WHATCHA READIN'? (2)

Elizabeth Hardwick’s Herman Melville (2000)  Another book picked up by chance at Gray Matters, to complement earlier readings this month of Jean Giono’s Melville and Hardwick’s own Sleepless Nights.

Here, Hardwick as usual writes well, conveying some of the excitement of reading Moby-Dick, but ultimately I’m not impressed, as she has no particular sense of Melville. It’s a belletristic performance in the bad sense. I’d say EH has no insight into Melville because she can’t fathom how completely bizarre he is. How sui generis. (Which is odd, given that she was intimate with the rather bizarre and sui generis Robert Lowell.) But EH, one of the founders of the New York Review of Books, commits the sin of the lit. journal: to describe others by your sense of judgment . . . and let’s be clear: that’s what book reviewing is. Publications such as NYRB promote work within the terms of their sense of judgment, and the implied idea is that everyone writes “in order to be judged” by them. It’s the grand conceit of lit crit: that its judgment trumps the object. Whatever the artist creates, what she or he achieves is determined by critical judgment. So all art asks/waits to be judged. Critics love to quote bad judgments so they can find an opening for their own judgment—but the self-congratulatory rhetoric is that such-and-such has “waited until now” to have its true or real judgment. No such thing. The judgment machine rolls on and other horrible workers will come (to paraphrase Rimbaud).

As something like the NYRB judgment on Melville, EH’s take is rather lacking in depth, though not a bad read. She likes to visit those “homoerotic moments” in Melville’s writing as if the fact that men can be attracted to men and be rather sanguine about that feeling is new or surprising (just how sheltered are intellectuals?), but has so little to say about Pierre (I’ve begun it, taking it slowly) which is rife with stunning oddity, a fantasy of psychosexual proportions that EH is not interested in at all. I suspect that Pierre will make me a Melvillean much as FW made me a Joycean—thought not as whole hog, perhaps, but convinced, again, of the writer’s unmannerly pursuit of “necessity.” EH can only shake her head, wondering why someone who flopped with Moby-Dick would next write Pierre. And there you have that judgment by market forces and by “critical judgment.” No one grasped what he was doing, the readership avoided it, so he should try to rectify that and write what the public want. Rather than what he wants to write. But Melville has that at least, the courage to write what he wants to write, and because there’s no “excuse” for it, otherwise, that makes him worth reading, to me. His manner is engaging, his ideas odd.

Jerome McGann’s The Romantic Ideology. A Critical Investigation (1983) Also part of the Gray Matters’ haul, this was a very gratifying find, a book I probably skimmed back there in Princeton but was surprised to learn was published in 1983 (I took it for a late ‘80s or early ‘90s book). My sense, reading it now, is that McGann’s sense of the English Romantics is clear, both in what they are and what they aren’t, and what he’s particularly good at is sifting the criticism of Romanticism, an area that, if more entrenched even than modernist criticism, can also boast better readers. The notion of “ideology” which he brings to the discussion, after Marx’s The German Ideology, helps to open the question of what—if anything—one tries to “teach” via literature. It’s a question I’ve never been satisfied about and was quite disillusioned with the forms it had taken by the time I tried to sign on (forms that, I note, McGann was already criticizing in 1983—when I was blithely indifferent to academia and following my own fantasy). He sees the too-easy assumptions of an over-arching period consciousness in which students learn the checklist of Romantic attributes and then look to see them evenly applied throughout the works of the period, while the so-called early and late Romantics are quite temperamentally distinct. Even critics and scholars who should know better take up positions that are aimed to explode ideas that no one who seriously reads the Romantics (rather than the synthesizers of the critics) would ever have.

What I miss in McGann is any very developed sense of romantic irony (he prefers the “romantic agony” approach—even with or especially with his man Byron); McGann, tinged by the claims made for artforms by the likes of Althusser and his epigones, has to do battle with the notions of “escape” and “transcend.” What McGann can’t seem to grasp (seems deaf to, as a kind of tone-deafness) is the ironic emphasis of most Romantic utterance. The romantic poet, to use Dylan Thomas’ phrase, “sings in his chains like the sea.” The irony is that is the best one can do. Romantic poetry is a soliloquy in a drama that one cannot “escape” in a world one can barely alter and never master. And yet one sings. And, while that situation might inspire “agony,” to me it was one of a more notable irony—as found in Shakespeare’s tragic heroes who, for all the tragic dimensions of their situations, can speak with a sense of irony that “the wheel has come full circle, I am here.” It is a question of tone, at last.

McGann is very good at stressing how poems are created in their own particular times with those kind of temporal assumptions that Bakhtin theorized as “the chronotope.” So much so that it might behoove me to consider, not only the extent to which “the Romantic ideology” has played its part in my formation but also “the Romantic chronotope”—both, I feel, are important to the scene or space of utterance in “Mobil Limbo” (which has gotten some significant tweaks this summer). It’s flights of imagination always land, we could say, back into that space/time. The “chains” are very real but the way they can be imagined, the way one can imagine breaking them or shedding them—there’s that “escape” and “transcend” again—is what keeps the game in play. Byron: “And mine’s a bubble not blown up for praise / But just to play with, as an infant plays.” As for all that, McGann did send me back to the poems of Coleridge headed “Limbo,” and I expect I will revisit “Childe Harold” and “Manfred” and would like to finally get through “Don Juan” (I’ve just acquired McGann’s texts of Byron in the Oxford edition, to that end). He also tipped me to Galvano Della Volpe’s Critique of Taste which I managed to acquire in a Verso summer sale (just arrived today—I’d already forgotten I ordered it). More anon.