Critical about Criticism: Arnold, Frye, White, and McKeon

     Ok, last night I finally finished Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). It took me more than a week, I admit, but I don’t think I have been altogether unproductive. During the same period I initiated a new practice (part of the “forest” initiative) where I read the introduction to a major critical-text every day or so, and immediately draft an annotated bibliography blurb on it. So while finishing the second half of Udolpho, I read and wrote on the introductions to Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and Hayden White’s Metahistory (1973), and finally finished Matthew Arnold’s The Function of Criticism at the Present Time (1864-5) and Michael McKeon’s Origins of the English Novel: 1600-1740 (2002).

              

I had a quick, strong, cocaine-ish response to the critical works, given that they all speak to one another in a continuous, engaged, and contentious conversation with one another.

There is a readily discernible passing of the baton from Arnold to Frye, Frye to White, and White to McKeon. Matthew Arnold’s definition of criticism as the disinterested identification, investigation, and propagation of the best art, with the wider goal of maintaining the free flow of ideas (thus assuring the fertilization of still more great art) is all but echoed by Frye in Anatomy ninety years later. Frye’s real dissent from Arnold is, first, that Arnold doesn’t make good on his own call for ideological and political disinterestedness, given that Arnold’s criticism is ultimately aimed at producing a Christian moral-religious perfection and, second, Arnold’s tendency to think of art/literature as readily hierarchizable in terms of objective, artistic value. Again, Frye points to ethnocentric contradictions in Arnold’s critique of mere “parochial taste” as opposed to real criticism, positing that any hard and fast canonization of some art at the expense of others denotes, to use Arnold's own words against him, a “parochial” taste." Frye’s criticisms of Arnold, of course, grow out of of his own affectionate commitment to Arnold; he only criticizes Arnold in terms of Arnold’s own values, in a way re-fitting Arnold’s conception of criticism for the multi-culturalism of the next half century which will prove inhospitable to Arnold’s signature distinction between high and low culture. I like how Anatomy, best known as Frye’s pre-structural, formalist break with New Criticism, also serves as a bridge for Arnold’s conception of criticism over troubled modernist waters.       

               From there, Frye asserts that literature-art forms itself out of swirling currents of repeated structures and motifs, and that identifying these formations is the major part of criticism. For instance, Western literature repeatedly structures itself in terms of the three aspects of literature (the tragic, comic, and thematic) and five modes (mythic, low mimetic, high mimetic, and ironic). In Metahistory, White contends that Frye’s (and others) generic formalizations apply to and structure the production of history contending that history-production is a literary act and thus that history and historiography are susceptible to literary theory. McKeon, in Origins, takes this one step further, and demonstrates convincingly that history and literary art are historically produced discursive formations that, although now seem mutually exclusive, at one time, at a different point of empiricism’s ever evolving relationship with Western discourse, were practically indistinguishable. McKeon’s text seems to me as directly, if not admittedly, in conversation with White as Frye is with Arnold. White’s lexicon and theoretical tool box – the notions of “dialectic” etc – seem to recur in McKeon in one form or another, which is to say: the very theoretical tissue of both arguments is cut from the same cloth. 

The July Progress Report: Dire.

               My productivity having taken a hit from New York Gay Pride, I just now getting back into a groove, studying on three separate tracks. First, I am reading the entirety of Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740, about fifty pages a day. Second, I am reading a leisurely chapter-or-three/day of Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), which has proved surprisingly pleasurable considering how long-winded it is. And, third, I am playing catch-up, writing blurbish summaries of the essays comprising The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader.

               My plan the past few days was to start studying in a way similar to that of BarBri students preparing for the Bar Exam, alternating studying at both the macro- and micro- registers. So, I would attack the “forest” by setting up an expansive outline for myself that covers pretty much all of the material I have on my lists (probably relying on a Norton and a History of English Lit I have lying around), so as to give me a sense of the connections, limits, continuities, and textures that will make up my exam as a whole. And then work on the individual “trees” by continuing my relatively close reading of Radcliffe and McKeon, filling in the former with my notes on the latter as I deem appropriate. This alternating between the forest and its trees, would continually contextualize whatever close reads I am doing, close reads that I might otherwise lose without an overarching structure to organize them. It’s easier to learn about Wordsworth when you read him already knowing (basically) how he relates to Coleridge, Romanticism etc.    In fact, it might be easier to learn about Wordsworth if I get myself a clear understanding of what Romanticism is beforehand. Much to my private embarrassment, studying the late Eighteenth century and early Nineteenth century English literature all on my own is seriously exposing the ignorances consequent of my rigidly Victorian literary predilections. Unfortunately, time and energy constraints (laziness?) have prevented my initiating the macro-level of my studying. Maybe I need to put down one of the three texts I am currently juggling to make that happen?  

The First Chapter of Anne Radcliffe's THE MYSTERIES OF UDOLPHO (1794), Genre, and Eco-Criticism

In the incredibly informative introduction to the World’s Classics Edition of Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Bonamy Dobree cites the novel's popularity as a product of its blending of three major genres, that of horror, sentiment, and picturesque. And Bonamy isn’t kidding; the first chapter of Radcliffe’s novel is all about the Aubert family’s sensitivity to each other and their remote natural surroundings. Aubert listens to the music of the nightingale, takes in the scents of the fresh water and plant life, and basks in the Burkean sublimity of the vast Pyrenees mountains. Emily starts crying over a sunrise. It's exhausting to read, really. I prefer my sentiment a little more dead, thank you. 

Of course, Udolpho is best known as the high water mark of Gothic literature. But after reading just the first chapter, the other generic activity Bonamy points out are just as strongly felt. And the specific mix of sentiment and nature loving, I think, results in something akin to a proto-eco-critical stance. Take, for instance, how St. Aubert reacts (sentimentally, of course) when his worldly, materialistic brother-in-law (and obvious foil), M. Quesnel, wants to do some gardening on Aubert’s ancestral property back home . . .     

'The ground about the chateau is encumbered with trees; I mean to cut some of them down.' 'Cut down the trees too!' said St. Aubert. 'Certainly.  Why should I not? they interrupt my prospects.  There is
a chesnut which spreads its branches before the whole south side of
the chateau, and which is so ancient that they tell me the hollow of
its trunk will hold a dozen men.  Your enthusiasm will scarcely
contend that there can be either use, or beauty, in such a sapless
old tree as this.' 'Good God!' exclaimed St. Aubert, 'you surely will not destroy that
noble chesnut, which has flourished for centuries, the glory of the
estate!  It was in its maturity when the present mansion was built.
How often, in my youth, have I climbed among its broad branches, and
sat embowered amidst a world of leaves, while the heavy shower has
pattered above, and not a rain drop reached me!  How often I have sat
with a book in my hand, sometimes reading, and sometimes looking out
between the branches upon the wide landscape, and the setting sun,
till twilight came, and brought the birds home to their little nests
among the leaves!  How often--but pardon me,' added St. Aubert,
recollecting that he was speaking to a man who could neither
comprehend, nor allow his feelings, 'I am talking of times and
feelings as old-fashioned as the taste that would spare that
venerable tree.'

The tree as “venerable” is laced with human virtue and St. Aubert is struck with sympathy or “feeling” for its pain and fate. Human consciousness and the natural world, in terms of Radcliffe’s idea of sentiment, are co-penetrative, which sounds a lot like eco-criticism, right? Whatever the case, Quesnel's reasoning that the venerable trees Aubert is so hot for "interrupt . . . [his] . . . prospects", denotes a proto-Marxist impulse to commodify the natural world that stands in opposition to Aubert's proto-eco-critical sentimento-preservationism. (#portmanteaucrazy)   

Anthony Trollope was HEAVILY Influenced by William Thackery, and I Can't Blame Him.

Super, R.H. Trollope’s “Vanity Fair.” The Journal of Narrative Technique. 9:1 (Winter, 1979): 1-20.

            In this mini-essay, “Super!” delineates the strong influence of William M. Thackery on Anthony Trollope. Super marks concisely the historico-textual intersection of Thackery and Trollope at the 1847 publication of Thackery’s Vanity Fair and Trollope’s completing his first novel and beginning his next, The Warden, immediately after. From the writing of The Warden on, Super says, Trollope is indelibly marked with Thackery-envy, becoming from that point a “Thackeryan novelist.”

I am interested in the notion that Thackery is not merely a historical influence on Trollope, one safely separated from Trollope by a generation or two. Thackery and Trollope were practically contemporaries.

Also interesting: the influences of Thackery evident in Trollope, the continuities that run between the two authors, are by no means an august tradition. The ideas, motifs, and textual engagements Trollope makes with Thackery are registered as shared artistic defects by the (roughly current) critics. What did this awful influence look like? I made a list.

(1)    Trollope takes up Thackerey’s idea of Vanity Fair as a “A Novel without a Hero” in Claverings.

(2)   Trollope’s novels, like Thackerey’s, all take place in a shared fictional universe, so that characters from one novel can show up or be mentioned in another.

a.       Vanity Fair’s Colonel Dobbin shows up as a guest of Colonel Newcome in The Newcomes, for instance. 

b.       The Saturday Review hated on this extended-universe-shit, saying that it was a sure fire way to bore readers. “If the present fashion continues, and the heroes of one novel reappear so constantly in the next, readers will begin to hope that funerals, and not marriages, may in future be made the finale in which all romances terminate.” (13)

c.       The Saturday Review, of course, is wrong; the surprise recognition of a known character from an earlier novel unexpectedly appearing in a later novel produces an excitement of recognition in the reader that is particularly pleasurable. It rewards close reading. And this pleasure doubles on itself with a kind of uncanniness, when the reader realizes that the novel they have in their hands, which they thought was a something completely new and alien, is in effect connected to and at one with a previously known world that turned out to be bigger and more complex than they imagined. Finding and mapping these connections, re-familiarizing oneself with the bigger and more intricate dimensions of the fictional universe they only thought they knew is a higher level of textual pleasure I usually only associate with sci-fi and comic book genres.

(3)     Thackerey and Trollope both integrated real life locations and businesses in their novels, as well as some of the “too-ridiculous-to-be-made up” names of real life people and personalities. 

(4)   Thackery and Trollope both parody giants of literature.

a.       Vanity Fair ch. vi: Thackery satirizes contemporary novelists.

b.      The Warden: Trollope parodies Carlyle and Dickens as “Dr. Pessimist Anticant” and “Mr. Popular Sentiment.”

(5)   Extending the concept of the “integrated universe” from (2), Trollope would include names from Thackery works in his novels.

a.       Thackery uses a pseudonym of his friend Matthew James Higgins, “Jacob Omnium,” for a character in Vanity Fair ch. xxii, which Trollope, in turn, picks up for the name of a Duke (Duke of Omnium).

                                                                          i.      In this case, the real life integration is passed on from Thackery to Trollope via Trollope’s textual integration. WHOA!

This is all not to say that Trollope is a completely passive in his reception of Thackereyan influence. Super points out that, although Trollope originally based his Lady Eustace on Thackery’s Becky Sharpe, he later rejects their similarity, almost ex post facto, claiming that Eustace would have been designed as she was had he never read of Sharpe. In a Bloomian fashion, here, Trollope receives Thackeryean influence, creates with it, and then rejects it so as to claim his production, Lady Eustace, as more fully his own, thereby overcoming and dominating the source of his own artistic power. Interestingly, Super endorses and ratifies Trollope’s Bloomian revolt on Thackery, judging that although Trollope was considered by his contemporaries as a “slightly inferior version of Thackery” that, in fact, Trollope’s Eustace was a superior – “more human” – construction than Thackery’s Sharpe. 

Trollope's "It Is What It Is" View of Capitalism in THE WAY WE LIVE NOW.

“When Melmotte’s affairs were ultimately wound up there was found to be nearly enough property to satisfy all his proved liabilities. Very many men started up with huge claims, asserting that they had been robbed, and in the confusion it was hard to ascertain who had been robbed, or who had simply been unsuccessful in their attempts to rob others.”

Trollope’s satire here is well taken. In a speculation filled, litigious capitalist society, the righting of large scale unjust enrichment is the occasion for a greater number of smaller unjust enrichments making economic justice an ever receding horizon.

  When Mr. Brehgert, the honest Jew, gets his investment capital back out of the Melmotte debacle, he hands his money over to a lawyer so as to better manage and protect the fortune his too trusting business sense almost lost. 

 “I shall just make Squercum [an unscrupulous but skilled lawyer] allow me so much a month, and I shall have all the bills and that kind of thing sent to him, and he will do everything, and pull me up if I’m getting wrong. I like Squercum.”
            “Won’t he rob you, old fellow?” suggested Nidderdale.            “Of course he will; - but he won’t let any one else do it. One has to be plucked, but it’s everything to have it done on a system. If he’ll only let me have ten shillings out of every sovereign I think I can get along.” (760)

            This exchange sounds like an especially trenchant “investment joke” conveying the endemic and systematic, but ultimately workable corruption of the new capitalist world order. Berghert can only protect his money from crooks by hiring one to steal from him. Those who recognize how much they have to gain by allowing a minimum of illegality – even when it cuts into their profits – are the ones who will thrive in the new world order. What I like about this scene is that it refuses the notion that Melmotte’s scam-capitalism is somehow expunged from the world of the novel once his Ponzi scheme fails. Melmotte is not the criminal economic aberration that, once excluded, restores the otherwise smooth running and just system of exchange. Quite the contrary, Melmotte’s dishonest speculation, his preying on the investors that trust him, is still the natural order of the novel’s economic universe if to a smaller, more manageable degree. Melmotte may be dead, but Brehgert and Nidderdale are still living in a world made in Melmotte’s image. Trollope isn’t jazzed about this new world order. But he seems to recognize that it is one in which we can live happily once, like Brehgert, we learn the rules; thus, Trollope accepts capitalism with a sighing eye roll.    

I attempt to read Dickens' The Pickwick Papers (1836), this is what happens.

As you might have noticed, I have yet to post anything on anything read recently towards my major historical field, The Long Nineteenth Century of Britain. This is because I am currently reading The Pickwick Papers (1836) on audio book, and I hate Dickens.

As a Victorianist, this is a hard thing for me to say, or – rather – it is a career threatening thing to say, given C.D. is so major to the field. However, I think the reasons I don’t like reading his work, especially the early Dickens, has a lot to do with why he is so important. For one, as Raymond Williams observes in The Country and The City, Dickens is one of the first to capture the city as a heterogeneous whole; Dickens effectively communicates the city as a sense-deluge of different voices, textures, sounds, and lights that somehow hang together as one thing. I find the orchestra of different voices confusing and miasmic as a whole, and when I focus on any one – like I did reading Oliver Twist – I find them limp, stereotypical, and un-compelling. Though The Pickwick Papers is less urban than, say, Oliver Twist or A Tale of Two Cities (duh), it takes place in small towns, manor houses, and farms as much as in London proper, the plotless-ness of the serial-made-into-Dickens’-first-novel is dizzying to read and impossible for me to invest in. It’s value, however, as an artifact of the history of the novel (also perhaps the graphic novel), and – as Eve Sofosky Sedgwick points out – a key example of a pre-Gothic homosocial milieu unmolested by homophobia – I begrudgingly accept.

            Dickens was twenty four when he got the commission to write the The Pickwick Papers. He was still writing under the pen name, Boz, and had hitherto written slice-of-life-in-London-pieces. The commission that would become Pickwick was to write copy for sporting illustrations by illustrator Robert Seymour, to create what was then called “a picture novel.” Long story short: Dickens flipped the switch on Seymour, took over the book and wrote whatever he wanted, regardless of what was going on in Seymour’s illustrations. The sportsmen of the pictures, in Dickens’ text, became a society of pseudo-intellectuals who follow the teachings/meanderings of their most pre-eminent member, Samuel Pickwick. The picaresque style adventures of the fraternity of buffoonish eccentrics, an effective lampooning of bourgeiose masculinity, caught on with readers; Dickens’ character, Sam Weller, especially, became something of a publishing sensation. Seymour killed himself, and other illustrators were hired, much like in contemporary comic book publishing (not using “The Marvel Method”), to illustrate Dickens’ story.

            The Pickwick Papers is all about an anxiety, or mild discomfort with male homosociality. It is very much a whimsical double of the very dark, very serious Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), whose plot is really about the corruptive – sexual, moral, physical, and chemical - potential of professional males bonding with one another rather than wives and children. Other than the tone – the two novels differ in class focus, Stevenson’s novel seems to be about working, professional men (doctors and lawyers) while the members of the Pickwick club seem more or less highborn. The attitude toward homosociality in the two novels differs as well. In Dr. Jekyll the male characters are seemingly innervated by a secret relationship that, although never stated or expressed, manifests in the degeneration of their clique of professional males. In Pickwick, the homosocial bonds are very much above board, only border line erotic, and – as Sedgwick notes – don’t incite any homophobic panic. Instead of physical and psychological break down, the homosociality results in a lot of slapstick buffoonery.