With proto-puritans whose proudest boast,
Back then as now, was to make doubly sure
That errant thought not conjure up a coast
For its Bohemia10 and thereby secure
Full-scale poetic license.
There are some
Of your late essays where the marsh-light lure
Of wordplay—as, by Johnson’s time,11 they’d come
To think it—largely frees you from the rules
Of normal scholarship and lets you drum
Out syncopated readings where old tools
Won’t fill the bill since it’s your jazz-inspired
Prosodic and thematic riffs when school’s
Out, so to speak, that kept your prose live-wired
And keeps the circuits humming when we read
You now. Most likely the same neurons fired
Each time an agent rang to say they’d need
A trad-style drummer up to handling things
When some jazz legend came to town. Then we’d
Just happen by and think how your prose swings
The accent phrase to phrase yet always keeps
In view the cunning denouement that springs
A shocker such as positively leaps
To eye (take Armstrong/Fortinbras!12) once sprung
But, on a first encounter, either sweeps
All scruples clean aside or seems far-flung,
Like Shakespeare’s puns to Johnson, way beyond
What mutual interests and a common tongue
Required to keep intact the vital bond
Of civil concord. You had little use
For suchlike notions, thinking them au fond
Just means to reinforce or reproduce
The same old deferential ways of talk
That education plus a bit of nous
Should get us over once we’ve learned to chalk
Up every stage along the post-war road
As either one step in the lengthy walk
To social justice, since it breaks the code
Of class-respect, or else a backward lurch
Since, like unthinking reverence bestowed
By rote on classic texts, it makes a church
Where orthodoxy’s prized at the expense
Of thought. Let’s call your project not “research”—
A word you loathed, along with “excellence,”
“Engagement,” “impact,” “added value,” plus
“Empower” and “innovate”—but more a sense
Of what might do best service with least fuss
To show those culture-rituals up as mere
“Keep off the classics” notices for us
“New Accents” types who’d best not interfere
With matters that lay properly within
An altogether more exalted sphere
Of judgment. These include—lest we begin,
Thus theory-primed, to get ideas above
Our station—asking why the critics pin
Transcendent value to the sorts of love-
Intrigue that leave straight gender-roles intact,
Or why that preference goes hand-in-glove
With others, such as choosing who gets backed
For all the fellowships, or qualifies
As “research-active” owing to the fact
Of having come up publication-wise
With stuff in the right places.
There are those—
And were from early on—who say: “You guys,
The theorists, were the first ones to impose
This periodic curse, the latest round
Of research-auditing, since you first chose
To publish all those theory-books they found
Offensive, no doubt, but a ready-made
Excuse for telling everyone they’re bound
Contractually to keep up the cascade
Of four-star items or resign themselves
Either to have some bureaucrat degrade
Their post to ‘teaching only,’ or stack shelves
In Tesco.” More than that, the charge-sheet runs
To saying that the theory-stuff just delves
A little distance down so we’re the ones,
Us early converts, who kicked off the whole
Bad shooting-match by turning round the guns
Of critical dissent against the sole
Resource that might just possibly avail
To dig us theorists out of this deep hole
We’d dug ourselves. Best reassess our scale
Of values so as not to let the drive
For theory-centered projects so assail
Our judgment that no thoughts of ours survive
Beyond the stage of critical review
By some internal censor set to strive
For maximum research-points with as few
Hours spent in gaining them as might be spared
From writing research-grant proposals. You
Were quick to say, whenever someone aired
This anti-theory charge, that what they missed
By such comparisons was just what scared
Both management and those recidivist
Upholders of the canon whose real gripe
With each new book on the “New Accents” list
Involved their sense that talents of the type
That went to make good theorists also went
To make the sorts of literature they’d hype,
Those canonists, as fit to represent
The human mind at full creative stretch.
Yet then it seemed the speculative bent
Of theory worked, like poetry, to fetch
Up thoughts, ideas, and images unknown
To those who gave the standard hostile sketch
Of its agenda in the standard tone
Of high disdain. Your writing had a gift
For skewering those reviewers (all the clone-
Like Leavisites especially) who’d lift
Their pen as if reluctantly compelled
To set you straight, then show themselves adrift
Or floundering when it came to concepts spelled
Out as who runs may read in your precise,
Well-groomed, yet laid-back style that so excelled
In knowing just what joke might best suffice
To make the point.
So really what we need’s
Not some routine infusion of cut-price
Arnoldian high seriousness that bleeds
Away into low posturing as soon
As tried, but more an attitude that heeds
Your “Twenty Hamlets” point13: let’s take the tune,
The basic theme, then run as many riffs
On it as some jazz vocalist might croon
Or Shakespeare critic spin against the ifs-
And-buts platoon of scholars set to wage
Their old campaign anew through endless tiffs
In Notes & Queries. Sounding off with sage
Remarks, like Leavis, on the sorry state
Of things would get a laugh on Shakespeare’s stage,
Or catcalls, or be heard at any rate
As just the kind of talk that malcontents
Will typically come on and use to bait
A restive audience. Take their two cents’
Worth, you’d advise, but see the other side,
Their comic aspect, since it best prevents
The sorts of finger-wagging talk you tried
To show was just as out-of-place when used
By jazz-authenticists as when applied
By high-toned Shakespeare critics who accused
You and your rebel crew of making light
Those themes that, weighed more carefully, refused
Such infra-dig recension. Yet despite
That Brechtian or Bakhtinian readiness
To thumb your nose14 whenever you ca
ught sight
Of pious posturing (the TLS
Once ran a photo of you and referred
To your coiffure, and maybe style of dress,
As “a poor man’s Jacques Derrida”) you heard
Far subtler nuances and finer shades
Of meaning in some long neglected word
Than ever struck the not-so-light brigades
Of Shakespeare savants. They deplored the lèse-
Majesté of a writing that degrades,
So they suppose, the solemn offices
Of scholarship—here taking the same line
As, long ago, l’Académie Française
On Shakespeare—yet in truth’s a very mine
Of senses lost on those with filters set
To block whatever readings they’d incline
To count as signs of how absurd things get
When presentism bids our better part15
Of judgment screw itself. For then we let
Anachronistic fancy trump the art
Of balancing (they say) a due respect
For what’s been made of Shakespeare’s works by smart
Interpreters against—lest we neglect
The scholar-critic’s calling—a robust
Sense of how texts, like whole careers, are wrecked
By any too egregious breach of trust
Between two basic items in the shrewd
Shakespearean’s credo. These advise: adjust
To changing times but don’t let that exclude
Such readings altogether from the fold
Of civilized consensus among clued-
Of critic-types who’ve figured just how bold
To be, or not to be.
Not in the least
Your way, that canny ruse to put on hold
The scope for speculation that increased
Apace through theory’s liberating zest
And so make sure their boundary-pushing ceased
At just the point where commonsense deemed best
To rein it in. We didn’t know, back then,
How soon enough you’d stand out from the rest
As scourge of all like-thinkers, even when
They thought like you. So, Terry, if I quote
“We shall not look upon your like again”
(Predictably, you’d say) as the right note
To end on, please forgive this weak resort
To citing just the text you always wrote
About so well: the gesture sells you short.
NOTES
1 Meaning by Hawkes: alludes to Terence Hawkes’s 1992 book Meaning by Shakespeare. This is a typically well-turned title conveying that (1) any meanings we may find in the text are supplied courtesy of Shakespeare, although (2) they are in no way fixed by author’s intent or “original” sense, since (3) we ourselves—readers and audiences—“mean by” the plays whatever we take to be their purport or significance as judged by (what else?) our present-day cultural lights. These were, to say the least, controversial claims and were defended by Terry with incomparable verve and resource.
2 J. Dover Wilson: For a full-dress treatment of the events, chance encounters, scholarly exchanges, and historical-political context, see Terence Hawkes, “Telmah,” in That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process (London: Methuen, 1986), 92–119.
3 to Greg’s critique: The Shakespeare scholar W.W. Greg had published, much to Dover Wilson’s consternation, an article questioning the dramatic coherence of “Hamlet.” See Hawkes, “Telmah,” for the complex of social-political circumstances around Wilson’s reading of this article and its life-changing impact on his subsequent career. My poem gives just the bare bones.
4 unheimlich: unfamiliar, strange, with echoes of Freud on the uncanny.
5 that old imperial theme: Readings of Shakespeare—such as G. Wilson Knight’s book of that title—which emphasize the royalist, conservative, or proto-imperialist aspects of the plays rather than the more subversive or suggestively dissident aspects stressed by recent left-wing critics.
6 Traversi and the like: Derek Traversi is a Shakespeare critic of deeply conservative views (defender of Franco’s regime) who can be read as deploying a transcendental (mystical-religious) interpretation of Shakespeare’s late tragi-comedies in order to disown any political bias while smuggling in all manner of covert ideological baggage.
7 Graham Hough: Cambridge-based literary critic who provoked a sharp response from Terry for some less than positive comments in the London Review of Books concerning literary theory and, more specifically, the New Accents series. Terry’s letter rose to an expertly judged rhetorical climax but ended with a bit of (let’s say) knockabout demotic phraseology rarely to be found in such contexts.
8 cultural materialists: Movement in British literary criticism and theory, active from the early 1980s on, which sought to place texts in their historical-political and sociocultural contexts of production and reception, generally (though not so much in Terry’s case) with an emphasis on the former. In some ways a British counterpart to the US New Historicism, albeit less markedly “textualist” in its orientation.
9 as Leavisites were prone to scoff: Reference to F.R. Leavis, the Cambridge-based critic who had much to say about Shakespeare’s preeminence as an exemplar of “creative-exploratory” language, and who took a strong (some would say dogmatic) line concerning the “great tradition” of English poetry and fiction. He was also known for coming out forcefully against the claims of literary theory in its various, increasingly prominent forms from the US New Criticism down.
10 a coast / For its Bohemia: Much-debated geographical error (maybe joke) in The Winter’s Tale, which has an account of sailors shipwrecked off Bohemia’s nonexistent coast.
11 by Johnson’s time: Dr. Johnson notoriously had little time for Shakespeare’s “quibbles”—his puns, ambiguities, multiplied metaphors, etc.—considering them (along with kindred faults in Donne and other metaphysical poets) just signs of an as-yet barbarous or unreformed language. This extreme, even morbid sensitivity to the threat of linguistic misrule went along with Johnson’s typically eighteenth-century horror of its (supposed) social-political equivalent in the mid seventeenth-century English Civil War. Terry did much to make readers aware of these larger cultural investments at stake in such (seemingly) specialist literary-critical debates.
12 take Armstrong/Fortinbras!: After various en passant allusions to jazz Terry brings his “Hamlet” essay to a half-jesting close by advancing this odd convergence of names as in truth “no coincidence.”
13 your “Twenty Hamlets” point: One of Terry’s best-known lectures of the 1980s; took the TV cigarillo advert as its launch point for running through twenty sketch-interpretations of the play, thus making his point (see note above) about “meaning by Shakespeare” and the open-ended character of reader-response.
14 Bakhtinian readiness / To thumb your nose: Reference to Mikhail Bakhtin, the Soviet critic and theorist who wrote extensively about satire, the carnivaleque, and the many-voiced (“polyphonic”) character of novelistic discourse.
15 when presentism bids our better part: In his later work, Terry took a stronger line on the impossibility (as he saw it) of our ever escaping the interpretative mind-set—the interests, priorities, and ways of reading—imposed by our contemporary cultural milieu. He and I disagreed on this topic of critical presentism and, especially, about its political implications. But his case in its defense was, as always, powerfully and wittily argued with a constant readiness to engage opposing views in a generous and large-minded way. See Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, 2002), and Hawkes and Hugh Grady (eds.), Presentist Shakespeares (London: Routledge, 2006).
ON THE PLURALITY OF WORLDS
Now, as in the Ideas of God there is an infinite number of possible universes, and as only one of them can be actual, there must be a sufficient reason for the choice of God, which leads Him to decide upon one
rather than another.
—Gottfried Leibniz, The Monadology (1714)
For if comparative perfection were sufficient, then in whatever way God had accomplished his work, since there is an infinitude of possible imperfections, it would always have been good in comparison with the less perfect; but a thing is little praiseworthy when it can be praised only in this way.
—Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics (1686)
All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.
All the interests of my reason, speculative as well as practical, combine in the three following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope?
The light dove, cleaving the air in her free flight, and feeling its resistance, might imagine that its flight would be still easier in empty space.
—Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1781)
Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.
—J.B.S. Haldane, Possible Worlds
Each thing’s itself and not another thing.
For the Tempus-Fugitives Page 16
