-
Marc Redfield: Geoffrey, thank you
for this occasion. I'd like to pick up on the present
occasion and suggest that our conversation be centered
on Wordsworth and then maybe also on poetry and
religion and the present moment or modernity.
-
Geoffrey Hartman: Okay.
-
MR: Partly following out on your
talk at the conference and partly thinking about, let's
say, the function of criticism and poetry at the
present time. So let me ask you an opening question,
which is about Wordsworth. You have written about so
many authors and periods and topics, but Wordsworth has
always been, particularly since 1964, your special
author, if that's fair.
-
GH: Actually . . .
-
MR: Maybe not.
-
GH: Earlier. [Laughs.]
-
MR: Earlier, yes. [Both laugh.]
-
GH: Earlier, because The
Unmediated Vision had its first chapter on
Wordsworth.
-
MR: Okay. And the others were Rilke
and Hopkins and Valéry. And you continued to
write about these figures, but . . .
-
GH: I've continued to write on
Hopkins . . . not on Rilke . . . but also on
Valéry. I wrote on Rilke later only in view of a
comment on Paul Celan. I mean, he figures, but not in a
sustained way.
-
MR: You've written about the
Wordsworthian sense of place that you acquired as a
child refugee . . .
-
GH: Right.
-
MR: . . . in England, and your most
recent writing up through today continues to draw
strength from Wordsworth and to return to him, so I was
wondering if you would be willing to try to sort of say
something in an interview format about your own sense
of the importance of Wordsworth for us today. I know
that's an enormous question, but that might start us in
a direction.
-
GH: Well, you know, you have to
presuppose that poetry is of importance. [Chuckles.]
And then, that Wordsworth is of importance. I mean that
it is true if there were no Wordsworth, Milton still
would be important, Spenser, Shakespeare, and, you
know, continental poetry, and so on. Poetry would not
go away . . . But having said that, Wordsworth does
stand there permanently to my mind, and I think that's
a general consensus; we've recognized that there is a
divide between the old and the new: symbolism, old
style, new style, however you would describe it.
Wordsworth is an innovator and one should talk about
exactly why he is the beginning of modern poetry. It
doesn't matter if we say modern or modernist. We still
don't know the decisive elements that went into that
change from an older style of symbolism and writing
poetry to the new style—the new style being a new
type of visionariness but also a certain intermingling
of prosaicness or a diminished fear of the difference
between prose and poetry. Should poetry come closer to
prose, that might be a strength rather than a weakness.
So, I think this development, which may not be the
first thing people think about, has something to do
with the history of prose, at least in England. Because
in England there was previously, before Wordsworth, a
considerable division between poetic style and prose
style; and Wordsworth, as you know, revolted against a
special language for poetry, wanted to do away with
"poetic diction."
-
So, one would have to make an excursus into prose
and prose rhythms and into the whole question of the
transformation of meter, which finally goes into free
style or vers libre. That is only the
technical level. These technical matters are important,
even if we cannot make a one-to-one relation between
technical and thematic or form and content. But the
main thing that makes one think of Wordsworth as
originator is the way he handles paranormal or intense,
quasi-mystical feelings for the natural world ("the
incumbent mystery of sense and soul") as an everyday
kind of ecstasy. I don't quite know how to put it and
so I usually cite Freud's Psychopathology of Everyday
Life. This aspect of Wordsworth was clear enough yet
not valued at the beginning, but now we have no great
problem with it. Behind it, of course, is a crucial
reflection on the depth of everyday life. As well as
the role of nature in everyday life as a nourishing
environment, and how it affects what we are
increasingly calling the ecology of mind. That is, not
just the relation between open spaces or rural nature
and mental space, but a necessary symbiosis of nature
and mind or nature and the imagination. One learns to
understand the poet's fear that nature in the future
may not sustain a characteristically English
culture—will not sustain the imagination it has
fostered. And if nature does not sustain the
imagination, then the mind will desert nature or the
imagination will. The result is fatal to the ecosystem
of both nature and mind. There is a growing dependency
on increasingly coarser stimuli abetted by urbanization
(a process the poet analyses in his 1800 Preface to
Lyrical Ballads), the crowding of people in
cities, the hurry, the helter-skelter, the
proliferation of news and sensational
writing,—matters that, later on, Walter Benjamin
also observed and expressed in more direct
socioeconomic terms. Benjamin added the insight that
modernity did not augment perception and sensation by
the addition of new media but the contrary of that,
that the media actually impoverish our capacity to feel
directly and for "the meanest flower."
-
MR: The shock experience . . .
-
GH: Yes, Wordsworth emphasizes the
shock experience of the City, but as a negative. Even
when poets like Baudelaire don't talk about shock, that
shock enters their poetry. Wordsworth does talk about
it, especially in his description of London in The
Prelude, but it is interesting that for him the
shock came first in youth, from nature itself, and in
that context was positive, tonic. And he stays with
that, and holds onto that, because the later, urban
shock is more intractable, does not contribute to
maturation, or else he just doesn't know how to deal
with it. Of course, anyone serious about urban studies
would say "Wordsworth is
arrièré, he gets it backwards;
cities can be developed as a wonderful habitat, we just
have to get used to, use them as a creative field of
stimuli rather than succumbing to trauma and sensory
flooding."
-
MR: Still, would it be fair to say
that you've seen and read in Wordsworth a poet whose
particular power speaks to. . . well I was thinking of
two things as you were speaking, they are, of course,
themes in your writing: the impending ecological
disaster, and then secondly the degree of violence
which has gotten attached to religion and to
expressions of religious fervor in the very
contemporary world.
-
GH: He knew about the violence, and
he knew it from England's history itself. He became a
very strong supporter of the via media, yet
was not overly concerned with religion. He may have
been close, early on, to the spirit of Methodism, and
did not fear "enthusiasm" the way that Locke and other
enlightened thinkers feared religious mania of every
kind. Chiefly, though, he was concerned that if your
thoughts turned too much towards otherworldliness and
became trapped in compensatory religious structures of
the imagination, then your sensibility would move away
from nature even more, and closer to apocalyptic
fancies. And that violence, leading to the
loss of the natural world as what should suffice, as
poetry's true nourishment, he wanted to avoid at all
costs. That is one reason why he doesn't, like Blake,
erect a counter-visionary structure in his poetry. He
doesn't try to replace one vision by another but subtly
transforms, "naturalizes" an older symbolic mode
entirely.
-
MR: I'd like to pursue that along a
particular track, and it's a bit self-interested
because I've been trying to write about the "war on
terror" in relation to certain Romantic sources, if you
can believe it . . .
-
GH: You gave a lecture on that at
Yale I could not attend.
-
MR: Yes, and in (I think) 1947,
Jean Paulhan wrote a book that's pretty much forgotten
except in French departments called Les fleurs de
Tarbes, ou la Terreur dans les lettres, and it had
the sort of counterintuitive thesis that modern
literature, we would say romantic as opposed to classic
literature, craves terror in a sense because it craves
transparency.
-
GH: Craves?
-
MR: Desires.
-
GH: Desires . . .
-
MR: . . . is attracted to terror,
to the Revolution, because it desires immediacy, or to
pick up the great title . . .
-
GH: Okay, that's . . .
-
MR: . . . "unmediated vision."
-
GH: I must admit to an early
admiration (craving?) for unmediatedness. It may be
that the terror experienced by the poet, also as the
Terror that beset a phase in the internecine struggle
of the revolutionary factions in France, has something
fanatical and ideological in common with our
contemporary experience. I am not sure, though, that
this murderousness in the name of religion (also of
"enlightenment" or self-empowerment when we think of
Wordsworth's critique of Godwinianism in The
Borderers) arises out of a desire for the
unmediated. Yet as a wish to throw off all hypocrisy,
repression, convention, arbitrary
mind-shackles—in short "second nature"—it
tends that way and may indulge in fantasies of a
violent purgation. The French Revolution joins up with,
becomes, a political religion. Wordsworth was, for a
time, an enthusiast of the revolution; his
understanding of it was not far from that of Carlyle,
who later on saw it, despite its militant secularism,
as a religious phenomenon—a religious phenomenon
in the political realm. The wild post-Revolutionary
speculations, Wordsworth wrote in The Prelude,
tried to separate future from past absolutely. They
separated, as by a gulf, the man who would be, the man
of a new order—I'm paraphrasing—from the
man of the past. Eventually that led the poet to
return, in reaction, to continuities with his own
tradition; even to define the poet generically as one
who would be saved from the wound of such discontinuity
by memories returning of his early intercourse with a
beauty "old as creation." Even the early fearful
experiences bound him, as he now saw, to his habitat.
He turned from certain abstract immediacies and came to
honor the concrete, embedded qualities of a religion
apparently formed by spirit of place, by local and
national traditions. There is, we might say, a return
from globalism to localism. But still, being a complex
if unconventional thinker, Wordsworth had a notion of
natural religion that was pedagogical. Nature was a
great pedagogue, and any social engineering, any
mechanical scheme of education, could not replace the
accidented and multifaceted influences that, he
claimed, made him a poet. In The Prelude he
describes, for instance, how Nature liberated him from,
well, I call it a "spot syndrome," from fixating
localizations. Their localization has a mythic, even
theophanic strength; but that does not cancel the
psychological drama of having to progress from their
haunting to the concept of Nature itself, nature as
Nature, something much larger. Wordsworth's
Prelude becomes our first significant poem
centering on developmental psychology. He couldn't
simply go back to local virtue, or local attachment.
"Local attachment" at the end of the eighteenth century
was a dialectical response—well, even if not
dialectical, it was a reactive response to the growing
cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment. All these are the
complicated movements which factor into what we call
"Wordsworth."
-
MR: Yes. And perhaps, to just
pursue this one step longer and then we'll turn to
something else, Paulhan defines "terror in letters" as
the desire to extirpate the flowers of rhetoric, right,
and to achieve an unmediated vision, and Wordsworth's
relation's highly complex . . .
-
GH: Yes, yes, it is . . .
-
MR: . . . the achieving of a
plainer style.
-
GH: Exactly . . . Paulhan would be
relevant to Wordsworth and his distrust of rhetorical
"glitter." Yet in Lyrical Ballads he didn't
want to extirpate, really, the flowers or colors of
rhetoric. He wanted to give them genuine roots, wanted
them to proceed from the popular imagination, and, as
it were, emerge from the soil, from a heart, or
homeland. So Yeats too asks us to ground myth in the
earth The result is, as in many of the Lyrical
Ballads, a minimalism of incident and style; and
when the poet does use flowers of rhetoric, they are
very closely, almost pedantically, but still quite
powerfully attached to the particular person or story.
In the "Idiot Boy," even though it is night, the idiot
boy thinks the moon is the sun which shines so cold,
and the owls hooting are the cocks crowing. So the
metafelicity of this, the distortion, the
coloration—what one could call strong, crazy
metaphors— is sunk into the specific instance.
Otherwise he is a minimalist, as in the Lucy poems.
There, when you compare "Strange fits of passion" to "A
slumber did my spirit seal," you see how much he
elides, or rather condenses in the latter. But there is
no sense of wishing to extirpate figures, only dead
metaphors. Live metaphors, however rare, are the stuff
of poetry. When in "The Ruined Cottage" the baker's
cart goes by Margaret's house, because she has no
money, so why stop there, she says, "that wagon doesn't
care for me." She doesn't say "the baker doesn't." She
transfers it to the wagon, "That wagon doesn't care for
me."
-
MR: It's the more powerful because
it's a sense of a process.
-
GH: Yes, you feel the poetic
process, the metaphoric transfer or displacement . . .
The animation of what is inert, of the mute, insensate
thing, is part of that, and is justified by Margaret's
passion, even as she remains movingly shy of cursing,
or anger, or attributing blame directly.
-
MR: I suppose I'm trying to connect
this to Wordsworth's resistance to apocalypse as you
have taught us to see.
-
GH: If apocalypse is also . . .
-
MR: . . . as a resistance to
terror.
-
GH: Yes. Well, that's a jump, yet
it's relevant. Apocalypse is always associated with
violent images of purgation, and with a rhetorical
violence too, about which Wordsworth may be too
squeamish. So I think that is right, your perception is
to the point. Wordsworth's purgation of poetic diction
is not terroristic in Paulhan's sense. His plain style
bypasses (to Blake's disgust) the "terrors" of a
theomanic imagination for the deeper, daily, subtle
profoundnesses of a mind seeking what will suffice.
-
MR: And then let me ask you a
question that goes in a slightly different direction;
again, I have half my eye on the contemporary world
that we are living and suffering in. One aspect of
globalization, of course, is the global spread of
English. And in our little local part of the world,
what that means is a great deal of stress put on
foreign language departments, near catastrophe for
German departments in many universities . . .
-
GH: Also for French at the
moment.
-
MR: For French, yes. So here, just
to sound a little perverse about it, is a problem that
Wordsworth can't help us with as it were. One would
want to, of course, instead urge that people read Rilke
or Valéry in the original. The serious question
I would like to ask you is for any reflections on
comparative Romanticism and the future you see for
comparative study in the world today.
-
GH: I can't give you even a
moderately simple answer that would suggest a clear
corrective or resolution for the paradox that even as
we become multicultural we neglect the basis of every
culture, its language. Our globalism becomes ever more
abstract and our actual knowledge ever more parochial.
That is why I prefer not to limit your concern to
Romanticism. Of course, one should go back to
Romanticism and extrapolate from it because there is so
much of it that involves theory of language. I don't
mean just Rousseau's theory of language but also the
more concrete, empirical reflections of Humboldt in
Germany. We should learn, I think, to pay attention to,
to study as an ensemble, language theory,
interpretation theory, and the creative literature that
arises at a time that introduces via Goethe the concept
of world literature, without any thought of abandoning
the study of the particular national literatures. Then
you also have to go back in time and study the
dialectic of global and local: the way a language
renews itself, is renewed by writers trying to revive
its fossilized metaphors or retrieve its supposed
original vigor. The short answer is that unless we
cultivate a greater respect for the way language is an
indefeasible part of thought rather than its
utilitarian shell, we won't progress but will regress
in this media age.
-
It would be pedantic of me to offer a précis
of the differing literary histories and philosophies of
language in major European countries, the ones I know
about (France, Germany, England), but Comp. Lit.
scholars are acquainted with how productive and erudite
European stylistics was in the hands of a Spitzer or
Auerbach, who knew the evolution of the relevant
vernaculars and could closely relate them to their
developing literatures—interactive yet
distinctive for each nationality. So one can extract
some very important lessons concerning the way that
language fertilizes itself and exerts great influence
on a historical thesaurus but also on the imagination.
How language is intrinsic to the development of a
literary imagination. It's not that you have an
imagination and then you strive to find a language for
it, somehow create new words. It is a much more
intricate process. So I would go in that direction, but
the modern instance is made more difficult because
language is proliferating unequally: in certain areas
very, very fast, and in some areas hardly at all. Just
think of the popular craze for acronyms and
abbreviations now exacerbated by e-mail and text
messaging. Multiple sources from print and speech flow
into the river, the flood of language and junk speech.
The growth of the optical deceives us, makes us believe
(a willing deception on our part) that we can
understand all this as if—to return to your
concern—it were transparent, as if it could be
understood immediately. But that immediacy overlooks
the linguistic and interpretive moment and is, in
reality, more mediated than ever. Whether our knowledge
of language is expanding or contracting—and there
is a lot of inventiveness around—it doesn't
settle or sift incrementally. The new or idiosyncratic
is soon consumed. It does not seem to build up, as in
Shakespeare, to a creative synthesis of popular and
higher genres. There does seem to be an important
current, however, an incipient canon of popular music
that may already be contributing to the thesaurus of
speech, rhythm, poetry. So, I'm not saying that the
contemporary situation is arid, rather that it is
confusing, and has led to an unfortunate neglect of a
vast heritage as well as a disincentive. There is a
distinct lack of interest in the deeper study of
poetry, and generally of the way traditions have always
refigured themselves.
-
MR: I suppose it goes back to a
theme that we were discussing in the panels today. Just
the double-edged nature of mediation, technical
mediation; although,
-
GH: Yes, technological mediation .
. .
-
MR: on the one hand, the technical
flowerings of creativity, and on the other hand,
standardization.
-
GH: It is very interesting, this
encroaching standardization. Auerbach mentions it in
the last chapter of Mimesis, one of the Comp.
Lit. Bibles, as both eulogy and elegy for a
many-splendored historicism. I.A. Richards too should
be mentioned—Ogden and Richards worked together
on The System of Basic English. Ogden, actually, wrote
a book around 1930, called something like Against
Babel or Debabelization
[chuckles]—and that was a tirade against French
and German etc., against bothering to be multilingual.
Their position was "it is better for education and
world peace to have a language which can be adopted
universally, so let's work on basic English." Another
side of that was the short-lived utopian idea of a
universal Esperanto. What one is afraid of is that
language will now, on the one hand, spin out of control
in various ways, and on the other standardize and
impoverish itself.
-
MR: Yes, well in particular of
course from the point of view of the people who teach
languages other than English . . . I don't know . .
.
-
GH: The case has to be made that
everyone should have more than one language. Now, that
kind of bilingualism is necessary, not primarily as an
epistemic or even economic tool, but because you cannot
understand and really own your language unless you have
also another language. That is the minimum principle to
be adopted, and I wouldn't care what language it is,
whether an African-American pairing or a
Spanish-American, or English-Latin. But you should try
to master two languages; and, if possible, two
languages with either a significant written canon or a
recorded oral tradition, and—you were talking
about comparative literature—you would acquire
some capability of comparing them. That is, to test the
limits of translatability, and as you get to the limits
of translatability, you also see how and perhaps why
cultures are different. . . Disaster awaits if you
underestimate the depth relation of a culture to its
language, as we see in American foreign policy, its
ignorant adventurism.
-
MR: Right. Let me close the
interview with a couple of questions about poetry, just
to bring us full circle. There was a very striking
moment, at least for me, in an interview that Harold
Bloom gave around 1985, I think it was Imre Salusinszky
. . . if I got the name right . . .
-
GH: Yes, he published an interview
with Frye, who else, myself, Bloom, Gayatri Spivak
perhaps, and . . .
-
MR: Maybe Edward Said, I don't
remember . . .
-
GH: Yeah, I think Said was there
too . . .
-
MR: Well, anyway, at a certain
point in the interview, I think that it is this
interview, Bloom confessed to having completely changed
his mind about Blake. He commented that when he was
young he would have said he put Blake on the highest
level, and Pope lower, considerably lower, and now he
would do it the other way around. So, that's the case
in which a critic has changed his mind about something
very large given the history of this particular
critic's writing. I wonder whether you've had any
experience that's analogous in which a writer who once
meant a great deal to you maybe now means less, for
reasons that would be interesting.
-
GH: No, and I don't think that
reflects favorably on me [laughs], the fact that I have
to say no. It may be that I don't go out on as many
limbs as Bloom does. And I know it was quite a
reversal, because Bloom and I were in very close daily
contact for a long time. And I saw, even wrote about
the change in his attitude about Blake, but that is
another subject. [Pause.] I really don't think I have
ever reversed myself, because even when I fall away
from a poet such as Rilke, I still enjoy that poet.
Bloom has to adopt something wholeheartedly and then
reject it. I mean he takes it into his bosom, and then
he divorces. I think a certain love/hate remains; he's
a very passionate person in that respect. I seem to be
more cautious, I fall for a poet easily enough but have
to work hard to justify what I feel, to prove that
poet's worth to myself. Bloom, however, has a capacity
of intuition when it comes to poetry that is absolutely
remarkable, while I have to woo a poet, and do it from
the outside. I look at the style and say, "Now this is
interesting . . . " and very gradually, you know, I get
used to it, attain a certain intimate confidence, but
it takes time. Now, in the case of Wordsworth, it had
something to do with my displacement into another
language. And with Wordsworth and English nature
hitting me at the same time. Not that I was in the Lake
District, I was in another place, in Bucks, but it was
a typical English rural nature that hadn't changed all
that much when I found myself there in '39. So, I got a
start like this. But even with Wordsworth, I stayed a
long time pondering features of style Bloom would have
probably have considered trivial—the repetitions,
and so on. I don't think they should be disregarded,
but Bloom is not particularly interested in diction, or
stylistic norms and deviations, unless they tell his
ear about a deviant borrowing from precursors. When he
comes to a poet like Hopkins, he kind of throws the
diction away, and flies immediately to the poetical
ideology, as it were. I have a very close relationship
to Wordsworth, but—how should I put it—I
don't incorporate the poet that I read, or anything
that I read, in the way that Bloom does.
-
MR: In the 50s and 60s, you wrote
about contemporary American poetry . . .
-
GH: Yes, I did.
-
MR: Do you still read contemporary
American poetry?
-
GH: I still do, but it is not as
intense. I decided early on that I was going to do
poetry reviewing, because that's how I would get into
contemporary American and English poetry—through,
you know, the pressure. I need a lot of pressure. My
aim was to be a poet, so at that time I read poetry to
get on as a poet. To inspire and feed me. To encourage
me. And this reviewing of poetry was really my way of
getting deeper into the poetry. I was also piquing my
intellect, because each poet is a little world, a
heterocosm, so that was the challenge. I made some
discoveries, or I thought I made them, like A. D. Hope,
the Australian poet. I was sent his book together with
about 30 others by the Kenyon Review, and I
said to myself, "This is a great poet. How come no one
knows about him?" Of course, while they didn't know
about him in America, he was already famous in
Australia, so I wrote this review under the illusion
that I was a discoverer of a new poet, that's how
naïve I was. I had no big background. Whereas
Bloom, as he told me, from very early on read and read
and poetry simply fell into him. He memorized Yeats
completely. He didn't say he memorized every other poet
too, but he knows, he knows a tremendous amount by
heart. Empson was another who knew the canon by heart,
big swatches of it. I envy their capacious memory, or
should I say heart: their non-mechanical learning by
heart. That is lost to so many of us.
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