Bad Form
A few years ago Jacqueline Rose and Ted Hughes had a wrestling match. Though a few clapped and cheered it wasn’t pretty; rather nasty in fact, it hurt when his testicles were squeezed. We left the auditorium feeling very sad. We ranted a little. The professionals, we became convinced, shouldn’t pick on amateurs.
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Can there be limits to a civilised culture? You look puzzled. Have I said something odd? Well, Schloss, that is a damn foolish thing to say. Of course there are! You tell me a story to prove it.
I was still a callow youth when invited to Professor Edmund Leach’s leaving party. Keen to assert my independence, and exhibit my cleverness, I described his last book as weak, and praised Meyer Fortes, who I called the great anthropologist of the post-war period. I was a young Turk back then. No one and no occasion would stop me telling the truth. The truth! What did I know… Afterwards Jack comes up to me. What, don’t you like old Edmund? he whispers into my ear. And massages my shoulders: it was Jack’s way. Then he gives me a penetrating look. Why so keen to hurt a poor chap’s feelings, especially today, his last at the college? Rather cruel, isn’t it… I bridled, of course. But I knew he was right. This party isn’t a seminar. I wasn’t writing an article for Radical Review. A polite but noncommittal comment on the book; Fortes dropped for the duration into the umbrella stand, picked up later when leaving, these are what the occasion demanded. There were borders to this country and I had crossed them, causing pain and risking ostracism.
I give a little laugh, and nod my head. Very good, this is very good indeed. Of course such a culture, sophisticated and sensitive, tolerant to others, knows instinctively the boundaries it must not cross; easily discriminating between a private event and a public discussion, a departmental brouhaha. Popping poor old Meyer in the umbrella stand, as you so charmingly put it, is always the civilised thing to do; and we do it automatically; thank the heavens, and Mr Skyman who reigns there. Though I don’t believe you were so unkind. You uncouth? Never! Like me, your instincts for the humane and the social have been trained to a near perfection. We’re good circus animals. We can be trusted with our host; merge with the ensemble that plays around him. We’re not Pierre in that party that opens War and Peace. Do you remember? Our bumptious hero forgets that one must agree with the crowd not argue against it. Certainly not discuss serious topics. You hint that you know them, flattering the egos of those less knowledgeable than yourself; everyone to feel comfortable, even those with low IQs. And done so naturally! Around and around the ring we go; no need for Anna Pavlovna to whip us into line. But… Consider this. If something is so instinctive that it does not enter our consciousness can it be called a limit in any real sense? Do we say there is a limit to riding a bicycle or drinking a cup of tea? You smile. Of course you do; because the question is nonsensical. Is it not the same with the highly civilised? They have no limits because they will not come even close to touching them. If one lives in the middle of Russia one never sees the sea.
Once academics were thought to belong to this sophisticated society. Remember the self-deprecating Cambridge don? You wouldn’t know about his vast erudition unless you read his books.1 Beginning in the 1980s this changed. Today, even dons are salesmen selling their ideas and their expertise; coarsening the sensibility, which then enters the work…
Why then does Hughes once again represent with such unremitting anger those who have responded to Plath’s writing, or who have been inspired by what she wrote to write words of their own?
There is no feeling for the proprieties here. The writer out of sympathy with a man who has suffered not only a personal tragedy but the attention of those who seek to vandalise both his past and his person. He’s had enough of these hooligans. But our writer is oblivious to this. Today my friend’s parable would be real, and dismissing Edmund directly to his own face he would be surprised at the reaction. Why so obtuse? Jacqueline Rose appears genuinely baffled by the response. She cannot conceive why Hughes should be so defensive. Although a border line has been crossed, she is completely unaware it. Yet she had been warned.
What happens when [these speculations] leave her head, and start up a life outside her control, inside other people’s heads? Don’t they, at that point, cease to be speculations and become - nine times out of ten, if only in a fluctuating, provisional way - facts?…
…when one of those students or readers meets Sylvia Plath’s actual children will the connection be made: this is the son or daughter of that freaky woman who was like that.
He doesn't want to be pestered by the louts of literature. Ted Hughes is reminding Rose that people exist, and that they can be hurt by books and the newspaper chat that surrounds them. Defending herself she writes:
Far more crucial, or within reach of what I am able to read in the letter, is the extraordinary link which it demonstrates between representation and ethics. For it is only if the poem is literalised - if the gap is refused between writing and identity, between fantasy and a life - that Hughes’s ethical objections stand. Only if Poetry is read as reference can its exploration of sexuality - of anything - become a slur. Hughes may indeed be writing about what happens all too often to interpretation in our culture (shaming as a central component of celebrity). On that much we agree. But, as I see it, that is not a reason for less interpretation, but more. It is a reason for anyone involved in the interpretation of writing, Plath’s writing, to struggle harder to keep open the space where language works. (All quotes from On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World)
A fascinating example of the scholastic mind. Having written a book that uses the poetry to explore Plath’s psychology this writer now disclaims the link, arguing that there is a gap between the poem and the person who wrote it. Instead, she accuses Hughes of making that connection! We congratulate Rose on her chutzpah. But come on professor, do you think we are so clever that we will overlook the obvious…the very title of your book: The Haunting of Sylvia Plath. A biography that isn’t a biography, is how you describe this work. How convenient! To have it all ways; your subtle mind to play on both sides, your own and the opposition's. But if there is such a gap between writing and identity why bother with the paraphernalia of biography at all, why put Sylvia on the front cover? Better, surely, to write a critical study, where, under the common tropes of psychoanalysis and feminist theory, the personality is lost inside a labyrinth of abstraction. All the interpretations you desire, and they’d float free from a real person.
We know the reason: the book wouldn’t sell.
Hughes has made the mistake of thinking Rose’s book a serious study. He hadn’t grasped that it was all just a fantasy, an academic’s game. Or, to use the correct technical terminology, it is an interpretation.2 Inside the academy nothing matters because nothing exists off the page… Only words.
A mere pattern of linguistic signs is not literature. Browning. Rossetti. Eliot. All are attached to life. They are not bibliographic hermits sealed up inside book-filled rooms. Reduce a poem to words and it loses both the authorial spirit and its own energy; to become an intellectual puzzle, a meaningless discourse.3 The trajectory of all education, as Trotsky noted of his own schooling,4 is towards an empty formalism. The method of instruction more important than the content of what you learn. We have progressed since then: now the method is the content, for which we thank both Margaret Thatcher and the Parisians of 68. The academic as assassin. When Roland Barthes killed the author he also killed off literature. The bureaucrat - as they always do - had won.5
We suspect Rose is trying to escape this trap; thus her over-reliance on psychoanalytic readings of literature; which though sometimes crude and wild can elucidate a writer’s work, while also creating their own strange poetry: her piece on Virginia Woolf in the same volume. But when confronted with the real-life effects of her book, Rose retreats to the current academic fashion: there is no connection between life and words, she says. How handy are the conventional academic clichés when one is in a tight spot! But alas… She cannot escape her own sentences, or that book’s cover. Her abstractions not quite abstract enough to isolate them from Plath the poet, the mother, the one-time wife. Poem and poetic persona slip and slide over each other, then merge into the woman Hughes once loved.
A poet doesn’t use language to inoculate himself from reality. Literature is not an escape from life - it is not a cosy donnish study far from the noisy street - but an attempt to capture that life as accurately as possible.6 A poet of the quality of Hughes is a scientist of the phrase. An odd kind of scientist for sure, who carries his own feelings, perceptions, as well as his idiosyncratic thoughts, into the laboratory, which he dissects, analyses, expands, concocts… More alchemist than chemist. The poet’s personality is never wholly free from the poem. Rose, in her best moments, knows this.
Afloat on the academic ocean of language Rose has lost sight of the mainland of ordinary existence. She has forgotten that the actors in the Sylvia Plath story are still alive. She hasn’t noticed that they are living beings not texts. Yet, to treat a living person as if they were a written page, reducing them to a linguistic object, is to exhibit the profoundest inhumanity: it is to say I have no care for your feelings, your history, your sense of yourself as a human animal. You’re just print, that I can manipulate at will. This is the toxic nature of the modern academy: its indifference to the human.7 Plus that terrible egoism.
When someone is alive - at the time of this book Plath was biographically inseparable from Hughes - to represent them is a question of ethics; for we must consider the effect of our words on that person’s all too human frailties. That Rose thinks this idea extraordinary shows the dissociation of the academic mind; its lack of human sympathy, its unconcern with the emotions of others.8 Interestingly, it is just such cold-heartedness, this emptiness of spirit, that Mary Midgley defines as evil.9
This lack of feeling is the reason why Rose relies so much on psychoanalytic and feminist theory; concepts replace the soul, with its instinct and intuition, as the measure of a literary work. The organs of literature removed, its blood drained out, only skin and skeleton remain. Just words. I prefer Steven Rose: we emote therefore we are.10 What a shift! Today it is the scientists who care about our feelings. This is because the biologist must be in touch with what is. Not so the literary critic. Protected from the world by the doors of the university library they have lost contact with what is outside.11 Poor literature! Too weak to resist the demands of the university mind, its need to dissect, to analyse, to rearrange, you have died on the operating table. We wait for the pathologist, and the diagnosis they are sure to give.12
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1. Darwin: It appears to me, the doing what little one can do to encrease [sic] the general stock of knowledge is as respectable an object of life as one can in any likelihood pursue. (Quoted in Rosemary Hill's LRB review, Small Special Points.)
2. And since interpretation is itself a good the more interpretations we have the better, is the argument. We side with Erasmus. We need to limit the interpretations, so as to bring us back to the original spirit of the work. In the Universal Church the passion for allegory created endless allegorical readings, which also supported the bureaucracy of the Church. So today. We have a myriad of interpretive fantasies that serve the needs of the institution: its beliefs feeding both off and into its administration.
Today, art is our god, the university its interpreter. And like the late Medieval Church the university has not only lost connection with its godly source but replaced it with its own authority. The universities await their Reformation. (For Erasmus and the Medieval Church see some brilliant pages in Diarmaid MacCulloch, A History of Christianity.)
3. For a good example of this misunderstanding see the TLS review of the Kenner-Davenport correspondence (Archives of Exact Information). Hugh Kenner is the classic example of the academic formalist. The review contains a wonderful irony: Kenner, the pure academic type, believed himself: yes: a non-academic!
5. See my Critic as Clerk, for more discussion. Essential reading is J.G. Merquior’s From Prague to Paris. John Gross’ The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, itself an important work, charts the transfer of literary criticism from writers to the academics. F.R. Leavis the milestone here.
6. A marvellous description of the creative process - the best I’ve read - can be found in Hazlitt’s On The Pleasure of Painting, in Selected Writings, edited by Ronald Blythe.
7. In his wonderful collection of essays - The Hall of Uselessness - Simon Leys comments on the inhumanity of the American humanities departments. The disease has long spread to Britain.
8. Pauline Kael: Many academics have always been puzzled that Agee could care so much about movies. Alloway, by taking the position that Agee’s caring was a maladjustment, re-established their safe, serene world in which if a man gets excited about an idea or an issue, they know there’s something the matter with him. (Zeitgeist and Poltergeist in I Lost It at the Movies)
9. Wickedness.
11. Philosophers and bookish people generally tend to live a life dominated by words, and even to forget that it is the essential function of words to have a connection of one sort or another with facts, which are in general non-linguistic. Some modern philosophers have gone so far as to say that words should no longer be confronted with facts but live in a pure, autonomous world where they can be compared only with other words… This is one of those views are so absurd that only very learned men could possibly adopt them. (Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development)
I quote this a lot. But then so few other people do!
12. E.M. Forster has some interesting things to say about dangers of analysing works of literature in The Raison d’Être of Criticism in the Arts, in Two Cheers for Democracy.
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