Resonance

Re-publishing some thoughts on poetics

It seems glib to say, but one of the lasting functions of art is resonance, or the evocation of enduring emotions, images, and memories. Texts are often described as ‘speaking to’ the reader: through resonance the illusion of a dialogue is constructed between the author and the reader. Minds thereby commune.

I think resonance – coming from resonare, to echo or re-sound – is (or should be) a perennial aim of poetry, which since its origin has been mnemonic. Metre and music aid memory, but so does resonance, which is that quality which allows us not only to know poetry but to feel known by it. We also come to know other minds who appreciate the same text for the same reasons. That is the beauty of being a member of a readership or audience: it shows us that we occupy a shared interior (as well as exterior and empirical) world, and can be transported by the same artistic vehicles. In other words, great art seems to defeat solipsism. When an audience applauds or groans in the collective experience of pathos, it enjoys a kind of critical consensus.

Historically, we’ve manifested our consensus on great art and literature by building canons. Canon formation tends to prize virtuosity: displays of erudition, perspicuity, imagination made familiar, and so on. We arrange canonical works according to period and genre, which helps us to reward authors and artists who initiate new epochs. Especially in the case of literature, what is common across canonical texts is their capacity for mythopoesis, or the creation of fictive worlds which become mythic: events in great novels and plays are used as exempla in philosophy, common parlance, and mathematical textbooks. Myth making is an important way in which we transform local truths into universally resonant, transhistorical lessons.

But despite the – albeit imperfect – consensus which canons represent, there is a persistent mystery to the power of language and the ways it acts on us. The fairly objective standards for great literature and good prose don’t erase the ineluctable subjectivity of reading and resonating. Some passages of poetry contain an ineffable quality for certain readers, while others will be baffled that anyone can have a strong emotional response to something as ornate or crabbed as Tennyson’s ‘Locksley Hall’. Why do certain lines of poetry possess an ineffable or transportive quality for some and not for others? This subjective difference in the face of art might contribute to the allure of individualism in all its iterations, down to scepticism regarding the consciousness of other minds. This, however, forgets that pathos – the ultimate appeal to subjectivity – is intended for discursive reception by audiences belonging to a broad culture suffused by common myths. Audience members tidally beget one another’s laughter or sympathy in the immediate moment of the performance, in the intermission, and in the form of review and discussion in the interminable aftermath.

Poets and critics have long attempted to articulate the ineffable quality, if it exists, which makes great literature resonant. In doing so they also try to account for readerly subjectivity. Wordsworth called the consciousness of significant memories ‘spots of time’, and devised the narrative structure of The Prelude, his autobiographical long poem, to emphasise those ‘spots’ (for instant, by means of narrative time expansion), which particularly resonate with the reader. Without having lived Wordsworth’s life, we sympathise with his half-mournful, half-inquisitive reflection on youth and innocence, and with his anxiety about one’s imperfect ability to remember. Virginia Woolf called similar moments in literature ‘moments of being’: instances of astonishing intensity, perhaps intensity of unutterable thought, which the author renders into utterances. James Joyce called them ‘epiphanies’: in the voice of his character Stephen Dedalus in his early work Stephen Hero, he describes the epiphany as ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself’. He considers it the author’s task to record – which is to produce – these epiphanies, conquering their evanescence somehow.  

Dedalus’s theory of epiphanies is more systematic than Woolf’s, deriving from the Thomistic triad of aesthetic principles: integritas, consonantia, claritas. Stephen calls integritas ‘wholeness’, or the quality of discrete thingness to an image or structure, ‘self-bounded and self-contained upon the immeasurable background of space and time’. Consonantia is harmony: ‘complex, multiple, divisible, separable, made up of its parts and their sum, harmonious’ […] ‘the synthesis of immediate perception is followed by the analysis of apprehension’. Claritas is a kind of radiant significance, that which makes the discrete moment worth attending to: the thing’s ‘soul leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance’. This final aesthetic principle sounds like Roger Scruton’s idea of the art-object which, like a being with personhood, radiates a quality which is ‘over and above’ its reducible parts, like the discernible image of a face emerging from a mass of minute brush strokes constituting a portrait.

Scholastic precision aside, trying to put the ineffable into words might remind us of our powerlessness to express ourselves without resorting to approximation and metaphor – a concern as ancient as Plato, who stands in opposition to, say, Percy Bysshe Shelley on the matter of language’s capacity to measure and reflect reality (which I discuss here). I think Shelley’s position can be balanced with linguistics: language is shifting and approximate but can bring minds remarkably close together, as in Jane Austen’s precise, analytic insight into the psychology of her characters via free indirect discourse. It’s quite amazing that we can communicate profound feeling with one another in metaphor or in terse and imagistic language, as in Ezra Pound’s poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd:

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Think also of how much heartache can be contained in two of George Herbert’s lines in ‘Whitsunday’, in which he mourns that Christ seems absent from the sorrowful world:  

Thou shutt’st the door and keeps within;

Scarce a good joy creeps through the chink…

This brings me to a few thoughts about the hermeneutic methods we apply when we write about the canon. I don’t mean to insist on fixity in literary scholarship, but prizing subjectivity over the communal knowledge and aesthetic sensibility produced by literature can neglect the power of resonance through language.

Intricate, obscure arguments in literary scholarship are permitted by the license of subjectivity, but they aren’t permitted the whole way: scholars spend a great deal of time justifying their arguments as worthwhile especially if they aren’t concerned with knowledge of history (or textual history), philology, authorial networks, authorial intent, or authorship in general. This happens in several ways, and for several reasons.

Besides critical theory in service of grievance politics and anti-‘logocentrist’ advocacy, opaque theoretical readings bolstered by their originality (and, by accident or not, their immunity to criticism) are rife. In 1984, Stanley Fish invented an entire thesis based on a technical misreading of Ben Jonson’s poem ‘In Authorem’, based on the phrase ‘With this author[’]s readers will it thrive’ – ‘it’ being the reputation of Nicholas Breton, to whom Jonson dedicated the poem. Fish disregarded that possessive apostrophes were not necessarily used in the early 1600s, taking ‘authors readers’ to be a hyphenated phrase rather than a possessive, grouping together the author with the readership in a ‘community of the same’. The irony is that Ben Jonson means to chastise bad readers who misinterpret Breton. But Fish pioneered ‘reader response theory’, which basically held that attention to authorial intent is a shackle on the text which denies readers full subjectivity.  

I tend to think the kind of critical writing which Fish helped to normalise is more of a shackle upon knowledge than an appreciation of a text’s plural meanings. Regardless, plurality of interpretation, the rejection of rules, the denial that there are ‘right and wrong’ readings, is famously stressful for readers and paralysing for poets. This is why it’s easier to write a decent sonnet than a decent 14-line poem in free verse.

Similarly, American critic and Harvard professor Gordon Teskey demonstrates how error can run riot in scholarship if we indulge originality for its own sake with subjectivity as the justifying crutch, having abandoned the assumptions that historical context, attention to authorial intent, philology, and clarity of meaning are absolutely necessary for good scholarship.

In his book Spenserian Moments (2019), Teskey proposes a narratological theory of ‘moments’ in Spenser’s long poem The Faerie Queene which posits that Spenser writes instances of what he calls ‘kinestasis’, a quaint neologism which fuses movement (kinesis) and stillness (stasis). Teskey positions ‘travelling passages’ like that of III.i.14, when the female knight Britomart and other knights ride ‘Long […] Through countries waste’, against moments of narrative time expansion (when Spenser dwells for a long time on shorter events), like the beautiful Florimell’s irruption into the narrative in III.i.15 – she is described at length, and almost petrifies the knights with her beauty (269). Teskey attributes a ‘rotational’ movement or ‘Coriolis effect’ to Spenser’s expansion of time, when he describes something in a drawn-out fashion that seems to ‘freeze’ the event.  

Teskey superficially reconciles the differences between visual and linguistic media. To borrow Lessing’s dichotomy in his essay against the ekphrastic tradition, Laocoon (1766) (known to me via Stephen Dedalus), poetry presents things in time, one after the other (nacheinander) whilst painting presents things in space, next to one another (nebeneinander). Here it is useful to draw on the proem to Book III in which Spenser favours the suitability of verse to that of painting in the task of honouring the Sovereign:

But liuing art may not least part expresse,
  Nor life-resembling pencill it can paint,
  All were it Zeuxis or Praxiteles:
  His daedale hand would faile, and greatly faint,
  And her perfections with his error taint:
  Ne Poets wit, that passeth Painter farre
  In picturing the parts of beautie daint,
  So hard a workmanship aduenture darre,

For fear through want of words her excellence to marre. (III, Proemium 3) 

Spenser asserts that the Poet’s wit ‘passeth Painter farre’ at the painter’s own art, which is ‘picturing’ virtue and beauty. Skilled in wedding semantic meaning with the syntactic, alliterative, and musical qualities of his language, Spenser draws attention to the ‘living art’ of language: its dynamism and flux within a narrative which painting cannot express to the same extent.

Conversely, Teskey (taking his argument to its conclusion) proposes that, in order for Spenser’s moments to be literally kinetic and static at once like a rotating Chinese vase, these moments must possess a torque. He frames this ‘external pressure’ allowing for the ‘momentum inside’ as the pressure of the knights’ pursuit of the fleeing Florimell. He concludes with a vision of the entire text of The Faerie Queene as a galaxy in which discretely rotating systems themselves rotate around a central ‘singularity’ (277-278). This last flourish is particularly vague.

The slickness of this framing doesn’t make up for that fact that Teskey is muddling the meaning of the text to a readership largely made up of students. Granted, he also provides an argument for other scholars to either refute or ‘build on’, giving them the golden opportunity to get published. Meanwhile, The Faerie Queene fades further and further into the background. I think here of George Steiner’s complaint about the distractions of secondary literature in Real Presences (1986). Criticism is about other criticism more than it is about the primary texts.

Teskey’s close reading shows off the argumentative contortion which can proceed from over-indulging inventiveness in literary scholarship. ‘The literature’ can, in result, come to resemble a galaxy of loosely entangled but ultimately inward-facing bodies rotating around, but always remaining at a distance from, the primary texts. The problem is not just that critics and scholars are willing to manipulate texts in imaginative ways: it’s that these articles are assigned to undergraduates who want to be taught the canon. At least, I can’t imagine that most undergraduates who sign up to learn The Faerie Queene would find such imaginative somersaults helpful as they come to know what the poem means. Other scholars, however, will find it useful fodder for their own publications.

To end: it isn’t the only metric for literary quality, but literature’s power of insight into reality – an insight catalysed by the author’s imagination, which is always tied to their memory and therefore their biography – deserves attention in critical literature. Historicism takes us a good part of the way. Psychoanalysis has tried to do this but has been hampered by a lack of certainty re: psychology and the difficulty of escaping Freudian error (see Robert Grant, Imagining the Real (2003)). The two disciplinary approaches can and have been fused: the pre-Romantic ‘self’ has been variously imagined, which I think is a useful endeavour. Generally, we should challenge critical inventions which distance us from the primary texts in question without worrying that we look unsophisticated or ‘anti-intellectual’ for doing so.