Good fighter
Anthony Thwaite
In Defence of the Imagination Helen Gard- ner (Oxford University Press £12.50)
Towards the beginning of these 1979-80 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard, Helen Gardner says that she ac- cepted the invitation with the notion that she would 'attempt a restatement of the humanist belief in the value of a study of literature as the core of a liberal education in the "whirl of new doctrines" today'. (The internal quotation is from Gilbert Murray, giving the first of his own Harvard lectures over 40 years earlier). Dame Helen goes on to say that she felt particularly suited to do this because other preoccupa- tions kept her isolated from new literary criticism and new periodical articles bet- ween the middle Sixties and the middle Seventies, so that when she came back into circulation she found herself 'a kind. of literary Rip Van Winkle in a strange, disturbing world'.
What had happened, of course, was the lava-flow and ash-fall from various Franco American eruptions, a phenomenon that blanketed the universities of the West (and
the East, or at least Japan) with a new ter- minology. Literature — or rather, 'the text' — was now a matter of distinguishing bet- ween parole and ecriture; of Deconstruc- tion; of Antithetical Reading; of Struc- turalism; of Stylistics; of Misreading — this last an invention which was not, as one might have supposed, a matter of unwit- tingly getting the thing wrong but of quite deliberately getting the thing wrong, in order to demonstrate the impossibility of ever getting it right.
In fact Dame Helen's OtiU111 liberate, spent pleasurably housebound while she assembled her splendid New Oxford Book of English Verse, was the decade when the new universities in Britain really got going, and it was in their glass and concrete en- virons that the 'interdisciplinary' concept was built in from the beginning. Bizarre marriages were arranged; strange progeny resulted. At some universities, it was said, students ostensibly studying English Literature could negotiate their three years without ever hearing the name, let alone reading the work, of Shakespeare. Instead, one could set one's hand to `de- normalising' a text, or perhaps subjecting it to 'beneficent violation'.
Dame Helen's absence from this scene didn't mean, however, that she was content to take cover in some belle-lettrist redoubt when she re-emerged. She is, and always has been, a good fighter, combining with her genial readability a talent for the polite- ly withering rebuke. Confronted with an American audience, she had no compunc- tion about chiding some of their leading literary panjandrums. Of Harold Bloom: 'I cannot accept his dismal image of the poet in the last three hundred years wrestling in solitude with his precursors, doomed to in- creasing disappointment as the centuries go on'. Of Stanley Fish: 'In taking a long sentence out of Donne, or out of a work of the length of The Anatomy of Melancholy, and asking us to accept it as paradigmatic of the whole and "spectacularly self- consuming", Fish is like a man trying to sell a house by showing a brick'. Of Leon Edel: 'It is one of the dangers of a chronological approach to a writer's works that they are seen less as what they are in themselves than as leading on to something else, as if development and progress were synonyms'.
As for our own Frank Kermode, for all her granting him his 'customary wit and elegance', his interpretation of the Gospel of Mark in The Genesis of Secrecy is given such a going-over by someone who com- bines the strengths of literary acumen, Biblical scholarship, and sprightly common- sense that little is left but a battlefield of demolished riddles and enigmas. It is all done with much good humour, with a raised eyebrow rather than a big stick; but Ker- mode's unnerved acknowledgement of the indeterminacy of literary texts is briskly countered, along with his 'unfollowable world': 'I find this conception as impossible to swallow as it is difficult to pronounce'.
All this is much more than squabbling between academic literary critics. Dame Helen has devoted her life to the reading, teaching, editing and interpretation of literature, with particular attention to Donne, Shakespeare and T. S. Eliot. She believes in what she has done and is doing. But she is chary about over-valuing inter- pretation, or about spreading critical discourse so widely that it fatigues and con- fuses itself with injections from sociology, psychology, linguistics or other 'alien disciplines'. Even works of literary criticism are themselves tools, or references: 'I do not read them for their own sake, and rare- ly re-read them'. What matters is the poems, the plays, the novels, and those who wrote them.
In the last of her six lectures, Dame Helen offered Harvard her 'Apologia Pro Vita Mea'. In it, she gives a delightful and affectionate account of her progress through English Literature, from undergraduate at St Hilda's College, Ox- ford in 1926 to Emeritus Professorship at the same university today. Its pleasures and distinctions will no doubt seem quaint to Deconstructionists and Misreaders. Inter- disciplinarians will look askance at attitudes and activities which, in the birth-pangs of the Oxford English School towards the end of the 19th-century, were sneeringly characterised as 'prattle about Shelley' (though in Dame Helen's case it would be prattle about Donne). Some will dislike the professional elevation by Dame Helen of `one of the greatest human qualities', exer- cised by the passionate and disinterested reader: 'intellectual curiosity, the desire to enlarge his being by learning about something other than himself The message is that we should not always be busily assessing whether this or that work is 'relevant' — that catchword which demands our continually reading the literature of the past wholly as if it had been composed for the expectations of the pre- sent. Or, to use the words Dame Helen bor- rows from Eliot at thd end of her preface: the communication Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
In Defence of the Imagination is a spirited corrective to much current cant. It
is also an often moving testimony to the 'potency of life' to be found in books, by someone to whom Literature and Life are indissolubly one.
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