(Such thoughts amaze
You as they should) a day of blue-
Sky prospects yet in store
For all the multi-million different ways
Our lives could always go to skew
Their routine compass-points. For then us shore-
Bound types might raise
Long-downcast eyes to where the view
Now bids them freely soar
And readjust their coast-accustomed gaze
To oceans glimpsed ‘not with but through
The eye’, as Blake desired. Else we ignore
All that the haze
Of habit had us misconstrue
As simply down to poor
Eyesight or some such sensory malaise,
So finding reason to eschew
That matutinal glory-song as your
New trick to faze
The mind of a late-sleeper who,
Like me, lies waiting for
A sub-ecstatic wake-up that delays
The dawn assault. Way out of true,
I’ve come to think, the idea that would draw
From that which stays
The flagging spirit just a few
Stock pretexts to deplore
As mere credulity whatever pays,
In just your way, the homage due
To days. For it’s their dawnings underscore
Each latest phase
Of our awakening that drew
First light from night’s rapport.
HYSTERON-PROTERON (DOUBLE SONNET)
I admit that I do not understand the title that Chopin liked to give these short pieces: Preludes. Preludes to what?
—André Gide, “Notes on Chopin”
When Liszt wrote that “they are not only pieces destined to be played in the guise of introductions to other pieces,” the key word is “only”: Liszt at once admitted the traditional function of the genre while he praised the poetic ways in which Chopin’s contribution exceeded this tradition.
—Jeffrey Kallberg, Chopin at the Boundaries
It is but an hysteron proteron, and preposterous conceit, to fancie wages before the work . . .
—Henry More, Annotations (1682)
What are these preludes preludes to?, asked Gide,
Of Chopin as it happens, though he might
Have pressed the query further. What if he’d
Opted to turn the thing around, re-write
The rule of part and whole, and ask instead
By what generic warrant it should seem
Plain true to say, of anything we’ve read,
Or thought, or said, that this exhausts the theme
Or ends the prelude? That which guaranteed
The law of genre never managed quite
To screen all mixed-mode variants that might lead
Beyond its safe enclosure to a site
Of meanings, melodies, or forms ill-bred
As breeding goes. This metaleptic scheme
For genre-stretching gives the go-ahead,
Like double-sonnet form, to move upstream
Against the backward pull, yet not exceed
The norm so far that then it seems alright
To skim-write or to aquaplane. What’s freed
From custom’s grip or newly brought to light
By hybrid modes is all the things unsaid
As much by those subdued to the regime
Of formal rectitude as those who tread
Undaunted where the first lot fear to dream.
So Gide’s enquiry begs us grant the need
For lingering cadences that won’t incite
The rage for closure in an ear misled
By chords one false relation might redeem.
TERZA RIMA FOR TERRY (MEANING BY HAWKES)1
Terry Hawkes was my mentor, colleague in Cardiff, good friend, and regular Saturday-night drinking companion for more than three decades, so his death in January 2014 left me wishing we had remained more closely in touch during the past few years. I had two main reasons for choosing what might seem the quaint or distinctly eighteenth-century genre of verse-essay or verse-epistle. One was our last exchange of emails when Terry had said some typically acute and generous things about previous ventures of mine in a similar mode. The second was my feeling that the style and ethos of that period were close to what Terry most enjoyed about living in the cross-over zone between academe, literary journalism, and critical theory where the gloves were apt to come off—at any rate in print—and a ready wit would often do vital service alongside critical acumen and depth of scholarship. He wouldn’t have wanted solemn proceedings so I tried to evoke—rather than match or imitate—something of Terry’s own cheerfully irreverent, unfailingly good-humored, verbally inventive, at times polemically hard-hitting but never less than genial and magnanimous spirit.
The main topic is of course “theory” and the large—indeed central—role he played in propagating new ideas about literature, criticism, and culture through his editorship, from the early 1980s on, of the New Accents book series and the journal Textual Practice. The poem also talks a lot about Terry’s truly ground-breaking essays in Shakespeare criticism, his frequent run-ins with hostile (anti-theory) reviewers and respondents, and his expert deployment of cultural-materialist readings as a natural extension of adversarial class politics within and beyond the academy. These went along with his singular gift—or creative flair—for approaching issues of Shakespeare interpretation via some ingeniously reconstructed set of historical and/or personal circumstances as they bore on some particular scholar-critic at some especially salient or critical point in a play’s reception-history. Terry’s essay on Dover Wilson’s notably over-determined relationship to “Hamlet” was (I think) the first of these exhilarating ventures and, for my money, the most inspirational, so it figures as the main point of reference here.
What the poem tries to do in a more general way is make the case that opponents of literary theory—some teachers of creative writing among them—are getting it wrong when they posit a kind of inbuilt antagonism between it and the processes, whatever these may be, involved in writing poetry or fiction. One way to challenge that idea is to point out how many students at various levels choose to do both and manage to combine them with no signs of stress or cognitive/creative dissonance. Another—more prominent here—is the sheer self-evidence of literary as well as intellectual creativity in a critic/theorist like Terry and others who looked to literary theory as offering a welcome release from the strictures of mainstream academic discourse. Debunking the more arrogant or self-serving claims of creative writers was undoubtedly one of Terry’s favorite pastimes and very likely has something to do with the kinds of ambivalence or creative-critical tension—if not the full-scale Bloomian “anxiety”—plainly legible in critics like Geoffrey Hartman and the Yale acolytes of deconstruction. However in Terry’s case the creativity expressed itself far more directly and with no such agonized quasi-Freudian detours, displacements, or sublimations. Scholarship and criticism were creative activities for him, and he did more than anyone since William Empson to show that writing about Shakespeare had better be criticism as “answerable style”—in Hartman’s well-chosen phrase—if it was to have any claim on our receptive-responsive powers.
Anyway I hope that some of this will come across in the poem which I dedicate not only to Terry’s memory but also to that other eminent Shakespearean, John Drakakis. John did more than anyone over the past thirty years both to carry on the cultural-materialist project and, after Terry’s first major illness, to put him back in touch with his colleagues and admirers around the world.
The Cardiff thing it was, plus things that went
Much farther back—mum, dad, class stuff, and school,
In your case Handsworth Grammar, where they sent
Bright kids to learn the ropes in ways that you’ll
Soon learn to turn around against the bunch
Of snooty Oxbr
idge types. Nobody’s fool
Unless, like Lear’s, the one who had a hunch
That speaking truth to power was something best
Done by convincing them you’re out to lunch
On some wild anecdote or screwball jest
Which then—before they notice it—turns out
A real game-changer. That was how you’d test
Those manor-born Shakespeareans who’d tout
Their natural entitlement to tell
Us groundlings what the plays were all about,
Or how us dull provincials would do well
To cultivate a decent reverence
For such transcendent genius. This should quell
All thought that common readers could dispense
With mediation by the fit though few
Interpreters who’d properly make sense
Of things and help the hoi polloi construe
What otherwise would surely stretch their poor
Resources past endurance. So when you
Came up with sundry items from the store
Of odd Shakespeareana—all those tales
Retrieved from centuries of scholar-lore
Or followed back along the mazy trails
Of critics’ lives and times—it was to show
Bardolators what craziness prevails
When zealous champions of the status quo
In Shakespeare studies, such as (let’s recall)
J. Dover Wilson,2 pledged themselves to go
That extra step in striving to forestall
The least suggestion that in truth their god
Might sometimes err or even Hamlet fall
To Greg’s critique.3 Should its creator nod
And it not hang together then (he wrote
In Milestones on the Dover Road) the squad
Of strikers up North might as well just vote
To join the Soviets since, as well as Greg’s
Outrageous article, he’d taken note
On his rail journey up to meet the dregs
Of disaffected labor how the press
On that same day was putting all its eggs
In revolution’s basket. Just to stress
Him out yet further the war-effort now
Looked well-nigh certain to collapse unless
He won them over and contrived somehow,
In this his current role, to get the strike-
Call lifted and persuade them to allow
Munitions through despite his strong dislike
(Think Coriolanus) of the fawning role
This might require. You figured how he’d psych
Himself up and establish his control
Over these looming crises by the choice,
From then on, more devoutly to extol
Great Shakespeare’s genius, give that genius voice
Through commentary, and so redeem its claim
Against all comers. Chiefly he’d rejoice
In giving back to Hamlet its good name
Against the charge of playing fast and loose
With time-scales or enjoying unjust fame
Since the cracked plot gives Hamlet no excuse
For his wild conduct.
Other critics caught
On soon enough and started to produce
More Shakespeare criticism of the sort
You trail-blazed there, but didn’t have the near-
Shakespearean dexterity of thought
Or—what enabled that—a poet’s ear
(There were some early poems, but you kept
The fact well hidden) for effects of sheer
Linguistic serendipity. These leapt,
For you, right off the page or gave the cue
For jokes and puns unthinkable except
By way of those same language-paths that you,
The signifier-sleuth, had tracked so far
Into Shakespearean country that the view
At times seemed quite unheimlich.4 If we are,
In truth, all these years on still just a touch
Bewildered maybe it’s because the star
We hitched our lumbering wagons to was such
A dazzler that it left the common sky
Of scholarship a zone where nothing much
Stood out compared with how some pure trouvaille,
Some chance encounter turned up in the course
Of (maybe) casual reading, by and by
Took on the unlikely role of vaulting-horse
To scenes, real or imagined, that supplied
Through Prospero-like conjuring a source
Of critical perspectives from outside
The goldfish-bowl they’d made of academe,
Those keepers of the flame. That’s why you tried
To get them off that old imperial theme,5
To show them how the transcendental stuff
(Traversi and the like6) ran out of steam
Once recognized as just a high-toned puff
For fascism, to épater the kind
Of Oxbridge tone you caught when Graham Hough7
Reviewed those first New Accents books (“please mind
Your language—don’t say that,” they begged in vain,
Your publisher and everyone inclined
To smooth things over), and—surely a main
Intent of all your work—to take a hint
From Marx, confront them on their own terrain,
The Eng Lit gentry, call them out in print,
And give no quarter to the dozy heirs
Of scholar-privilege. To look asquint
At all the classic texts they took as theirs,
As if by right, to annotate and gloss
Was your big strategy to kick upstairs
Your young “New Accents” crew and teach the boss-
Class how their precious canon might emerge
Scrubbed up and sprightlier despite the loss
Of culture-capital. A very scourge,
They thought, with new barbarians at the gate
And cultural materialists8 set to purge
The libraries till no vestige of the Great
Works they’d long served now lingered to reproach
Them for their failure to avert the fate
Of literature once theory drove a coach
And horses through the delicate rapport
Of text and reader. Truth is, you could poach
The big game—even Shakespeare—right before
The big game-keepers’ eyes because you’d read
The plays more often, better, and with more
Attention to what other critics said,
Or—just as relevantly—didn’t say
But wrapped in secrecy, so that instead
It fell to you and those who knew a way
Of making silence speak to unconceal
The interests that required they not betray
Such less than noble truths. You had a feel
For just what hidden crux it was in this
Or that Shakespearean text that made them deal
With it so off-the-pointedly, or miss
The mark with such persistence that their lapse
Of insight brought the hermeneutic kiss
Of life to those you’d helped to see the gaps
In classic texts as not to be repaired
By some discreet re-drawing of the maps
To join them up. Rather it meant a shared
Re-cultivation of the common land
Long since enclosed by critics who declared
Themselves uniquely fit to take a stand
On matters that required the exercise
Of literary judgment, not the hand-
Me-down ideas that took the Theory prize
(They liked to joke) for ways of passing off
Some half-baked notion in the splendid guise
Of some new jargon coined by some new prof
At the Sorbonn
e, or Yale, or any place
Except (as Leavisites were prone to scoff9)
The kinds of native habitat by grace
Of which the star-struck theorists might have learned
That well-trained readers didn’t need to chase
After strange gods. Such jibes you shrewdly turned
Around and batted back with perfect ease,
So that New Accents-bashers always earned
Not just another point-by-point reprise
Of where they’d got it wrong but, lest they not
Quite cotton on, a joke or two to tease
Them into seeing how they’d lost the plot,
Whether in reading Shakespeare or That Shakes
Peherian Rag, because of some blind-spot
Or (more like) ear that’s deaf to what it takes
To write engagingly about a text
Whose challenge to the keen-eared critic makes
That task the more demanding. This perplexed
Those on the anti-theory side who took
For granted how the curse of theory hexed
Our language-sense, although the merest look
At any page of yours would quickly serve
To knock that thought for six and cock a snook
At all those cloth-eared types who had the nerve
To set aside the awkward truth that yours,
Not theirs, is writing with the kind of verve
And creativity that’s on all fours
With how good poets (Shakespeare more than most)
Took every verbal chance to settle scores
For the Tempus-Fugitives Page 15