For the Tempus-Fugitives

by Christopher Norris

  (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