Chapter 1
The Alice
Fallacy; or,
Only God Can Make a Tree.
A Dialogue of Pleasure and Instruction
Did you ever read one of
her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned you? I sometimes (often have, many times)
have - A something overtakes the Mind -
Emily
Dickinson, "Prose Fragment" 30
[SCENE. The Faculty Club of a university. Instruction enters looking cast down,
puts his papers on the bar and throws himself into a chair next to Pleasure,
who is reading. Pleasure looks up
from her book and smiles with cool amusement at her friend. Across the room is a bar at which two
figures stand very erectly. They resemble waiters; they are Footnote and
Printer's Devil, respectively. A
Brechtian sign stands over the bar and reads in large letters: INTERSPACE.]
INSTRUCTION. I need a drink. (Calling toward the bar.) Two vodkas, please.
[Footnote and Printer's
Devil bring the drinks and return to their places.]
PLEASURE. Another enjoyable and informative
faculty meeting?
INSTRUCTION. "Pleasure and Instruction" --
isn't that our business?
Isn't it what poetry's supposed to deliver?
PLEASURE. We schoolmasters keep saying so, but
who believes us? We're
teachers after all, not players.
INSTRUCTION. How true. A little teaching is a dangerous thing. A lot is a disaster. Take me to the river. Drop me in the water.
PLEASURE. As bad as that, hm?
INSTRUCTION. Same as it ever was -- a kind of moral
sickness unto death, one more Great Awakening to righteousness and virtue.
PLEASURE. And what an odd symmetry at the moral
extremes! Political or religious
correctness, left or right, either will do. What is this need for a Codex Prohibitorum ? We've got to get over it.
INSTRUCTION. How?
PLEASURE. We could go back to 1966, back to Susan
Sontag. Against Interpretation.
INSTRUCTION. Her "erotics of reading", is
that what you mean?
PLEASURE. One could do worse, one could have more
Legions of Decency. Yes, an
erotics of reading.
I'll call
the work "Longinus o'er a bottle,"
Or, Every
[Critic] his own Aristotle.
(Byron,
Don Juan
And we won't neglect
instruction either.
INSTRUCTION. That's thoughtful.
PLEASURE. We'll have lots of commandments and
"fallacies" and that sort of thing.
[INTERSPACE
1]
PRINTER'S DEVIL. What's
this about fallacies and commandments?
Is Pleasure serious? She
seems to be contradicting herself.
FOOTNOTE. Maybe this is what it means to be
beyond the pleasure principle. Not
that Pleasure has much to do with principles. I guess she's just being silly. She's remembering that epidemic of 50 years ago when
professors and critics started cranking out all kinds of literary
"fallacies" as they called them -- the intentional, the affective,
the fallacy of imitative form. And
there were "primers of modern heresy" and "defenses of
reason" and all that sort of thing.
PLEASURE
(resuming). It'll begin with a
commandment forbidding students (and anybody else) to talk about ideas in
literature until they show they can sight-read fifty lines of verse without
sending everyone howling from the room.
I mean just think about
what our classes have turned into!
The "teacher" comes in and talks about (and about and about)
some wonderful poem, say The Rape of the Lock or "Goblin
Market". He (or she) burrows
into "the text" and comes away with all those ideas and meanings it's
been concealing from us -- meanings it either contains (new critically) or locates
(with cultural studiousness).
Or the teacher doesn't
teach, he (or she) comes in and starts a ("Socratic")
"discussion" by proposing some question, or by directing the class to
talk about some passage or other that "problematizes" what we might
think about the poem's "meaning". Then the class is encouraged to talk about it and we get a
free-wheeling "discussion" of what the poem means, which is to say
what everybody is thinking it means or it might mean. And the livelier the discussion the better the class seems
to be, and when it's over everybody once again realizes how complex and rich
poetry is, and how clever or how serious one has to be to read it.
About seven years ago
the wickedness of all this suddenly "rose from [my] mind's abyss, like an
unfather'd vapour" -- as the poet once said. We were in fact discussing that very poet, Wordsworth, and
that very passage (Prelude
). The class was talking in
such animated ways about what it might mean that I began to feel they were
losing hold of the poem's words as they raised up and tracked through great
thickets of ideas. So I called a
halt and asked a bright student to help clear the air. "George, read the passage for the
class".
It was appalling. He stumbled across that splendid set of
lines like "one that hath been stunn'd/ And is of sense forlorn" --
wrecking the phonemes, the phrasings, the entire play of the metrical scheme in
its unfolding grammatical order.
He couldn't read the poem.
He could "read off" the poem, and generate all sorts of
ideas. But the oral delivery? It was a total crack-up.
Quel giorno piu non
vi spiegammo avante. We just went around the class and everybody
took turns reading or trying to read.
It was an amusingly painful experience.
For the rest of that
term we spent much of our classtime simply reading and rereading the printed
texts, and talking about these different performances. Everybody got better at reading, and
not just because they were forced to practice recitation. They began deliberately to look at the
words, paying attention to their parts as well as to the many kinds of physical
relations that different passages of poetry built between the words.
An erotics of
reading. Or call it interpretation
through the performance of language -- something like the way musicians
interpret a piece of music by rendering the score. I'm bringing it
into all my classes. The
rule is that no one will raise questions of meaning unless he or she is
prepared to perform the work. And
if we're not ready for that, we spend our time reciting until we are ready.
INSTRUCTION. I like it. It makes me think of Blake's program for cleansing the doors
of perception:
For man has
clos'd himself up till he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.
(Blake,
The Marriage of Heaven and Hell plate )
That's to say, through
embrained organs of attention and awareness. Recitation as a route back to the body in the mind, back
through "the chief inlets of soul in this age", "the
senses".
PLEASURE. Sometimes I think it's best to work
from poems that aspire to the condition of music -- poems that work to collapse
the distinction between the physique of their language and the content of their
ideas: poems committed to what Shelley called "Intellectual
Beauty". Poems like Shelley's
own, "Which walk upon the sea, and chant melodiously":
Life of
Life! thy lips enkindle
With their love the breath between
them;
And thy
smiles before they dwindle
Make the cold air fire; then screen
them
In those
looks, where whoso gazes
Faints,
entangled in their mazes.
Child of
Light! thy limbs are burning
Through the vest which seems to hide
them;
As the
radiant lines of morning
Through the clouds ere they divide
them;
And this
atmosphere divinest
Shrouds thee
wheresoe'er thou shinest.
(Shelley,
Prometheus Unbound )
That's on Mondays,
Wednesdays, and Fridays. On
Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays I think we're better off reading Pope or
Byron than Shelley or Christina Rossetti -- poems where the thought seems so
clear we can easily neglect its articulate energies:
Ovid's a
rake, as half his verses show him,
Anacreon's morals are a still worse
sample,
Catullus
scarcely has a decent poem,
I don't think Sappho's Ode a good
example,
Although
Longinus tells us there is no hymn
Where the sublime soars forth on wings
more ample;
But Virgil's
songs are pure, except that horrid one
Beginning
with "Formosum Pastor Corydon".
(Don Juan
I st. 42)
The schools are far too
preoccupied with what young people should or shouldn't be thinking. Let's get back to the words, to the
language -- to the bodies of our thinking. I'm "against interpretation", I'm for
recitation. And for
memorizing. I want my students to
memorize and recite. If they can
do those things well, it's enough for me.
For the time being at any rate.
INSTRUCTION. It's not
enough, though I admit it makes a good start. It's not even erotic enough. Your "erotics of reading"
stays too close to the shore of the physical senses. It makes for a charming and delicious ride, I grant you, but
it won't satisfy an adult, a full-fledged eroticism. We want more from our reading experiences. Let's head out to sea.
Go back to the classroom
and think about it again. The
worst that goes on there isn't what you're complaining about. The worst is the hypocrisy of it, the
pretense to freedom of thought. Everybody
knows that the thinking in these "discussions" is controlled by the
agenda -- maybe even the ideology -- of the teachers. The best one can hope for is that the agenda be made
explicit -- so the students understand from the start that they're being taught
to think in certain ways.
And the longest lesson
of all is the old Platonic one --that poetry will be justified when it becomes
useful to society. If it occurs to
someone that "society" always seems to have very different opinions
about itself, then what? Well, you
"teach the conflicts".[1] But nothing has really changed,
then, has it? We keep trying to
make teaching and literature socially productive -- the usual "war of the
many with one". And so
students keep turning into what their teachers have become --
[INTERSPACE
2]
PRINTER'S DEVIL. I don't get it. If you don't teach an agenda and you
don't "teach the conflicts" of the different agendas, what's left to
teach?
FOOTNOTE (rummaging
around in some papers). These are
Instruction's classnotes and syllabi.
What a mess! It's a miracle
if anybody learned anything from him. Instruction's all over the place, he can't even make
up a common syllabus. There are no
conflicts to "teach", no one's even reading the same books. There's just difference, going this way
and going that.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. Maybe Instruction wants to stop
teaching altogether.
FOOTNOTE. Maybe he should stop. He can't be doing a very good job.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. I think his classes are very popular.
FOOTNOTE. Right. And so students keep turning into what their teachers have
become.
INSTRUCTION (resuming).
. . .moralists and utilitarians.
You were awakened one
day when you realized how many of your students, how many of their teachers,
couldn't read. Well here's
the story of my awakening.
I was teaching Keats's
"Ode on a Grecian Urn".
I was running a socratic discussion (so-called) and we were all having a
splendid time. We were gradually unfolding
the poem's delicate ironies, and I was leading them as well into the brave
world of new historicist revelation.
[VIRTUAL REALITY
appears. This is the
audience. Jennifer, Christopher,
Margaret, and Geoffrey are seated toward the front. Instruction turns and begins speaking, as if we were talking
to his class.]
"And notice the
word `legend'; I mean in the line: `What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy
shape'. Does the poem answer that
question? Christopher, what do you
think about that?"
"Well Sir, I'm not
sure. I hadn't really thought about it."
"What is a
`leaf-fringed legend' anyhow, do you think? Margaret, can you tell us?"
"It's a strange
phrase, Sir. To me a legend is a
kind of fabulous but traditional story that people tell and retell. So I guess Keats is thinking back
through the phrase `sylvan historian', as if to say that the Grecian Urn
retells for us an old story or set of stories."
"Like the stories
implied by the images on the urn, the images Keats redescribes for us in his
poem?"
"Right."
"Yes, I think so
too. But do you know about any
other meanings for the word `legend'?
[Long Silence]
"Geoffrey, how
about you? Do you know any other
meanings?"
"Uh, I can't think
of any."
"Do you want to say
something, Jennifer?"
"Well, when we were
studying Shelley I read a passage I loved so much I copied it out. It's short,
just a couple of lines:
Like a
child's legend on the tideless sand
Which the
first foam erases half, and half
Leaves
legible.
(Shelley,
Now in that passage
`legend' means something like `inscription', doesn't it? And I think I'm right in remembering
that people talk about `legends' on coins and graves and things."
"Yes, that's
exactly right. But does that
meaning have anything to do with this poem?
[Long Silence]
"Well, what about
the famous conclusion to the ode?
`Beauty is
Truth, Truth Beauty. That is all
Ye know on
earth, and all ye need to know.'
Notice it's in quotation
marks."
"You said yesterday
that there are different possible placements for those quotation marks."
"Right, Chris. But what does that have to do with the
problem we're talking about now?"
[Silence]
"Well, let's
bracket out the question of the alternative punctuations of the passage, for
the moment anyhow. Let's just
think about the fact that some part of the text is being set off here as if it
were a quotation."
"Like an
inscription or something?"
"Exactly,
Chris. Does that make sense for
the poem?"
"Well, do you mean
that we're supposed to think of the quotation as the `legend' mentioned
earlier?"
"What do you
think?
[INTERSPACE
3]
PRINTER'S DEVIL. How I hate that classic classroom
move! That wide-eyed teacher's
hypocrisy, talking as if he wanted his students to think for themselves. He's got his lively "discussion"
in good train and he knows how to keep it going where it's supposed to go.
FOOTNOTE (checking
through a pile of papers). I don't
find any documentary evidence of that at all. What makes you think he's manipulating his class? Margaret's free to say what she
wants. He can't know what she's
going to say.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. He
knows the class is trying to figure out a good answer, the best
answer. He knows the class thinks
he knows what that is, or knows at any rate the range of the best answers
(ahead of time), or knows at any rate how to tell if an answer is a good one or
not. So they're thinking on his
terms and grounds.
FOOTNOTE. The discussion does run along in pretty
predictable ways.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. It can't be a good sign that
Instruction comes in with his telling questions at crucial points.
FOOTNOTE. But isn't he supposed to know the
answers?
PRINTER'S DEVIL. What answers? Even Instruction knows you don't read poetry to get
answers. That's the whole point
of his coy question. He's
pretending they're having a conversation and that it's free and open. He's pretending he isn't what he
clearly is, a pompous know-it-all.
So he asks his contemptible leading question -- "What you you
think?"
INSTRUCTION
(resuming). -- Margaret, you want
to say something?"
"Suddenly it came
to me. I mean, what is a
Grecian Urn? It's like one of those
amphora I saw when I was visiting the Getty Museum with my parents. And I remember some of them had inscriptions
on them, and these inscriptions sometimes circled the neck of the urn, and
often they would be decorated with ornamental leaves and things like
that."
"Right."
"And so I think I
know the answer to your earlier question, about whether the poem has an answer
to its question about the `leaf-fringed legend'. The answer is `Yes', -- in fact, the
answer is literally that `inscription' given to us as the poem's sententious
conclusion about truth and beauty.
It's wonderful."
We were all quite
pleased with ourselves during this "discussion", as you may
imagine. In fact, so far as I was
concerned all we had left to do was mop up the details. That's when it happened.
"Well, does anyone
have any other questions?"
[Pause]
"Sir, what's an
"Attic shape"?
"Does anybody want
to answer that question for Christopher?
Geoffrey?"
"Well here it must
be some kind of ghostlike thing, some old piece of memorabilia or
whatever?"
[I smiling] "Why do
you say that? I don't really
understand."
"It's an attic
shape, it's some kind of thing from an attic. I mean, it goes back to that line we began with: `What
leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape'. Keats is imagining some kind of mouldy apparition whose
features aren't too clear -- something slightly ghoulish from the dead past,
with brede
Of marble
men and maidens overwrought.
I love those lines. This ghost is Keats's cobwebbed version
of Mozart's stone guest, or Roger Bacon's Brazen Head, something like
that. I love the puns on
"brede" and "overwrought". Keats's `Attic shape' is a pretty lively stone guest after
all. And when Keats lets the ghost
speak at the end -- well, it's a kick!
He must have loved making that final comic move, sending the whole thing
up and over the top at the end."
[I smiling more
deeply] "But Geoffrey,
`Attic' here doesn't mean what you're thinking. Keats's word means something like
`classical', `Attic' refers to Attica, in Greece.
"Oh. I thought Keats was thinking of an
attic, like at the top of a house, under the roof."
"I know."
[Smiling in an understanding way]
"Well it made sense
that way to me. I mean, the poem
is about old legends and haunting
shapes. And where would you find
an urn like the one in the poem?
In a museum maybe, or buried somewhere, or left forgotten in some
storeroom or attic. They didn't
have garages in Keats's day, did they Sir?"
"No Geoffrey, they
didn't. And while I do see the way
you're thinking about the poem, it's just not possible. Keats is using the word in a specific
way, it means `classical'. Look at
the text. Keats capitalizes the
word to emphasize its particular reference to `Attica' and ancient Greek
civilzation."
"Sir, couldn't it
mean what Geoffrey says? I mean
historically speaking."
"Well, Jennifer,
yes it could -- that is, technically. `Attic' had both of those meanings, as
well as some others, when Keats wrote his poem."
"Then what's wrong
with Geoffrey's reading? It makes
sense in the poem. And it even
adds a whole new way of thinking about it. I like what it does to the poem, it makes it richer,
wilder. Or it helps to explain
that peculiar way Keats loads and even overloads his poems with figural
effects:
`to set
budding more,
And still
more, later flowers for the bees'
Here the text is
"overwrought" not only because of that strange pun (and the equally
strange one on "brede").
The word "overwrought" works so well exactly because, in one
sense, it appears to make so little sense in this poem. The style of the verse is cool and
controlled. If I imagine the
"bold lover" "overwrought" with his passion, the poem toys
easily with this thought. It wants
to play a game of passion `far above' `breathing human passion'. So it constructs images made not only
of sounds (`Attic'/`attitude'; `ear'/`endeared'), but of `unheard' sounds and
melodies. In this world the lover
appears as it were unimaginably `overwrought', a verbal figure everywhere
conjured in unexpected forms and antitheses (`Cold Pastoral').
"Look at that
completely arbitrary juxtaposition of "Attic" and
"attitude". Sounds pull
the words together, but their horizons of meaning never quite connect. And the verse doesn't stay to let the
reader stabilize their surprising relations. Even stranger verbal creatures immediately appear (`brede',
`overwrought'). The effect is
finally uncanny, as if one had entered a purely magical space -- a vitalist and
metamorphic world. It's all apples
and oranges. It's a garden that
`breeding flowers, will never breed the same'. In Keats's gardens words miseginate (`brede'). Their relations and their offspring
seem a kind of `wild surmise' of a new world -- a world far more wondrous than
the America that set Keats voyaging in his sonnet on Chapman's Homer."
"Well that's a
remarkable set of imaginations, Jennifer.
And I'm more than a little surprised that Geoffrey's mistake about the
meaning of the word `Attic' should have triggered those thoughts. Because so
much of what you say makes sense for anyone wanting to read Keats's
poetry. I don't know what to make
of that. All I do know is
that Geoffrey's meaning for `Attic' is out of the question.
[INTERSPACE
4]
PRINTER'S DEVIL. So much for our instructor's pretense
of catholicity. What his talking
head can't do, at any rate, is stop making sense. That's out of the question.
INSTRUCTION
(resuming). Keats clearly intended
it to mean `classical'. [Smiling
at a happy thought] After all, if
we go along with Geoffrey we'll have to set up the Humpty Dumpty School of
Criticism."
[Puzzled laughter]
"What's that, Sir?"
"Don't you remember
Alice in Wonderland? When
Humpty Dumpty tries to assign purely arbitrary meanings to certain words, Alice
challenges him about `whether you can make words mean so many different
things'?"
"But didn't Humpty
Dumpty have an answer? Didn't he
reply: `The question is. . .who is to be master-- that's all.' It seems to me that Lewis Carroll
didn't take a position on the problem.
Humpty Dumpty isn't talking foolishness. So why can't we go with Geoffrey's reading?"
"Well of course
poetry wants to multiply meanings, but only within the limits that are
permitted by the poem.
[INTERSPACE
5]
FOOTNOTE. I wonder what he means by "the
limits of the poem"?
PRINTER'S DEVIL. Not much. He's forgotten to think about that thought, hasn't he? He throws it out, as if it were
self-transparent. What
"limits", what "poem"? It's not as if Keats or anyone else had the authority to
declare what they or it might be.
When Blake and Shelley decided it would be a good idea to take Satan as
the hero of Paradise Lost, they exploded those limits for good. But there never were any such
limits. That's what upset Plato
about poetry in the first place.
That's why he wanted to throw the poets out.
FOOTNOTE. It's interesting that Instruction talks
as if the poem were a person, as if it could give and take permissions. As if it laid down a law that it
comprehended, or maybe embodied.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. He talks as if he were Jesus Christ
himself, "like one having authority". He talks, he always talks, when he should be paying
attention to the text of the Ode and to what his students are saying. He should be listening within the
limits that are permitted by the poem.
INSTRUCTION (resuming). And here `Attic' in Geoffrey's meaning
just doesn't make sense."
"Yes it does. It made sense to Geoffrey. And when he explained it, it made sense
to me too. And it made more sense
of the poem, and it made sense for Keats's poetry in general."
"It made nonsense
of the poem! It's a
travesty."
"Well then maybe
nonsense is sometimes more sense.
I thought poetry was supposed to open up doors of
perception. Isn't that what you're
always telling us, Sir? This
reading opens up the poem in lots of new and interesting ways."
[Silence from the front
of the room]
"She's right, Sir,
it's as if Keats were playing with his subject, making sure it didn't kill
itself with its own seriousness and classicism."
"Well, . . .
."
"Actually, I like
that reference Jennifer made to Keats's sonnet on Chapman's Homer. It made me think again about the
mistake Keats made -- confusing Cortez and Balboa. The mistake turns out to be a happy one -- what's that
phrase you like to use, Sir? -- a kind of `felix culpa'. I like Keats a lot more than Wordsworth
and Byron just because his poems are so unguarded, so -- full of
surprises. You walk into a Keats
poem and suddenly all things become possible. But Wordsworth seems so worried about losses and disruptions
that he can't help making sure everything is organized. And Byron's deliberateness is
positively fanatical. That's why
his great hero is Lucifer, immortalized in his dark, unchanging splendour. Keats is always so fresh."
[As Jennifer is about to
speak] "My goodness how late it's gotten! The period will be over in five minutes so why don't we stop
now. I'm sure we can take up these
subjects another time. -- Next class, remember, we move on to Shelley. Read his `Defence of Poetry' and
Peacock's `Four Ages of Poetry'. Make sure you check the notes in our text. These essays are difficult to
understand."
"But Sir, what do
you think -- I mean about what we've just been saying?"
"Well, it's very
interesting. I'll have to think
more about it."
[VIRTUAL REALITY
recedes; Instruction resumes his conversation with Pleasure.]
PLEASURE. A pretty embarrassing experience.
INSTRUCTION. I was mortified. I still am. The only thing that kept me going for the next few days was
remembering Whitman: "He most honors my style who learns under it to
destroy the teacher." (Song of Myself, ) And Jesus:
"He who would save his life must lose it."
PLEASURE. So what did you do?
INSTRUCTION. I started trying to imagine new kinds
of critical thinking. Remember
Emily Dickinson's suggestion about reading poems backwards? It seemed like a good place to
start. So I began reciting poems
in reverse -- just the words, just pronouncing the texts."
PLEASURE. An excellent thought.
INSTRUCTION. And then I started other kinds of
exercises. I'd go to famous
passages randomly. Say, Macbeth:
"Be innocent of the
knowledge, dearest chuck,
Till thou applaud the
deed."
(Macbeth )
Or Wordsworth (again):
"To me the meanest
flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often
lie to deep for tears."
(³Ode.
Intimations of Immortality², )
Then I'd propose an
arbitrary task -- say, "Give a homoerotic reading of that text." The results were surprising -- truly
the Humpty Dumpty School of Criticism.
The Macbeth passage turned out to be a wonderful Shakespearean
joke, a Brechtian moment when the actors slyly reveal that Lady Macbeth is
being played by a boy. And the
"Intimations Ode" passage!
It will never be the same for me, indeed the whole poem is
"changed, changed utterly".
PLEASURE. By giving the Ode a kind of Platonic
blow.
INSTRUCTION. Well that's the least of it,
really. Let's say we just keep it
from turning into an Ode to Duty.
These kinds of critical moves free poetry from its obligations to the
state and the state's representatives, the teachers: everyone who is presumed
to know. Truly now one can begin
to imagine "voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone" -- or
not alone. With others. Like all games, such readings work best
when people play at them together.
And then after I worked
hard at these kinds of exercises, I decided to try a full dress effort with
something unlikely --
[INTERSPACE
6]
PRINTER'S DEVIL. There's something wicked happening
here. Suddenly Alice has become
Humpty Dumpty.
FOOTNOTE. Right. Those interpretive exercises Instruction talks about -- they
can't be serious. Do you think
they were actual class exercises?
PRINTER'S DEVIL. They're jokes, of course. They're the exercises of his sick
brain.
FOOTNOTE. Bad jokes.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. Deliberately bad, that's what makes the
whole thing so irresponsible.
Don't you see, he's manipulating those ridiculous signs to play out a
play. Through this looking glass
Alice undergoes a sex change. She
becomes Humpty Dumpty -- truly a full dress effort at something unlikely.
INSTRUCTION
(resuming). -- something important
partly because it would seem so unlikely.
I meant to set my sights high.
I wanted a reading that could make a real difference in the way we go
about our intercourse with poetry.
And I didn't want something smartass and deconstructive, some gloomy
"exposure" or negation of a canonical text, or whatever.
It took a while but one
day I realized what I wanted. I
wanted to read a poem that would help us begin reading poetry all over
again. I wanted to go back to the
beginning -- or to some place that seems like a beginning. For me that meant one thing: Understanding
Poetry. I had to go back there and start all over again -- back to the road
not taken by the schools.
Frost says it makes a
great difference when you decide between roads. He also suggests that once you make a decision and travel
along, you can't go back again.
And Frost was the darling of New Critical reading, as one can see from
his dominant presence in Understanding Poetry.
But maybe that idea is
just part of what comes with having taken a frostbound road in the first
place. Maybe along another road
one can go backwards or forwards or any old way one wants.
So back I went to Understanding
Poetry. And I set off from the
book's most crucial moment, the moment when it began to issue its Everlasting
Nay. I wanted to plant roses where
Brooks and Warren's thorns had begun to grow. I wanted to redeem their time.
[Voiceover intones
Kilmer's "Trees" while Instruction mouths the words.]
Trees
(For Mrs.
Henry Mills Alden)
I think that
I shall never see
A poem
lovely as a tree.
A tree whose
hungry mouth is prest
Against the
sweet earth's flowing breast;
A tree that
looks at God all day,
And lifts
her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that
may in Summer wear
A nest of
robins in her hair;
Upon whose
bosom snow has lain;
Who
intimately lives with rain.
Poems are
made by fools like me,
But only God
can make a tree.
Now before I give my
comments on this poem I want you to look at the essay that inspired me. You will recognize it I'm sure. Few of the critical pieces in Brooks
and Warren's Understanding Poetry were more famous than their commentary
on Kilmer's "Trees".
[INTERSPACE
7]
FOOTNOTE (handing a
manuscript to the Devil). Here's
the actual original. We can check
it against what we're about to hear.
I don't trust any of this anymore.
I mean really. Joyce
Kilmer's "Trees"!?
"This poem has been
very greatly deplored by a large number of people. But it is a good poem.
[INTERSPACE
8]
FOOTNOTE. Why go on, it's just a travesty, isn't
it? The actual "original of
the essay" begins: "This poem has been very greatly admired by a
large number of people. But it is
a bad poem." The game is to
read black where Brooks and Warren read white.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. And so not a "positive image to a
negative" but a negative to a positive. As you say, a travesty of Brooks and Warren.
FOOTNOTE. I suppose it all depends on where you
stand. That's part of the point of
Instruction's joke, isn't it -- to turn Brooks and Warren's debunking
"negative' reading of "Trees" into a positive act of
appreciation. To develop the
picture they took of Kilmer's poem and make a positive (re)print from it.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. Clever. But is it a good poem?
"First, let us look
at it merely on the technical side, especially in regard to the use Kilmer
makes of his imagery. Now the
poet, in a poem of twelve lines, makes only one fundamental comparison on which
the other comparisons are based; this is the same method used by Housman in `To
an Athlete Dying Young.' In
`Trees' this fundamental comparison is not definitely stated but is constantly
implied. The comparison is that of
a tree to a woman. If the tree is
compared to a woman -- literary tradition weighs heavily here, as it does for
so much modernist writing -- the reader can't expect a consistent use to be
made of the aspects of the woman which appear in the poem. . .
[PLEASURE. My God, what a sexist remark! Did Brooks and Warren actually write
that?
INSTRUCTION. Hold your questions till I get to the
end of this. We don't want to
spoil the coherence of the argument with interruptions.]
"Look at stanza
two. [Voiceover intones stanza 2; Instruction mouths the words] Here the tree is metaphorically treated
as a sucking babe and the earth, therefore, as the mother -- an excellent
comparison that has been made for centuries -- the earth as the `great mother,'
the `giver of life,' and so on.
"But the third
stanza introduces a confusion: [Voiceover intones stanza 3; Instruction mouths
the words]. Here the tree is no
longer a sucking babe, but, without warning, is old enough to indulge in
religious devotions. But that
isn't the best part of this confusion.
Remember that the tree is a woman and that in the first stanza the mouth
of that woman was the root of the tree. So now, if the branches are `leafy arms,' the tree has
metamorphosed in a very strange way.
The poem's woman begins to appear an uncanny, a wholly imaginative
creature.
"The fourth and
fifth stanzas maintain the same anatomical arrangement for the tree as does the
third, but they make other unexpected changes: the tree that wears a `nest of
robins in her hair' must be grown up, perhaps bejewelled; yet the tree with
snow on her bosom is also a chaste and pure girl, for so the associations
of snow with purity and chastity tell the reader; and then the tree that
`intimately lives with rain', who is she?
A chaste and pure girl? A
woman vain enough to wear jewels?
Our difficulties at this point have grown extreme. For this girl/woman, though living in
an intimate relationship with someone (`rain'), also appears withdrawn from the
complications of human relationships and might be said to be nunlike, an implication
consonant with the religious tone of the poem.
"Now it would be
quite pedestrian for the poet to use only one of these thoughts about the tree
(1. the tree as a babe nursed by mother earth, 2. the tree as a nun praying all
day, 3. the tree as a girl with jewels in her hair, or 4. the tree as a woman
involved in an ambiguous sexual relationship) and to limit himself to a single
metaphoric structure. The poem's
success comes because the poet has tried to convey all of these features in
terms of his single basic comparison to a woman. As a result, he presents a poetical image that has all the
confused and metamorphic power so typical of modernist works of art and poetry.
"For a moment it
may seem possible to attack the poem by pointing out its absurd romantic title,
`Trees', with its implicit appeal to the consistencies of an organic approach
to art: one tree is like the babe nursing at its mother's breast; another tree
is a girl lifting her arms to pray, and so on. But this line of attack would damage itself more than the
poem it seeks to denigrate: for `Trees' is not consistent and romantic, it is
modern and grotesque, and as such it refuses to provide any real or natural
basis for seeing one tree as a babe and another as a devout young woman -- and
least of all for establishing a `natural' consistency between those figures and
the complex sexual being who emerges toward the climax of the poem."
* * *
PLEASURE. The essay is strangely familiar -- like
something often thought but never so well expressed.
INSTRUCTION. It ought to be required reading in our
introduction to poetry classes. I
especially like the tact of its historical awareness. The authors don't belabor the point, but they lead us to see
how important historical context must be for "understanding
poetry".
[INTERSPACE
9]
PRINTER'S DEVIL. Clever. But is it a good poem?
FOOTNOTE. Maybe that's not the point at issue --
I mean, whether "the poem itself" is good or bad.[2]
PRINTER'S DEVIL. What's the point then?
FOOTNOTE. I suppose Instruction wants to show up
the fragile authority of even the most authoritative critical moves. Alter a few words and this famous
foundational essay of 20th century criticism changes from a duck to a
rabbit. The arguments and evidence
brought forward support antithetical readings.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. So Instruction wants to "teach the
conflicts" after all!
FOOTNOTE. More than that, surely. He wants to generate the
conflicts. Play the gadfly.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. As I say, "teach the
conflicts".
FOOTNOTE. No, it's more aggressive, more like
"teaching conflict" than "teaching the conflicts". Look carefully at those last remarks
about "required reading" and "the tact of its historical
awareness". They're corroded
with an ironical attitude toward "introduction to poetry classes" and
the modern founding fathers of those classes. And as for those founding fathers, well, Brooks and Warren
made their reputations by a wholesale assault on historical awareness. Instruction isn't sincere. He has nothing but contempt for
teaching and for understanding poetry.
INSTRUCTION
(resuming). Not once do they tell
us that Kilmer was editor of The Dial, for example, or that the poem
comes out of the same period and place -- New York in the teens of this century
-- that produced Stevens' Harmonium. Yet how obvious the connection must now seem to us! One thinks immediately of Stein's early
cubist poetry, and we may even remember that Tender Buttons was
published at exactly the same time as Kilmer's book.
But "Trees"
has more in common, I think, with more traditional kinds of Modernistist
experimental writing. Surely the
similarity of Kilmer's poem to Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a
Blackbird" is obvious! It
isn't just the physical shape of the two works that recall each other, though
that's very striking. Think of
Stevens' disorienting and revelatory shifts of focus. These dominate Kilmer's poem as well, and the regularity of
Kilmer's rhyme only makes the shifts more shocking. Besides, in Stevens' charming poem the romantic commitment
to a specular order of attention is hardly violated, so that his poem has more
than a trace of that "consistency" (properly) deplored in Brooks and
Warren's hypothetical critique of "Trees". But in "Trees" the order of things is
fractal and chaotic -- an effect heightened exactly by the poem's seductive
apparition of consistency.
Not that Brooks and
Warren's essay has given the last word on Kilmer's poem. On the contrary, their reading's
preoccupation with "technical" matters has caused it to misrepresent
a key feature of the work, and to miss altogether the literal meaning of the
final two lines' climactic and defining moment.
PLEASURE. What do you mean?
INSTRUCTION. I'll explain by making a confession
about the text of the essay I gave you.
The truth is that I slightly altered what Brooks and Warren originally
wrote. I did so to highlight something important that's
missing from their reading.
PLEASURE. Go on.
INSTRUCTION. In the essay I gave you, whenever
Brooks and Warren wrote "human being", I substituted the word "woman".
PLEASURE. Is that all?
INSTRUCTION. No, but it's important. Now I did this because "human
being" is completely untrue to the meaning of the poem. "Trees" is not only written to
a woman, its running human analogy is gendered female at every point. The subject of the poem is what Robert
Graves would soon name "The White Goddess". So the title is apt -- "Trees", not
"Tree" or "The Tree".
PLEASURE. But the women in the poem appear so unmythic
-- despite what Brooks and Warren say about "the earth mother" and
all that. So quotidian and, in one
case -- the baby girl I mean -- so completely nonsexual. Think of Keats's La Belle Dame. There's the White Goddess! Kilmer's Trees are hardly pagan at all;
they're too correct -- too American and Irish-Catholic.
INSTRUCTION. You're deceived by one level of the
poem's appearances. Think
again. Think, for example, about
the dedication to Mrs. Henry Mills Alden.
[INTERSPACE
10]
FOOTNOTE. That dedication line, incidentally,
isn't reproduced in the text of Understanding Poetry. Brooks and Warren took it out, I guess,
because they thought it wasn't part of "the poem itself".
PRINTER'S DEVIL. Is it?
FOOTNOTE. Of course, just as much as the
title. But Brooks and Warren want
to uncouple poems from their explicit historical connections. Removing this actual woman rarifies the
poem. And these losses of textual
reference tend to affect all the more concrete aspects of poetic language --
for example, the signs themselves.
The poem's signs slip loose from their physicalities -- from their
phonemic and rhythmic structure -- and readers begin to treat poetic language
as "a text", a conceptual organization, a play of Saussurean
signifieds. It's important to see
the particular woman standing among Kilmer's trees -- Mrs. Henry Mills Alden.
PLEASURE. Who is she?
INSTRUCTION. Kilmer's mother-in-law, a woman who for
years had moved at the center of the New York literary world. A poet herself, she married Henry Mills
Alden -- the editor of Harper's -- when she was a young, aspiring writer
and after a whirlwind three-month courtship. Their love sprang up when Mrs. Alden, then Mrs. Kenton
Murray, submitted some poems to Harper's.
PLEASURE. So?
INSTRUCTION. You're so ignorant, all you care about
are the surfaces of things! Read
between the lines, behind the words!
Mrs. Alden's obituary notice in the Virginia Pilot and Norfolk Leader
(4/14/1936) describes her as "a woman of high intellectual attainments, of
courageous spirit, and of marked personal charm". The significance of this language in
that newspaper becomes clear when one recalls that her first husband had been
editor of the Norfolk Landmark.
Furthermore, although
married to Alden she continued to publish her poetry under the name Ada Foster
Murray. (She was born Ada Foster and grew up near Huntington, Virginia -- now
West Virginia.)
In short, the words
"Mrs. Henry Mills Alden" release the poem under the sign of a woman
and a poet. More significantly,
this person would be seen -- we are looking from Kilmer's point of view -- as a
volatile and complex being. Brooks
and Warren's remarks on the poem's inconsistencies are subtle glosses on the
name standing at the head of the text.
Look again at the text of the verse! Kilmer's Trees are populated by evanescent Ovidian
figures. "Moving about in
worlds not realized" -- moving about the poem's forest of strange symbols
-- are "light winged dryads" whose presences we glimpse by oblique
suggestion -- as we glimpse them in Heine and Baudelaire, and in so many
poet/painters of modern life:
Gods float
in the azure air
bright gods
and Tuscan
(Ezra
Pound, Cantos )
From Poe to Pound, even
North America did not free itself of that world. Mrs. Henry Mills Alden, upright and respectable, comes
from that world.
The first sections of
Kilmer's verse text are full of deliberate deceptions; so we only glimpse, by
various stylistic plays of confusion and indirection, the poem's disturbing and
erotic presences. In the end,
however, they are presences that are not to be put by.
Upon whose
bosom snow has lain;
Who
intimately lives with rain.
Poems are
made by fools like me,
But only God
can make a tree.
All further commentary
proves unnecessary as soon as we realize the startling sexual wordplay in the
word "make". Kilmer
descends to this kind of vulgarity only once in the poem. But it is a descent
that must be made, a
descent to coarse pagan earth. The
descent is telling and overthrows the whole fabric. What did you say about Dickinson reading poems backwards? This word "make" unmakes the
text, forcing us to read it all backwards: back over again, back against the
deceptive inertia set in forward motion at the outset of the work.
But we are ready for
this backward overthrow because -- despite its appearances -- the poem has
never settled into its rectitudes.
As Brooks and Warren were the first to notice, it is far too
inconsistent and "confused" for that.
PLEASURE. But then the poem is some grotesque
male joke -- is that what you're saying?
INSTRUCTION. Not at all. As in "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and so many
similar poems, "Trees" is written out of a certain kind of male
eroticism. After all, what else is
the so-called myth of the White Goddess?
But if this were all the poem had to offer -- serving up another coarse
of that myth -- it would have scarcely arrived at the level of Keats's
traumatic fantasy. What
distinguishes Kilmer's poem is the fact that it is God who makes the
tree. This literal (religious)
fact can barely tolerate the extreme "opposite and discordant"
suggestion introduced by the wordplay.
In forcing that extremity upon us, the text leaps to an unspeakable
imaginative level. The achievement
recalls nothing so much as certain analogous moments in Lautreamont's Les
Chants de Maldoror -- for example, the great scene in Canto III when
Maldoror narrates the story of God and his desolate strand of hair.
I think Nietzsche wrote
the moral for Kilmer's poem before Kilmer ever wrote the poem:
It is with people as it
is with trees. The more they
aspire to the height and light, the more strongly
do their roots strive earthward, downward, into the dark, the deep--into
evil. (Nietzsche,
The Gay Science sec. 371)
This is a thought fully
realized in Kilmer's shocking last couplet, where we come upon something far
worse than a simple religious blasphemy.
The coarse final wordplay doubles back upon the penultimate line,
undoing the idea of poiesis itself. From the original sin committed among the trees of his
little garden, Kilmer has imagined the adamic fall of the poem itself.
[INTERSPACE
11]
PRINTER'S DEVIL. How right you were about Instruction's
insincerity. This is all an
outrageous act of cleverness and self-display. Instruction tells a greater (and a worse) truth than he
realizes when he turns Kilmer's wretched little verses into an allegory about
"the adamic fall of the poem itself". His cynical games with poetry will be the death of poetry.
FOOTNOTE. Did you catch the sly allusion in that
phrase? "The poem
itself" is one of those word plays Instruction seems incapable of
resisting. He's recalling another
famous book from the period of New Criticism's hegemony Stanley Burnshaw's The
Poem Itself.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. So?
FOOTNOTE. I guess his reading wants to imagine
"the fall" of a certain kind of "poem" or idea about
poetry. In this sense his
"allegory", as you call it, would be an historical allegory, not a
transcendental one. Which makes
sense, given his critical view of Brooks and Warren's (unhistorical) way
of "understanding poetry".
PRINTER'S DEVIL. And what's Instruction's
"way" of "understanding poetry"? It's to invade the texts and force them to turn nonsensical. Ever critic his own Aristotle indeed!
FOOTNOTE. Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost
is a nonsensical idea. But you
gave it your good housekeeping seal.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. Yes,
because its nonsense is useful. It
helps to expose the contradictions that run through Milton's Christian
mythology. In doing that, it helps
to expose the structure of poetical discourse in general.
FOOTNOTE. As nonsensical?
PRINTER'S DEVIL. As incommensurable. What did Wilde say? "A truth in art is that whose
contradictory is also true."[3]
FOOTNOTE. I think your ideas have more in common
with Instruction's than you realize, or admit. You have highbrow ideas so you want highbrow examples. That appeal of yours to Blake could
have been made by our Instructor.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. Yes, but in his mouth it would have
been a rhetorical jeu, a sign that poetical authority rests with him,
with the meanings he sets in play.
If I'm highbrow, he's just a vulgarian. Besides, the incommensurability of poetic discourse is for
me one of its key objective features. That's a crucial difference between us. Another -- it's even more crucial --
relates to the fundamental unseriousness of Instruction's critical
methods. And in truth how could
he take himself or his ideas seriously!
They're grounded in nothing beyond his own fancies -- mere airy
nothings, as fragile as himself, as all subjective criticism will always be.
FOOTNOTE. Or as Shakespeare?!
PRINTER'S DEVIL. What?
FOOTNOTE. I was just reflecting on your allusion
to Shakespeare and his airy nothings, his poetry and his ideas about
poetry. Maybe you shouldn't be
quoting Shakespeare, or appealing to Oscar Wilde. You don't help your case.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. What are you thinking?
FOOTNOTE. I'm thinking about Instruction's
"unseriousness", as you (rightly) call it. About how studied it is.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. Right. That mannered style is what stamps his thinking as
iredeemably trivial. It doesn't
even take itself seriously.
FOOTNOTE. But what if that's the point? What if the question isn't "how
could he take himself or his ideas seriously" but "why should
he take himself or his ideas seriously"?
PRINTER'S DEVIL. Explain
please.
FOOTNOTE. Why do you, why does anyone, privilege
"objective" values?
Because they're imagined to have weight and substance, something more solid than mere personal
ideas and subjective whimsies.
When Instruction flaunts the fancifulness of his critical ideas, when he
-- in effect -- turns them over to his friend Pleasure, he puts them in that
"unsubstantial faery place/ That is [their] fit home".
In this sense, the
deliberateness of his unseriousness would thus not be a "cynical"
gesture, at least not in the usual sense we give that term. It would be a move to label the
fundamentally subjective character of his criticism, and perhaps to suggest as
well that all criticism -- even criticism, like Johnson's, committed to
objective standards -- operates subjectively.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. So what else is new!
FOOTNOTE. Two things, perhaps. First, Instruction's game-playing
assumes a formidable (double) standard for critical acts: a demand for a high
level of reflective self-awareness, on one hand, and for a matching style and
practise on the other -- for a sound that would be the echo of its sense. His triviality is significant exactly
because it's so cultivated. He is
labelling his proposals "modest".
PRINTER'S DEVIL. Or "indecent".
FOOTNOTE. Yes, modest and indecent both. It's Pleasure's ideal of an erotics of
reading, a move "against interpretation". And the move is important because of the implicit challenge
he's laying down. His criticism of
"Trees" emphasizes the rhetoric of interpretation, so his
studied triviality signals that he appreciates the difficulty of the reciprocal
demand his challenge puts on us.
He comes forward not as a master but as just another player. Or if he seems a master, his behavior
emphasizes the mortal limits of mastery.
Second, the dialogue
argues that meaning comes as acts of thinking (which may get reified into sets
of ideas), and thinking comes as exchange of thought. All sorts of uncommon critical possibilities might flow from
that view of things.
PRINTER'S DEVIL. Including the slaughter of criticism's
innocence.
FOOTNOTE. A prophetic sign announcing a new day,
perhaps, when we may repeat, in a finer tone, "the adamic fall of 'the
poem itself'".
INSTRUCTION
(resuming). So a modest and even
genteel irony turns corrosive.
Aspiring to the height and light, Kilmer's poem discovers its damnation.
PLEASURE. If this is how one finds meaning in
poems you could almost persuade me back to interpretation.
INSTRUCTION. Sometimes you do read your texts too
simply. "Against
Interpretation", for
instance. It's clear that you've
let your enthusiasm carry you away.
For the phrase has, I think, graces beyond the reach of the art you have
in mind. You read the word
"against" as a mere prepositional call to arms. And that's fine, I like that reading --
even if it is pretty commonplace.
PLEASURE. Novelty isn't everything, my
friend. What is it Byron says?
I care not
for new pleasures, as the old
Are quite
enough for me -- so they but hold.
(Byron,
Don Juan )
INSTRUCTION. Well, what I like about that Byron
remark -- about Byron in general -- is the cool, self-conscious way he
approaches the pursuit, and the question, of pleasure. What did he say in Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage about thought?
Didn't he call it "our last and only place of refuge"?
Don't just run
with that phrase "Against Interpretation", think about it. Imagine
what you know. Suppose
"against" were an adjective instead of a preposition.
PLEASURE. The Everlasting Nay becomes the
Everlasting Yea!
INSTRUCTION. Ever the enthusiast. Suppose it were an adjective and
a preposition.
PLEASURE. Then you would have invented what
Xerxes wanted, a new pleasure.
INSTRUCTION. Or a new thought