pluralist frame. For Professor Booth, this fact is too tempting to resist. Try as he might, he can't help suggesting that Einstein found certain lines of inquiry inconsistent with one another. He wishes his own pluralism on Einstein.

But Einstein's pluralism, in so far as it existed, had nothing to do with finding certain lines of inquiry irreconcilable with one another. He never gave up on the possibility of a Unified Field. He just gave up on his own chances of finding it. Einstein believed that there was only one mode or method of scientific enquiry—scientific enquiry.

Different things which had been uncovered by scientific enquiry might be hard to match up with each other—hard even for him—but there was no reason to think that scientific enquiry would not be able to match them up eventually, although probably part of the result would be to open fresh gaps. That was the extent of Einstein's pluralism. It was the humble admission, by a supremely realistic thinker, that not everything could be done at once by one person. It had nothing to do with superficially exciting notions about the irreconcilability of modes. Einstein thought too concretely to get interested in stuff like that.

Lesser minds are perhaps more susceptible. Pluralism might be on the verge of becoming a fad, like ecology or macrobiotic diet. Beyond that, it could easily become a cult, like Scientology. It would be a pity to see Einstein posthumously co-opted into the role of L. Ron Hubbard. The same thing could happen to Sir Isaiah Berlin, who has been getting praise in the reviews for his alleged pluralism. To a certain extent he has brought this on himself, for appearing to be impressed by Machiavelli's discovery of incompatible moralities. Machiavelli thought, among other things, that the Prince needed to be cruel in order to be kind—in other words, that ends justified means. When it comes to practice, the evidence in favour of this proposition is not noticeably better than the evidence against it, especially if Italy is your field of study. Anyway for the decent politician there is no choice: he tries to do the liberal thing in small matters as in large, just as Sir Isaiah himself would, if he was put in charge of a state.

Sir Isaiah's cast of mind is better represented by his admiration for Herzen, who distrusted the idea that good ends could be brought about by bad means. Sir Isaiah's pluralism is really just the ability to get interested in a lot of different fields. What makes him a distinguished thinker is the way he combines vitality with range and penetration. It would be sad if his sympathy for Machiavelli reinforced the notion that there is some sort of philosophical endorsement to be had for living your life to a double standard. Sir Isaiah, or any other considerable thinker who finds himself saddled with the description “pluralist,” should do his best to buck it off. On those terms, pluralism can make any feather-brain a philosopher.

Professor Booth is a solid enough thinker, but he is far too apt to proclaim himself stymied when faced with the huge task of bringing order out of chaos. It would be better for his own morale, although it would lead to much shorter books, if he realized that the chaos is a mirage and that the order he brings out of it is largely uninformative. He pronounces himself daunted by the challenge of reconciling all the differently valid ways of critically responding to a poem. The luckless poem chosen for purposes of demonstration is Auden's “Surgical Ward.” Auden would probably have some short, sharp things to say if he were to rise from the dead and join the discussion. He might as well: he can't be getting much peace down there, when you consider how much he is being talked about up here.

Scrupulous in his pluralism, Professor Booth offers us his educated guess at how each of his three paradigm thinkers would approach this poem. We have to take it for granted that he is faithful to their respective modes, although an independent observer might point out that the modes can't be up to much if somebody else can take them over so easily. Be that as it may, it turns out that the three modes scarcely even begin to jibe, whereupon the awed Professor Booth gives forth plangent threnodies, of which the following is merely a sample: “Regardless of whether Ronald Crane finds any one sonnet or an entire sequence to be a beautiful construct, or whether Kenneth Burke finds Auden grappling effectively with the task of curing his or the reader's ills, the ‘Abrams test' remains: Does an intelligent, sensitive and informed historian find the sonnets responding to years of inquiry and to his effort to write a major history of the poem-as-moment? It is in the nature of the case that we shall quite probably never know the answer to that question.”

Clearly Professor Booth envisages a discussion that can never end. The reader might have difficulty in seeing how it can even start, if it has to be conducted using terms like “a major history of the poem-as-moment” or (from elsewhere in the book) “the need for overstanding.” But for the moment-as-moment we can grant that Professor Booth has brought us face to face with the unknown, perhaps even the unknowable. After all, a poem is much more complicated than a cone in space. Professor Booth makes much of this cone. If an observer sees the cone from end on, he thinks it is a circle. If the observer sees the cone from the side, he thinks it is a triangle. How can the observer be sure what he is seeing?

The answer is that he has to go on looking from different points of view, but not necessarily indefinitely. If
we
found out that the thing was a cone, why shouldn't he? Eventually he will either find out what we know or will just act on less-than-complete information. But there is no great mystery. Here as elsewhere with Professor Booth's examples, it is necessary to point out that the matter he has raised is a mare's nest. When the observer sees the base of the cone and calls the object a circle, it makes just as much sense to say that he has got things right as that he has got things wrong. He has
begun
to get things right, and within a reasonable time could well arrive at a proper identification of the object. That might open additional questions—such as what the cone is made of, or who put it there—but to say that a discussion never ends doesn't mean that we don't reach conclusions. Indeed if we didn't reach conclusions along the way there could be no discussion.

A poem is certainly a much more complicated thing than a cone in space, but there is less, rather than more, reason for carrying on as if it presented a challenge to the “inadequacy” of our modes or methods. Unless the ordinary reader is mentally defective he starts getting the poem right straight away. He might not be very sure of what it is, but he can immediately start being reasonably sure of what it isn't. After a glance at “Surgical Ward” you can see that there are a number of things it might be about. But that number is small compared with the large number of things it is manifestly not about. It is not about the fall of Rome, for example. Auden wrote a poem about that subject, but this one is not it.