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 .

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Literary History: Non-Subject Par Excellence

F. W. Bateson

HY

par excellence? For two reasons: one (the topic towhich this essay is principally devoted), because it glossesover a logical contradiction between two opposed modes

of thought; two, because literature and history are both excellent

things in themselves-provided they are considered (and practiced)

separately. Literary history is merely a by-product, a disreputable

though not entirely useless by-product. It can be compared to the

Philosophers' Stone. Though the medieval alchemists never discovered

how to transmute lead into gold, the science of chemistry is directlydescended from their failures. In the same

way literary history, thougha futile occupation in itself (one of the jokes of modern academic life),has had its own valuable by-products. For one thing, it has sharpenedour chronological sense; Old Style is no longer confused with New

Style, as Thackeray confused them in the evening preceding the duel

in Esmond. 1 Literary history has also played its part in encouraginghabits of accurate documentation and a general consciousness of the

relativity of critical values; we would never say-as Lytton Stracheydid in a review of Birkbeck Hill's edition of The Lives of the Poets in

19o6-that "Johnson'saesthetic

judgmentsare almost

invariablysub-

tle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recom-

mend them-except one: they are never right."2

Against these incidental blessings must be set certain incidental

scandals. Literary history has provided an umbrella of respectabilityunder which are still crowded teachers of literature who, have out-

grown their adolescent enthusiasms without acquiring a mature critical

sense. It was against these unfortunate misfits that the New Criticism

I Esmond 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" and

Esmond's proposal over an hour later that they should have "half an hour's prac-tice before nightfall" seems to reflect a muddle about sunset in O.S. and N.S.

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



S16 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

led its successful revolution, though an increasing specialization has

now changed the essential situation. The umbrella now covers pros-

odists, stylisticians, textual critics, analytical bibliographers, et hocgenus omne, as well as literary historians of the old school. No doubt

these gentlemen must live, but their need for bread and butter has ob-

scured the persistence of a more intellectual instinct, so far unfulfilled

and perhaps unfulfillable. We need literary history. I will call our con-

dition (with Blake, though in a different context) "The lost traveller's

dream under the hill." But I must not anticipate my conclusion.

II

We are faced with an initial logical difficulty. History is committed

by its nature to the exposition of differences between one temporalevent or period and another. A country in which no such differences

can be distinguished is a country without a history. And for a biogra-

pher it is necessary for his subject to be born, to mature, and ultimatelyto die-three conditions that necessarily differentiate themselves, even

though the child can sometimes be shown to be the father of the man.

Literature, on the other hand, is necessarily "esemplastic," to use Cole-

ridge's term. The emphasis in it is on similarities rather than differ-ences; images fuse with concepts, episodes connect, characters estab-

lish interrelationships. In a familiar passage in Aspects of the Novel

E. M. Forster invites us to imagine "all the novelists ... at work to-

gether in a circular room" (which he later compares to the Read-

ing Room of the British Museum). There, he tells us, we shall find

Samuel Richardson sitting by the side of Henry James, H. G. Wells

next to Dickens, and Virginia Woolf next to Sterne. (The historical

order is deliberately confused.) His slogan "History develops, Art

stands still" is, as he half admits, only a slogan, but a point has beenmade.

It would seem, therefore, that there is an inherent contradiction in

the notion of literary history. Like oil and water, literature and historywill not mix. However, Forster's examples may seem to refute his

generalization. No one would confuse one of Richardson's novels

with one of James's. And the differences between Virginia Woolf and

Sterne are surely patent and enormous, though it may also be agreedthat there are almost no resemblances between near-contemporaries

like Richardson and Sterne, or James and Wells.The point that Forster seems to have missed is that history is es-

sentially outward-looking, whereas literature is inward-looking. The

reader of a historical work or a biography finds himself continuously

compelled, or at times coaxed, into leaving the proper subject-matter



LITERARY HISTORY: NON-SUBJECT Par ExcellenceI 7

of the book he is reading for glimpses into related historical episodes. A

study of a past period enables one to predict, however precariously, the

outcome of what is proceeding somewhere in the world at the time ofreading. With literature, however, any such speculations will be a

sign either of incompetent writing or of incompetent reading. The

world upon which the historian is reporting is the real world about

which his sources of information can never be complete or whollyreliable. The novelist or dramatist suffers from no such limitatiron;he

is omniscient, even if-like Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde--hle may

pretend for special reasons of his own not to be. In contrast to the

historian's his success depends upon his ability to impose upon his

readers the illusion of reality-a pseudo-reality that is nevertheless"like" reality as the vehicle of a metaphor is like its tenor.

A connection, if a frail one, may be proposed between critical judg-ments upon a work of literature, or a whole corpus of such works, and

the judgments that a historian offers upon policies, social divisions,

technological influences, etc. But a literary judgment or critical com-

ment must still be distinguished from the literary experience "as in it-

self it really is." Literature being temporal in its essence (Act I pre-cedes Act V), the response to a work of literature must be continuous

throughout its performance, whether it is private or public. The readeror spectator is inside the aesthetic experience. What remains in the

memory is the merest skeleton of the actual subjective experience, and

the ultimate critical verdict is a skeleton of that skeleton, one that is

never wholly reliable because it has been reached outside the actual

aesthetic experience and so is likely to have been influenced by various

extraneous factors. At best we are left with an aesthetic nucleus that

the memory has sifted.

III

If we turn from the reader to his alter ego the writer, history (of a

sort) must enter the argument. At a certain point in time a work of

literature comes into being. Before November I637 when it was writ-

ten Lycidas did not exist; in 1638 it became publicly available in JustaEdouardo King. A relationship of some kind must be conceded to be

present between the array of names, titles, and dates that constitutes a

textbook history of English literature and the act of aesthetic communi-

cation between author's words andrecipient

reader which creates

"literature" (the actual literary experience). The words are essential.

Take them away and nothing is left. But the identity of the author of

the words is a secondary matter. Does it make much difference if CyrilTourneur or Thomas Middleton was responsible for the words that

constitute The Revenger's Tragedy? And how precisely must the date



I18 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

of its composition be determined to affect its aesthetic content? Any

year between I6oo and 1630 would be equally plausible if that play is

regarded primarily as an aesthetic construct that is still available to amodern reader. The aesthetic conditional is crucial. In the process of

responding to the play as literature the modem reader will ignore such

historical facts as the difference between the Jacobean pronunciationof English and that standard today, or the difference between the publictheatre in which The Revenger's Tragedy was originally performed

(no lighting, no scenery, no curtain, and an "apron" stage) and its

modem equivalent.

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

take refuge in grandiose generalities. T. S. Eliot is typical:

The poetry of a people takes its life from the people's speech and inturn gives life to it; and representsits highest point of consciousness,its

greatest power and its most delicate sensibility.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 the general state of mind-not as a duty,but simply because he cannot help participating in it."4 Such proposi-tions receive our general assent. They are at least more reputable than

those of the Art for Art's Sake critic. Writers do not live in ivory towers

(if they did they would starve to death). On the contrary, they are

members of society, with the obligations, conscious or unconscious,that such membership implies, and they are dependent for their words

on the language that is current at the moment.

The difficulty is to reconstruct the evidence from which such gen-eralizations must depend if they are to carry any conviction. Literary

history,as we have seen, is a feeble crutch because of its bias towards

differentiation. What is perhaps needed is a series of interlinking parallel

disciplines-political, economic, linguistic, cultural-which might be

subsumed under some such label as Social Studies. In this way as much

attention might be paid to similarities as to differences.

Literary history as it was practiced until recently concentrated its

attention on the discovery of new "sources." When I was a graduatestudent at Harvard I remember the indignation with which Lowes

repudiated the imputation: "Gentlemen, I am not a source-hunter "

And the little man's enormous voice thundered round the room. It

was a Chaucer class, but I had just read The Road to Xanadu and rec-

ollecting that masterpiece of source-hunting I scribbled a note to my

3 The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism (London, 1933), p. 15.

4 Selected Essays (London, 1932), p. 386.



LITERARY HISTORY: NON-SUBJECT Par Excellence 119

neighbour: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks " It may be

said, of course, that The Road to Xanadu is concerned with similarities,

the echoes of the travel books Coleridge had been reading before writ-ing "Kubla Khan" and "The Ancient Mariner," and does not qualify

accordingly as literary history. This, however, is to ignore the differ-

ences of genre and context that separate the matter-of-fact travel-books

and Coleridge's brilliantly fantastic poems. The travel-books, in spiteof Coleridge's repetitions of phrase and image from them, do not explainthe poems. They are not in pari materia-as some of the ballads in

Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry can certainly be said to be.

And what about chronological order, that other idol of the literary

historian? R. B. McKerrow's Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare(1939) is specific on this point. He tells us in his preface that the con-

clusion he had reached, after many years work on the Oxford edition

(still unpublished), was that "any satisfactory study of the works of

Shakespeare, or indeed probably of any other author, must take full

account of the order in which they were written, and . . . it is ad-

visable actually to study them, so far as possible, in that order."5 Must

it? Is it advisable to read an author's works in the order of their com-

position? The recommendation has a certain specious plausibility. If

a work of literature is essentially a temporal artifact, one in which theauthor invites you to begin with his first stanza, act, or chapter, it mightseem reasonable to extend the same principle to the whole body of his

writings. The objection that McKerrow's formula starts one off with

the juvenilia, which are often silly as well as immature, may be con-

sidered frivolous. This is a risk that the conscientious literary student

must be prepared to run; there may be nuggets even in the earlier

version of Spenser's "Visions of Bellay" that was printed in A Theatre

for Worldlings (1569), though I have not detected them.

But there is a more cogent refutation in wait for McKerrow. It is

simply that a writer's juvenilia may not qualify as literature at all.

The sensible thing to do surely is to begin with the works that are

generally considered his masterpieces. (One begins Spenser with The

Faerie Queene.) Literary history has a "value" element built into it.

Since it cannot be the history of all the books ever written, a process of

selection must be a necessary preliminary. And if the selection is not to

be merely conventional or mechanical, a critical reading is the first

necessity.The test

properto a

temporalartifact can be

summarizedin a sentence: to qualify as literature the work under consideration must

invite a reading backwards as well as a reading forwards. In less

technical terms, it must be memorable. But, because of his initial pre-

5 P. vi-



120 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

mises, the literary historian will find it difficult to read anything more

than once, and what he will tend to remember are the non-aesthetic

differences in it.The test of memorability is worth elaborating because it points the

way to the semblance of history that literature seems to permit. What

is read stimulates the imagination-and so it is immediately re-read.

And this second reading is superimposed, as it were, on the first read-

ing. But the two readings-if the first is still fresh in the consciousness

-are different in kind. The first reading presumes and indeed re-

quires an ignorant and innocent performer, one who will not know

what is to come next, what is or is not ironical, which of the dramatis

personae to trust and which to distrust. On a second reading, however,whatever is said will have acquired a somewhat different meaning be-

cause its consequences will be known. Iago, for example, who is so

plausible on a first acquaintance in the first scene of Othello, which

he dominates completely-such apparently genuine grievances, such

vitality of expression -has become a very different person when the

play ends. It is disconcerting now to return to the first scene, knowingas we do what is to come. (The man is "honest" only in the appear-

ance he knows how to create.) But the words have not changed, onlytheir implications. And a similar process operates, in different forms

and degrees, with the first and second reading of any unfamiliar literaryartifact. Verbal progress and verbal regress complement each other,

and the shock of surprise induced by their successful interaction leaves

a special imprint in the memory. And such imprints accumulate and

acquire contexts.

The problem that critical theory has been tempted to evade is what

might be called the elasticity of the literary artifact. We tend to beginand end with the single poem, play, novel, etc.-each to be hung in

the reader's private mental gallery, each in its separate frame, with a

title and an author's name attached to it. If the author's name should

be missing, a literary detective is encouraged to identify him in a

learned journal; if there should be no proper title, we invent one-the

Legend of Good Women, for example, or Comus. But this rage for

bibliographical tidiness misses a crucial critical point: the encirclingframe may be in the wrong place.

Shakespeare's Sonnets were published in 16o9 by that "well-wishingadventurer" Thomas Thorpe in a single volume; modern editors fol-

low him in treating all the 154 sonnets as a literary unit instead of the

Shakespearian miscellany they clearly are. A plausible case has even

been made recently for dating Sonnet 145 as early as 1582 on the



LITERARY HISTORY: NON-SUBJECT Par Excellence 121

ground that it is addressed to Ann Hathaway. 6 The best of the Sonnets

certainly detach themselves from the various series in which they occur

and survive as single poems. Sonnet 73 ("That time of year thou maystin me behold") is typical of such detachment; it is unquestionably a

part that is superior to the whole in which it happens to be found. A

similar superiority to Sonnet 73's other thirteen lines is exhibited by

general consent in its fourth line: "Bare ruined choirs, where late the

sweet birds sang." Here, then, we have three levels of poetic merit, each

enclosing a shorter but superior and separable artifact: (i) the collec-

tion or series as a whole, (ii) Sonnet 73, (iii) 73's fourth line (whichhas proved one of the most memorable lines in the whole of the Sonnets.

Such diminutions are accompanied, of course, by similar expansions.Thus the Sonnets is also a part of three increasingly larger literary units:

(i) the Elizabethan sonnet cycle, (ii) English Petrarchanism (though

"My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" is as anti-Petrarchan as

anything Donne wrote), (iii) the whole corpus of English Renaissance

lyric poetry. Other similarly inclusive units are, for example, (i) Shakes-

peare's complete works, (ii) the Elizabethan court (especially the

Southampton/Essex circle), (iii) the contemporary capitalist bour-

geoisie.I have selected nine obviously relevant historical elements or aspects

that contribute in one way or another to the meaning of Shakespeare'sSonnets. Embarrassingly, the larger the unit the less relevant it can be

proved to be to a sympathetic comprehension of the particular artifact

(such as Sonnet 73)-and correspondingly the better the artifact the

more it resists a historical or even a rational interpretation. "Bare

ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang" derives its memorability

entirely

from its detachment from the lines

preceding

it. The self-

pitying poet has begun by comparing his condition to the end of the

annual cycle (just a few yellow leaves left shaking in the cold).

Grammatically, the ruined choirs are simply a metaphoric extension

of the trees' leafless boughs; it was on such boughs-not in the choirs

-that the birds once sang. The line once detached from its linguisticcontext derives its pathos, however, from the birds' exclusion from a

church or chapel that is now a ruin. This is not what the sentence

says; it is what the line says, defying what the earlier lines want it to

say. And whether the choirs' ruins are an after-effect of the dissolu-tion of the monasteries or of capitalist sheep-farming is wholly im-

material.

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



I 22 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

I have used Shakespeare's brilliant line to exemplify the paradox in-

herent in the concept of literary history. The more closely great litera-

ture is examined, the remoter its connections turn out to be with anysort of history. A historical context of one sort or another must al-

ways be presumed, but the "facts"-including those of language, his-

torical or structural-do not seem to affect the literary object as in it-

self it really is, except perhaps in the preliminary stages of comprehen-sion. As the quality of the literature improves, the degree of aesthetic

detachment increases. Its sweet birds inhabit no identifiable ruins;their songs refuse to acknowledge this or that ancestral origin.

CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE,

OXFORD

literary history. non-subject par excellence

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