Lord Blake on the Cadogan diaries Reviews by Patrick Cosgrave, David Harsent, Michael Jaffe and Auberon Waugh
Denis Donoghue on language and power
" Since writing is the spectacular commitment of language, it contains at one and the same time, thanks to a valuable ambiguity, the reality and the appearance of power, what it is, and what it would like to be thought to be: a history of political modes of writing would therefore be the best of social phenomenologies." This passage from Roland Barthe's Writing Degree Zero is quoted in L. C. Knights's new book, the Clark Lectures for 1971, Public Voices.* Barthe's sentence also defines a concern pursued in Thomas R. Edwards's Imagination and Power-t Professor Edwards's inquiry begins with Tamburlaine and Coriolanus, and ends with Robert Lowell marching on the Pentagon, October 1967. Professor Knights is mainly concerned with the language of politics in the seventeenth century; his official texts are Shakespeare, Jonson, Hooker, Milton, Clarendon, Marvell, Dryden, and Halifax, but he begins with hard words on the manifestoes offered by the Labour and the Conservative parties in October 1968, and he ends by reciting a severe 'Lesson for Today.' He will not allow his theme to be buried in history.
Professor Knights has long been preoccupied with the question of literature and politics, the Shakespearian question in the form in which the critic receives it. "What literature continually brings home to us," he says, "is the value of the individual consciousness and the living moment." What politics brings home to us he does not specify, apart from an implication that it makes the threat under which that consciousness lives. But a serious literature, according to Professor Knights, lives with that danger, engages itself with the turbulence of politics; he would not respect a writer who turned aside from that risk. Professor Knights is an Englishman: that is, he takes the political question seriously, thinking of it as one of the great questions of life. The values to which he appeals are those which he finds common to literature and politics: "openness to experience, the willingness not to impose a pre-determined pattern on life's diversity." Of the public writer he says: *Public Voices: Literature and Politics with Special Reference to the Seventeenth Century L. C. Knights (Chatto and Windus £1.75)
filmagination and Power: A Study of Poetry on Public Themes Thomas R, Edwards (Chatto and Windus C3)
"from the schematisations of propaganda and the simplifications of popular history he brings us back to the human and particular, and however complex his material may be he holds it steadily in relation to fundamental values." Professor Knights associates art with the empirical sense of life, he speaks of "the continually renewed effort to see what is actually in front of us." His distrust of formal rhetoric and convention is greater than I would have expected it to be; he suspects that these procedures are congenial to people who have something to hide. He favours "the colloquial style," taking it as "the verbal equivalent of a moral habit of seeing the naked human actuality which, in the world of political and social antagonisms, is so often obscured." Equivalent? I have never seen such equivalence established, though hints and guesses are frequent. Especially, the critic deplores abstraction. " Abstractions muffle the reality of whatever is being discussed." Later, he says that Shakespeare "reminds us of what, in political action, men forget at the peril of giving themselves over to the abstractions that can triumph over life." I think I know what he means, and he has the work of Scrutiny behind him to establish a rhetoric of major words: experience, human, particular, life, see, feel. An examination of Scrutiny's modes of writing would make a valuable chapter in the modern history of England. But I wish Professor Knights would make his case without denouncing, in his remarks on abstraction, one of the fundamental acts of the mind. He maintains that he has Coleridge on his side, but I recall a passage in which Coleridge defends abstraction precisely on the ground that it protects the mind from the despotism of the eye. I cannot blame Professor Knights for liking his politics direct and truthful; or for liking his literature as a homely vernacular, animated by a common sense of life. But I think of a possible politics in which the whole of the mind is fulfilled, and I would give my first preference to such a thing, if we could have it.
Professor Knights has a critical position and he prefers to state it sooner rather than later. Professor Edwards allows his preferences to emerge as they will from time to time, normally by way of generalisation from a particular instance. For him, too, 'open' is a major term of praise. He speaks of "the adjusting of conflicting motives and energies that politics endlessly requires " and of "the open mind with which anyone is well advised to approach the public world." This may be a good prescription for peace, or at least it may help us to be defeated with dignity, but I cannot see that it has much to do with power. If literature is a form of power, its exercise cannot adequately he described as the work of an open mind; there must be more than that. I want to say that literature exerts upon political action the pressure of conscience, it works by interrogation and scruple. If that pressure were to be successful in the end, literature would effect the conversion of energy into intelligence. R. P. Blackmur was a great exponent of this notion, and he came to it from Henry Adams, who thought the question of power and intelligence the crucial question. Professor Edwards has much to say of power, and he is particularly interesting when he shows that power offers its congenial objects as spectacles to be contemplated, perhaps with horror, rather than as actions to be followed. It is often assumed that acts of power come at once under moral question and that such an examination is definitive; forgetting that power gives its acts an irrefutable force, detaching them from moral scrutiny as if they were acts of destiny. Professor Edwards is good, too, on the tendency of literature to conspire with power in this respect. Writing of Marvell's 'Horatian Ode,' he says that the poet brings heroic perspectives to bear upon Cromwell " to make it harder to subject him to the moral irony that seeks out human limitations inside the impressive public performance." There is a sense in which performance, if it is sufficiently powerful, puts the moral question out of account; the act of power retrains intact, and not merely as realpolitih, whatever the moralist says of it; it has moved into a theatre of spectacle, force, and destiny. Think of a small example, that of Rev Ian Paisley. The moral question arises in his case only tb declare itself defeated by a rhetorical presence. Nothing about Mr Paisley is as interesting as the fact that he exists; unless it be the theatrical nature of that existence. His existence transpires not in meaning but in presence, like a superb actor caught in a wretched play. But presence cannot be touched by moral questions, it does not account for itself to anyone.
Both of these books, then, provide notes toward a social phenomenology by attending to the language of political power. I am sure Professor Knights would allow that many of the procedures of the imagination are oblique and devious, otherwise he could hardly approve of fiction and form. But in these lectures he lets that argument take care of itself. Besides, many of his cases have already been made in his earlier books, so the lectures are handled as occasions of summary. Professor Knights believes that a value common to literature and politics is therby certified, and only a villain would undermine it. The political element makes for seriousness, scope, latitude of implication. The literary element makes for the individual truth, truth to life, proved upon the nerve. It is my impression that Professor Knights's lectures do most of their work of setting up a rhetoric of charity and peace and deploying it upon a quarrelsome century. He wants to see how the political literature of his chosen time would appear in the light of a modern sensibility, when he makes his critical preferences at once clear and gracious.
Professor Edwards surveys a bigger slice of time in a bigger book. Since the later eighteenth century, according to his argument, power and imagination have split apart: certainly the poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have found peculiar difficulty in doing justice to political concerns. This case is elaborately documented: the poems studied include Paradise Lost, Hudibras, Colin Clouts Come Home Again, Dryden's The Medal, Pope's Epilogue to the Satires, Gray's Elegy, Goldsmith's Deserted Village, Blake's London, Shelley's The Mash of Anarchy, Wordsworth's political sonnets of 1803, and many other works. Much of Professor Edwards's history is a tale of failure: though at the end, and not a moment too soon if the rhetoric of finale is to hold, he finds Robert Lowell's poems keeping the public lines open. "Lowell manages to avoid setting up the poet's personal concerns and affections in simple opposition to the collective life of a political community. Rather, public issues are taken into the mind and there allowed to represent opposing impulses of mind itself, the impulse to accept and participate in ' exterior ' reality and the impulse to question its value and authenticity." But this conclusion is reached on inadequate evidence: not a full examination of Lowell's poems but a questionable account of The March,' 'Inauguration Day,' and 'July in Washington.' The achievement of these poems seems to me provisional rather than secure, certainly not the kind upon which stirring conclusions may be based. That the poems are set off, in Professor Edwards's account, against a strange assortment of modern poems including Yeats's 'Easter 1916,' Eliot's ' Coriolan,' and Auden's 'September 1, 1939' makes the critical conclusion peculiarly doubtful. Besides, I would want to see the whole question of politics in modern literature examined, regardless of verse and prosody, by reference to such works as Under Western Eyes, Ulysses, The Trial, A Passage to India, The Bostonians, Mother Courage, and Dr Zhivago. Literary evidence is never more than circumstantial, so we need a lot of it before jumping to a conclusion. Professor Edwards's book is helpful on every score, but his most convincing chapters are those in which he deals with poems in which the relation between poetry and politics is a natural relation, problematic only in particular cases and well established in general. He says of Spenser and Marvell that they "praised political power and its achievements not because they felt inferior to it but because they believed strongly enough in art to be able to afford praise." These are the conditions which bring out Professor Edwards's best criticism. Things fall apart with Gray's Elegy and Goldsmith's Deserted Village, and thereafter Professor Edwards is somewhat insecure, writing of insecurity.
But he raises the right questions. The relation of literature to public themes, to what Yeats called "the general purposes of life," is a difficult question. Very few artists, Malraux and Mailer excepted, would claim to set statesmen right, but those who withdraw their imaginations from the public world inevitably cut themselves off from the plenitude of common experience. The best place for a writer's imagination is probably on the margin of things, since his special power is in correction and critique. Hence Burke's law of the imagination: "When in Rome, do as the Greeks." Or, in Blackmur's version: "The true business of literature, as of all intellect, critical or creative, is to remind the powers that be, simple and corrupt as they are, of the turbulence they have to control." I am content with that, if purposes are to be defined, and especially if it is taken along with Blackmur's next sentence, where he says that "there is a disorder vital to the individual which is fatal to society." If in this respect a writer favours the individual and harbours disorder, it is because he knows that a society immune to critique cultivates exorbitance in the guise of order.
Previous page
