I haven’t written anything new for today’s post because of various other claims on my time. Also, Saturday is when I’d usually write the bulk of a post but today I went to see Kevin Barry at the Rolling Sun book festival in Westport. He read a new short story, “Finistère”, and a couple of passages from his latest novel, The Heart in Winter. It was highly enjoyable. Allowing for bus times, that knocked 4 hours out of the middle of the day, though the event itself lasted just over an hour. Why did nobody warn me that retirement would be this time-consuming?

So instead of something new, I’m posting the following, which I’m afraid is more of a curiosity than a serious argument. I wrote it in 1999, as part of a longer piece. My original thesis supervisor had asked me to frame an argument as to why I thought it necessary (or permissible) to write yet more about Andrew Marvell’s poetry than already existed. Could there be anything to say that was both new and worthwhile? I rediscovered the piece when I was looking through my notes from the early days of my work on Marvell, trying to find a link between what I originally meant to write about (enclosure, containment, limitation) and the eventual topic of the thesis (Marvell’s ambivalence about justice). I had completely forgotten about the piece I had written in 1999, and was surprised to find that it included a few passages that had made their way almost unchanged into the eventual thesis, and one or two more that might still be worth developing. And also this (which amounts to about a fifth of what I originally wrote):

John Carey began his contribution to the York lectures on the tercentenary of Marvell’s birth, “Reversals transposed: An aspect of Marvell’s imagination”, by asserting

You cannot write about his poetry without feeling that you have flattened or coarsened it — or if you can, you should not be writing about it at all. (Carey 1978, 136)

Carey then went on to deliver what, according to John Creaser, “must be the most acute essay on the poet since T.S. Eliot’s classic of 1921 — an agile and lucid essay matching the poet’s ingenuities” (Creaser 1999, 147). I found Creaser’s judgment easy to accept: Carey’s lecture was indeed the the most acute essay on the poet that I had yet read — though at that point I had read relatively little, not nearly as much as Creaser had, or as I would do in the following years. It, along with the lecture by Christopher Ricks that immediately preceded it in the volume of tercentenary lectures, formed the starting point for the thesis I thought I was going to write (and, though less obviously, for the one I finally wrote).

A central element of Carey’s unease about critical approaches to Marvell is his distrust of paraphrase as a critical tool. He speaks of the trepidation that a critic ought to feel at the prospect of “using his own words to give an account of Marvell’s” (Carey 1978, 137), just as a few years earlier he had suggested that bad criticism was often criticism not of the poem itself but of a prose paraphrase (Carey 1969, 71). Marvell’s poetry, he says, resists paraphrase. This is one of the points that William Empson emphasized in his review of Approaches to Marvell. Noting that the lectures by Ricks and Carey stand quite apart from the others in the collection, in finding Marvell transparent and not inconclusive or “treacherous”, he argues that Carey could only achieve this transparency by departing from the “rigorous policy” he announced in his inaugural lecture as Merton Professor of English, which is paraphrased by Empson as follows: “… there must be no more paraphrase, no reading in or spelling out, because all such tampering with a text was the work of vandals” (Empson 1984, 39).

Carey bases the argument of his inaugural lecture as Merton Professor on the acknowledged impossibility of divorcing form from content. An earlier and influential statement of the case against paraphrase was made by Cleanth Brooks, who gave to the last chapter of The Well Wrought Urn the title ”The Heresy of Paraphrase”. His argument is much less dismissive of the usefulness of paraphrase than that title might lead the reader to expect. This may be why Empson (who had at the time already published Seven Types of Ambiguity and Some Versions of Pastoral, both of which employ a method which might be described as ”alternative paraphrase”), could give The Well Wrought Urn a very favourable review, saying that he could not disparage Brooks’s critical approach without attacking his own (Empson 1988, 282). Brooks emphasizes the danger of mistaking the paraphrase for the poem, and thinking that all that needs to be done to account for the working of a poem is to explain what it means in other words. He certainly does not say that an explanation in prose of what a poem might be said to mean can never assist the critical process.

Brooks’s warning of the dangers of paraphrase is considered, rational and persuasive; unfortunately, the lesson has been learned too well. Carey tells us that the indissolubility of form and content is so generally recognized that the words ”form” and ”content” themselves are no longer seen as acceptable, because ”they insist upon a separation in which we no longer believe” (Carey 1976, 178) It might be thought that paraphrase is useless because it cannot hope to catch every nuance, to convey every variation of tone, or to capture the sound and rhythm of the words themselves. Whereas, of course, if a paraphrase could do all these things, it really would be useless; it would carry precisely the same meaning as the main text, no more and no less; and therefore could not possibly add anything to our understanding of it. The utility of paraphrase lies, oddly, in its imprecision; to paraphrase is implicitly to say ”not quite this” or ”almost that, but with subtle, unspecifiable, differences”. Paraphrase helps to orient the reader, to locate the object of study (with greater or less certainty) among a number of other possibilities of meaning.

Paraphrase then, is a useful tool, though admittedly a dangerous one in inexperienced or careless hands. The question remains: useful for what? If it’s a critical tool, so the question would seem to be what are the purposes of criticism and, in particular, what is its immediate purpose? For the New Critics (and for other important twentieth-century critics such as Leavis), the purpose of criticism was valuation. If the poem is a verbal icon, or a figurative urn, the important question will inevitably be how well or ill wrought it is. Here again, Empson provides a useful corrective. Agreeing that the purpose of criticism is valuation, he argues that it is often not possible to pursue this end immediately. His own criticism tends more to the interpretive, and he is quite explicit that interpretation entails a determined effort to unearth what the author meant, or intended. For him, in short, intentionalism is not a fallacy; on the contrary, the fallacy is what he called “The Wimsatt doctrine”, which holds that the author’s intention is unknowable, and that to pursue it is fruitless and misleading.

This difference between the New Critics and Empson, who has sometimes been thought of as one of their early members, lies in their differing conceptions of the aim of criticism. Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s statement of the doctrine, “The Intentional Fallacy” (1946), proceeds from the undeniable proposition that, since our best evidence of what the poet meant is the poem itself, to attempt to judge the poem by its success or failure in realizing that intention is to impugn the evidence on which we rely. To attempt to use the author’s intention for evaluative purposes results in absurdity. But their objection to enquiring into the author’s intentions loses its force when the immediate aim of the enquiry is not judgment but interpretation, and Empson’s approach assumes that the latter must often precede the former; it is dangerous to try to evaluate a work of literature without having a reasonably clear idea of what the author is getting at, what he or she is trying to do.

Not only that, but it is possible that the interpretive effort may reveal previously unrecognized standards of judgment. In order to evaluate something, it is necessary to have an idea of what is good. If that idea has its origins outside the critical process (for example, in Christianity or Marxism, in the writings of Foucault, in a political commitment to liberal democracy, or in a suspicion that our whole idea of literature — among other things — has been irremediably distorted by the fact that women have been “hidden from history”), and is never modified by the process itself, there is a danger that all criticism will result simply in a confirmation of what the critic knew already. To avoid this danger, criticism must be an activity that learns from itself, that modifies its assumptions in the light of its discoveries. A criticism whose first and paramount aim is evaluation would then be in difficulty, a difficulty analogous to that ascribed by Wimsatt and Beardsley to intentionalism: the critic would have to attempt to amend his or her standard of evaluation in (and in the light of) the evaluative process itself.

Recognizing that the starting point and much of the activity of most criticism will be interpretation, we can return to Brooks’s indictment of the “heresy” of paraphrase. His central point is that a poem is a structure which is composed of stresses and tensions as well as “meanings, evaluations and interpretations” which complement each other; it relies on balance as well as harmony. It is the central importance of these stresses and tensions to the whole idea of poetry that makes necessary his frequent reliance on concepts like paradox and irony. An attempt to account for such a necessarily complex structure by means of paraphrase results in something that Brooks rightly describes as an abstract:

… we can always abstract an “idea” from a poem — even from the simplest poem … But the idea which we abstract — assuming that we can all agree on what that idea is — will always be abstracted: it will always be the projection of a plane along a line or the projection of a cone upon a plane. (Brooks 1968, 167)

Precisely; and if we doubt the usefulness of such projections, we might consider projections onto a plane, not of cones, but of the globe. The analogy of a paraphrase with a map or plan is a good one; no one doubts that a map is on a much smaller scale than the thing mapped; that it omits more detail than it includes; or that it is flat while the thing itself is three dimensional. In short, it is indeed an abstract. Yet (and particularly in the hands of an experienced map reader) it can help us to pinpoint where we are, and where we might arrive. To acknowledge the usefulness of the map is in no way to mistake it for the landscape. Nor is it to imagine that, once we have the map, the landscape can be dispensed with. Rather, a map of a landscape one never expects to see is of more limited utility than one of the landscape one now happens to be in.

The point of agreement between those, like Carey and to a lesser extent Brooks, who believe that the abstract or plan can be of little assistance and those, like Empson, who wield it enthusiastically, is that the poem is a structure, a complex totality. The disagreement lies in the belief of the former that this structure, if it is to be apprehended at all, can be apprehended only as a totality; to attempt to apprehend it piece by piece, or cumulatively, is to admit failure from the beginning. The opposing view is unabashedly analytical. Empson’s best-known statement on the subject of analysis is to be found in the note to his poem “Bacchus”: “… life involves maintaining oneself between contradictions that can’t be solved by analysis” (Empson 1955, 104–5). This recognition of the limits of analysis (what, in the finite world, does not have limits?) should not mislead anyone into thinking that analysis was anything less than fundamental to Empson’s critical approach. He wrote, for example:

As is particularly clear with children from homes where they don’t read poetry, but also sometimes true I’m afraid of all of us, it is quite possible to be confronted with a work of art and not see what the point of it is, what it is trying to do, how one part of it is supposed to affect another. There is room for a great deal of exposition, in which the business of the critic is simply to show how the machine is meant to work, and therefore to show all its working parts in turn. This is the kind of criticism I am specially interested in, and I think it is often really needed. Anyone who objects to it because it does not try to give a Final Valuation of the work, in relation to all other work, seems to me merely irrelevant. (Empson 1988, 106)

To “show all its working parts in turn” is precisely to analyze, analysis being a way of explaining or accounting for a complex system by separating it into its constituent parts. With a real machine, it may be necessary physically to take it apart in order to show how it works as a whole. It seems to me that this is what gives rise to the idea that analytical criticism is equivalent to vandalism, but that the objection is misconceived. The analysis of a work of literature remains distinct from the work itself, in much the same way as a map remains merely an incomplete representation of the landscape. There are, in fact, two quite different types of analysis, which might be labelled the abstract and the concrete. A chemical analysis, in which a sample of a compound is split into the elements of which it is composed, is a concrete analysis. More common, I suspect, is the abstract type: the analysis of an economic system, of the functioning of an organization, or of a task to be automated would fall into this category. It will be clear that the elements of an abstract analysis must comprise something other than the actual “working parts” of the thing to be analysed. These elements will themselves be abstract. I take it that it will often be the case that one of the elements in the analysis of a novel, poem or other literary work will be a paraphrase. The paraphrase does not, in other words, constitute the whole of the analysis but it does represent an important part of it.

I’m not at all sure that this 26-year-old fragment still has any relevance: at this remove its argument seems too obvious to be worth trotting out again. All the same, I’d rather post something that’s out-of-date than nothing at all, particularly as I’ve missed or delayed some posts in recent months. I hope that if you found it tedious you’re not still reading! Next time, I’m probably going to post about two books from the recent Penguin Archive series. I’ve bought 8 of the titles in the series, and so far read 5. I’ll probably save Muriel Spark (The Driver’s Seat) and Willa Cather (A Lost Lady) for later and write first about Stefan Zweig’s Chess and Bohumil Hrabal’s Closely Watched Trains (subject to change without notice).

Works cited

Brooks, Cleanth. The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry, 2nd edn. (Methuen, 1968)

Carey, John. Andrew Marvell: A Critical Anthology (Penguin, 1969)

Carey, John. “The Critic as Vandal”, New Statesman, 92 (1976), 178–80, 210–12

Carey, John. “Reversals transposed: An aspect of Marvell’s imagination”, in Approaches to Marvell: The York Tercentenary Lectures, ed. C A Patrides (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), 136–54

Creaser, John. “‘As one scap’t strangely from Captivity’: Marvell and Existential Liberty”, in Marvell and Liberty, ed. Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (Macmillan, 1999), 145–72

Empson, William. Collected Poems (Chatto & Windus, 1955)

Empson, William. “Other People’s Views”, in Using Biography (Chatto & Windus, 1984), 28–42

Empson, William. Argufying, ed. John Haffenden (Hogarth Press, 1988).