Being of Two Minds: Modernist Literary Criticism and Early Modern Texts

Being of

Two Minds

MODERNIST LITERARY CRITICISM

AND EARLY MODERN TEXTS

Jonathan Goldberg

FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK 2022

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Contents

Introduction

1. Impersonal Eliot

2. Anonymous Woolf

3. Ambiguous Empson

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Introduction

Being of Two Minds explores literary critical thinking. The literary criticism of T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and William Empson are the sites for this exploration; a chapter is devoted to each of them and their pursuit of questions about the nature of their practice. These questions arise from the ontology of texts, a complex territory, since ontological questions occur in multiple registers. There is, perhaps first, the question of the kind of reality one enters in the act of reading and interpreting a text. There follow the questions texts pose as their subject—ultimate concerns: questions about life and death, individuality and relationality, among others. Such questions came to seem especially fraught in the early years of the twentieth century as old assurances about artistic forms as well as ways of organizing meaningful lives appeared to have frayed irreparably. Willa Cather’s pronouncement in the preface to her collection of literary critical essays, Not Above Forty, that the world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts, echoes similar statements by Virginia Woolf, who declared that on or about December 1910 human character changed in perhaps her best-known work of literary criticism, Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown.¹ A few years later she wondered, in A Room of One’s Own, if the First World War marked that watershed in human consciousness. The exact date is not the question so much as the dilemmas raised by this supposed break: how to live; how to write. The two questions are entwined in the thinking of the three authors I consider in this book—not that they arrive at the same answers to these questions; not, in fact, that answers are what they (or I) seek to deliver. The shared point about the thinking exemplified in the writing I examine is that it does not come to an end so long as one is able to go on thinking; indeed, at moments, each of the three entertain the possibility that thought goes on even when the individual can think no longer. This thought can arise from realizing that the reading of a text is never fully finished. We know that from the obvious fact that readings are answered by other readings, our own as well as those made by other critics, whether they further an interpretation, complicate it, dispute it; no reading ever delivers a final definitive meaning. The dilemma that modernists felt had come to a crisis has not been solved, nor can it be; the issues raised then remain.

The scope of issues is vast, as even this brief preliminary sketch suggests; this book and the body of work it considers do not to seek to answer them, certainly do not suppose there is an answer to them. I try to stay close to the texts at hand while recognizing that the ontological questions raised trespass the border between the literary and the philosophical (and perhaps the religious, as well). A particular focus of the period guides and limits me. It’s the one T. S. Eliot announced in The Metaphysical Poets, a 1921 essay that represents a moment in Eliot’s thinking that he quickly came to repudiate and that, nonetheless, caught hold. (It was F. R. Leavis and the contributors to Scrutiny that first continued to promote Eliot’s radical revisions to the canon.)² Eliot had declared in the face of a dilemma felt by many of his compeers—the task that Ezra Pound memorably enunciated in the phrase make it new—that metaphysical poetry offered a model of how to proceed—how to make the past new as much as how to introduce something new when the old seemed no longer meaningful. The metaphysicals, to Eliot, showed the way: following them the poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate, if necessary, language into his meaning.³

These qualities, this violence, which had led Dr. Johnson to regard the metaphysicals as outliers, were for Eliot, at this point, guides to the direct current of English poetry as it once had been and might yet be practiced again in order to tackle genuine poetic questions. Eliot parsed these as the relationship between thought and feeling. Its current sundering had begun with Milton and Dryden; one could instead look to Donne (perhaps paramount among others) not just to get back the soul that Milton had divorced from body in poetry, but the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tract, as well (290).

Eliot’s 1921 call is in line with his thinking in Tradition and the Individual Talent, his 1919 brief for a new poetry that would answer tradition at the same time as it rewrote it. One way that would happen was by finding figures like Donne, once marginalized, as rather contributory to the direct current and thus able to stand by Homer, Greek tragedy, Dante, and Shakespeare without unseating them but nonetheless allowing the really new (15) to reorganize a past made present, a past no longer past. Eliot suggested that it would not be preposterous that the new could reorder the old, even as he also proposed that the most individual parts of the work of the modern poet may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert themselves most vigorously (14). This book starts with a close reading of Eliot’s Tradition and the Individual Talent not only for its importance as a manifesto for modernist literary theory and practice, but because formulations like these, in which the past seems never to die and yet to require a resuscitation by the present, press hard on ordinary logics and categorical distinctions of before and after, opening paths to nondualistic thinking, a condition of being of two minds at once that, in this instance, raises questions about temporality. In question is the temporality of life and of textual life; such questions are raised by each of the critics I read in this book, but not in the same way.

Eliot presses metaphor to do what one might expect a more propositional writing to convey. Although he often writes as if he were presenting a logically sequential case, it falls apart the closer one looks. I explore these gaps— especially those that announce themselves as such. I do not pursue a hermeneutics of suspicion, a desire to reveal some hidden truth. Rather, I follow Giorgio Agamben, who, asking, What Is the Act of Creation, takes joy in those moments when a text reveals its capacity to be developed, often by what it leaves unspoken. If we enter the discussion there, we inevitably end up at a point where it is not possible to distinguish between what is ours and what belongs to the author we are reading. Agamben calls this place a zone of indifference that he ties to the notion of potentiality in Aristotle.⁴ The sole literary quotation in Tradition and the Individual Talent comes from an early modern text, The Revenger’s Tragedy, conspicuously unidentified by Eliot. At the end of the essay another unidentified text is cited, this time quoted in Greek; it comes from De Anima 1.4, 408b, a speculative sentence about mind (nous) being eternal in which Aristotle wonders if our own minds might have access to an eternal mind.⁵ How can we, who live in mortal bodies, also exist beyond our mortal selves? Eliot halts and holds at this borderline state. He remains a being of two minds, bound to the life of the body, bound to the life of the mind. Midway in his essay, Eliot suggests that a metaphor may explain how the poet enters the condition of impersonality requisite for the poetic existence that represents the poet’s relation to the past as well as to present readers a state of mind perhaps akin to Agamben’s indifference. Eliot’s essay continually crosses between the positions of the poet and the reader in its attempt to establish where the poem takes place. His metaphor of a catalytic conversion results in a change in elements to produce a sulfuric mixture that yet leaves a thread of platinum unchanged, a strange passage that I follow through Eliot’s allusion to Dante meeting his teacher Brunetto Latini in the sulfuric circle of sodomites as a plot for his redescription of literary history. Sexual recastings also can be glimpsed in the projects of Woolf and Empson, although not in Eliot’s terms. Indeed, that is a central point in this book: that these modernist writers may share a critical project but that each is framed differently, in terminology, in the literary examples chosen to examine. Those differences reflect different ways of thinking, including differences in the responses of Woolf and Empson to aspects of Eliot’s thinking.

Woolf can be supposed in dialogue with Eliot in A Room of One’s Own and the two volumes of The Common Reader, although that is not something she makes explicit in her rethinking of the canon under the pressure of the present moment.⁶ Eliot’s canon is male territory. In A Room of One’s Own, the text I first explore, Woolf questions the absence of a tradition of women writers, turning over the question from a number of angles. Can that absence simply be assumed, she asks, given that the history of women, even the definition of what a woman is, has been delivered almost entirely by men whose gender seems to be what qualifies them to provide what passes for fact and truth? These facts are nothing but motivated fictions; Woolf answers in kind, and in both registers: she provides a roll call of earlier women writers (in it, Aphra Behn is the first woman to have earned a living from her writing, a woman whose sexuality does not seem to have been ordered by patriarchal prescriptions); she creates a fictional woman writer whose existence may perhaps be believed. Woolf names that woman Judith Shakespeare, twin sister to her brother Will, identical to him in every respect except gender (in that respect like the twins Viola and Sebastian in Twelfth Night). Her imagining a female Shakespeare resonates with Eliot’s call to look back to the early seventeenth century for predecessors to current poetic practice.

Being of two minds, Woolf insists on both the possibility that such a woman might have existed and the likelihood that she didn’t. Her solution to this seemingly impossible coincident ontological duality lies in the likelihood that the Anonymous who so often appears in early modern collections of verse might well name a woman writer. The naming of the woman without a name might seem very far away from the name Shakespeare until one realizes, as Woolf insists, that his proper name names his canonical status, not the person. When we say Shakespeare, it is not the man we mean so much as the writer of his texts, the man who gets a name from his work. Shakespeare names him as canonical. Anon, too, may name the nameless woman writer who exists in her writing. The author of A Room of One’s Own presents herself as nameless. Woolf answers Eliot in his own terms and by reversing them. Her anonymous and his impersonal share negations (a-, im-) that attach them to their supposed opposites, the name and the person. Even these terms can be turned around: persons, etymologically speaking, are masks. The proper name, as Shakespeare’s punning sonnets on will insist, is hardly univocal or only self-referential. Both he and his beloved have wills.

Woolf thus twins ontological questions about the reality of fictions and the reality of personal existence. They come together on the last page of A Room of One’s Own when she expresses her belief … that the poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. Judith Shakespeare lives, Woolf continues, in you and me precisely because great poets do not die; they are continuing presences.⁷ The life of the poet is not the same as mortal life, yet it also coincides with our life, the life that we, you and me, addressed in these words, confer. These readers include others than the person reading those words at any moment, and some who read are as undoubtedly dead as the author who wrote them. The life in the text is not simply there. Woolf designates the life she has in mind as the common life which is the real life and not … the little separate lives we live as individuals. That, Woolf continues, is the world she would have us realize that we inhabit and not only the world of men and women. We are enjoined to recognize that we live in two worlds at once, the one we ordinarily inhabit and assume to be the world and the one Woolf calls reality, a world lived in common and beyond not only the demarcations that separate you and me but that join us in a life not our own, nor one bounded by the parameter of mortality. It is not an afterlife but rather the life that continues after us, in other people, and in the world we leave when we die but that continues without us. That continuing world includes the ones poets imagine and put into words. It is true, as Gertrude tells Hamlet, that we all have death in common, but it also is true that we each die our own death but can all participate in the imaginative life that texts offer.

That common life is one of the meanings of common in Woolf’s project of The Common Reader, sets of essays, most of them previously published in venues like TLS, gathered, selected, edited, but also including essays written to fill out its project to cover a range of English literature (and a few examples from other national literatures) that extends far beyond the all-male canon Eliot imagines to constitute the mind of Europe. Woolf includes works by women, many of them written in forms that would not immediately be categorized as literature; she focuses often on the representations of women in the works she considers or pairs canonical and noncanonical authors as she does in an essay on Chaucer and the Paston letters. My discussion of The Common Reader looks closely at that essay among the additional ones Woolf provided to supplement the ones she chose. They are often essays on early literature: Eliot had called for a widening of the canon beyond those already included; Woolf adds women writers, women patrons, women readers, women characters, exceeding and abrading Eliot’s agenda for literature. Woolf writes about the Greeks not as forebears, but to distinguish them from us; she probes the question of whether we can understand these texts—we can’t, and that’s why we keep returning to them. They are not assimilable to a singular vision of the West that runs uninterrupted from the classics to the present. Their world is anything but the one Christianity misshaped.

Woolf’s procedures in these essays involve continually rethinking and reframing. Jacobean drama widens our imaginations and clogs them; its characters are not so much lifelike as life forces, violences, Woolf calls them. The language in early modern texts is too rhetorical to deliver immediately recognizable people, but nonetheless does at stunning moments. Woolf’s approach is epitomized in her treatment of Montaigne, the one early modern non-English figure she treats. He displaces the expected Shakespeare, a writer Woolf read over and again, as unpublished notes reveal and her diary records, but who barely