Impersonal disinterestedness: Leavis and Eliot
p. 17-28
Résumé
An interesting insight into the value, meaning, and significance of the concept of impersonality and other relevant and related terminology can be gained from the usage these were put to by some of the other, less exalted, practitioners of the age. Terms such as impersonality, thought and emotion are charged with meaning that Eliot gave them. Disinterestedness is a major Arnoldian concern which F. R. Leavis appropriated, and then used together with other terms, but his concerns embodied in these terms reveal subtle and significant shifts. For Leavis an element of impersonality denotes the quality of the self-sufficiency of a poem’s matter. For Eliot, impersonality is a goal for the poet to strive for. Eliot’s use of the term has to be defined in terms of his avowed classicism, his disparagement of romantic poetry, a neo-classical distrust of the personal, the unique, and the uncommon. Eliot therefore criticizes Wordsworth’s glorification of poetry as embodying ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions,’ while Leavis finds some of Wordsworth’s poems to be highly impersonal. This question can also be examined through the-death-of-the-author discourse involving Barthes and Foucault, among others.
Texte intégral
1An interesting insight into the value, meaning, and significance of the concept of impersonality, and other relevant and related terminology, in the context of British modernist literature, can be gained from the use these were put to by some of the other, less exalted, practitioners of the age in literary criticism. I have suggested elsewhere1 that F. R. Leavis considers it the function of a critic primarily to concentrate and focus on the poem without allowing the intervention of non-literary extraneous facts that scholarship proposes to dig up for us, or considerations moral, and Christian, or conceptualising framework to stand in the way. Once the focus of attention has been narrowed to the poem itself, and its significance appreciated, we can see Leavis at work in the pages of Scrutiny, where, in the course of analysis of certain poems, he defines a set of major critical terms which provide essential clues to his idea of the function of criticism. But the terms are not defined directly; they attain definition as they are applied in an actual analysis of poetry; as Leavis said of Coleridge, ‘Principle... here appears to emerge from practice.’2
2The terms that Leavis employs often appear to be similar to certain well-known expressions and phrases that have long been in common currency as literary terms. Considering his avowed debt to T. S. Eliot and his enthusiasm for Matthew Arnold, it is too easy to presume that his use of the same terms would be similar to—and, if different from, would be based on—those terms, phrases and expressions that they had earlier popularised. Terms such as impersonality, thought, and emotion are charged with the meaning that Eliot gave them. Disinterestedness is a major Arnoldian concern. But Leavis’s fundamental concerns as denoted by his use of these terms are his own. F. R. Leavis appropriated these terms, and then used these and other terms to serve his own ends according to his own predilections, but his concerns embodied in these terms reveal subtle and significant shifts of meaning, preoccupations and priorities.
3For Leavis, an element of impersonality denotes the quality of self-sufficiency of a poem’s ‘matter.’ For Eliot impersonality is a goal for the poet to strive for. Eliot’s use of the term has to be defined in terms of his avowed ‘classicism,’ his disparagement of Romantic poetry, a neo-classical distrust of the personal, the unique and the uncommon. Eliot, therefore, criticizes Wordsworth’s glorification of poetry as embodying ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,’ while Leavis finds some of Wordsworth’s poems highly impersonal. Leavis does not share Eliot’s enthusiasm for the neo-classical virtues, as exemplified, for instance, in Dryden; and if he judges Pope very highly, it is not for any typical neo-classical qualities as defined in opposition to the Romantic view of poetry. While Leavis disapproves of Shelley’s verse, he has high praise for Wordsworth, Blake, and Keats. Such being the divergent attitudes of the two critics, it is not surprising that for Leavis impersonality does not have the meaning that it has for Eliot.
4Similarly, disinterestedness, for Leavis, comes to acquire the same connotation and value that impersonality has for him. Arnold first used the term in 1865 in ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.’ If criticism, for Arnold, is ‘the endeavour in all branches of knowledge, theology, philosophy, history, art, science, to see the object as in itself it really is,’ it is a broadly cultural rather than belletristic activity: such an activity, according to Arnold, depends on an attitude of disinterestedness—a free play of mind reflecting ‘the best that is known and thought in the world.’ Disinterestedness, then, denotes a tendency to counter the provincial, self-centring, and limiting attitude to one’s own literature. Thus, if Eliot’s impersonality is opposed to the Romantic tendency to exalt the personality, Arnold’s disinterestedness seeks to counter the provincial nature of nineteenth-century English criticism.
5The question of the relationship of thought and emotion in poetry, furthermore, cannot be treated in the light of Eliot’s remarks on the ‘dissociation of sensibility.’ For Eliot, thought and emotion (Eliot often uses the word feeling, in place of emotion, and would insist on a difference between the two, which is perhaps better treated as a ‘verbal non-difference’) are ‘fused’ in a ‘unified sensibility,’ which is a special mechanism of sensibility, and which enabled men like Dante and Donne to achieve a ‘direct sensuous apprehension of thought.’ Leavis shows no interest in any special mechanism of sensibility in which the two— thought and emotion—would be fused. For Leavis, thought is used more to mean ‘reasoning control’ that puts a check on the overflow of excessive and unjustified emotions in a poem. Thought enables a poet not merely to distance an emotion to be able to better appreciate it, but also to reduce its impact: the element of thought registers an attitude to emotion that a poem embodies.
6One can go a step further and suggest that an attitude of objectivity, brought about by the presence of thought in a poem, reveals the poet’s willingness to confront, rather than escape from, the experience that the emotion presented in the poem embodies. What Leavis objects to in Shelley, for instance, is not a divorce between thought and emotion but a deliberate insistence on emotion for its own sake.
7As a critic Leavis’s insistent emphasis is on the impersonality or disinterestedness of emotions presented in a poem. A poem, for Leavis, has to have a ‘core’ or ‘substance,’ ‘a justifying situation within itself to vindicate the existence of the emotions presented.’ If the subject of a poem is ‘merely loose and evocative generalities,’ felt, by the poet, vaguely even if intensely; if the emotions are evoked, in other words, through recourse to associations outside the poem, and not through the ‘data’ that the poem itself offers—the emotions presented would lack the element of impersonality, or, would not be marked by disinterestedness.
8A poem that is not written out of any intense personal experience but is derived from literary sources, like the poems of Scott, is not likely to be more impersonal than the one that owes its origin to a highly personal, poignant experience. What is involved in this question is not merely the ‘escape from personal emotions’ on the part of the poet—either through not having had a personal experience as the subject of a poem, or through their suppression or evasion of any kind. It is a question as to what extent the emotion—whatever be its source or origin—‘develops or defines itself as we grasp the dramatic elements the poem does offer.’
9The essential concern of the critic, then, is significantly not with the personal emotion—impersonalised or not—but the fact that the poem exists in its own right: our response of joy to the dancing daffodils seen ten thousand at a glance must not depend merely on our memory of daffodils, recollected at their mention in the poem: the poetic skill ought to be able to generate and develop that emotion of joy in our hearts as we perceive and appreciate the elements that the poem chooses to put together for us to recreate that joy. What is involved is not merely a technical issue or two different modes of poetic composition or even two different poetic sensibilities. The whole issue of impersonality is, for Leavis, closely linked with the question of what he characterises as the question of ‘emotional hygiene and moral value,’ the question of ‘spiritual health.’ What he seeks to convey by the use of the terms ‘emotional hygiene’ and ‘spiritual health’ is, of course, not different from what is indicated by the terms like reality, sincerity, and the morality of form that I shall briefly discuss below.
10Leavis takes up two poems for analysis and develops his idea of the impersonality of emotions further. He disapproves of Tennyson’s ‘Tears, idle tears’: ‘It moves sweetly forward with a sweetly plangent flow, without check, cross-tension or any qualifying element. To give it the reading it asks for is to flow with it, acquiescing in a complete and simple immersion: there is no attitude towards the experience except one of complaisance; we are to be wholly in it and of it.’ (Leavis 217) He finds Lawrence’s ‘softly in the dusk, a woman is singing to me’ a superior poem. While Tennyson’s poem has nothing in it that would give ‘the effect of an object, or substantial independent existence.... No new definitions or directions of feeling derive from... suggestions of imagery, which seem to be wholly of the current of vague emotion that determines them’ and ‘seems to offer a uniform emotional fluid.’ (217) Lawrence’s poem offers a ‘strong effect of particularity... conditioned by the complexity— by the play of contrast and tension.’ It has ‘a very specific situation that stands there in its own right.’ If the poem makes a statement, ‘the stating manner’ is a manner of realising a particularity and concreteness. There is, in the poem, ‘the actuality of the remembered situation,’ ‘something held and presented in this poem,’ ‘a specific situation, concretely grasped.’ (217) Now, the concrete realisation of situation in a poem indicates the necessary disinterestedness in the poem; it also, for Leavis, indicates an attitude of critical objectivity towards the experience that the situation embodies. In the total organisation of the poem, Leavis would say, ‘the critical mind has its part in the whole... sensibility in the poem doesn’t work in complete divorce from intelligence; feeling is not divorced from thinking.’ (Leavis 216)
11To recapitulate, a successful poem, for Leavis, involves presenting an emotion or experience in its totality within the poem arising out of a specific situation, ‘grasped and held’ in concrete particularity. The specificity of the situation lends the poem an independent status that renders the emotion impersonal or disinterested—the qualities that reveal the author’s attitude towards the experience, an attitude of critical judgement and disinterested valuation; it assures that the emotions are not indulged in for their own sake, but have been subjected to the control of intelligence and, therefore, feelings are not divorced from intelligence. Shelley, therefore, is severely criticised for preaching a doctrine, in ‘The Defence of Poetry,’ ‘that makes the writing of poetry as much a matter of passive submission to the emotional tides, and as little a matter of active intelligence, as possible.’ (Leavis 218) In Shelley’s poetry, the plangent flow of emotions lulls the mind and intelligence—‘the thinking mind’—is held in abeyance. Shelley’s lack of concern for actuality, his inability to create an experience objectively for want of an intervention of thought and intelligence, renders his poetry un-impersonal—and, what is more, registers an attitude of irresponsibility and, as Leavis would insistently characterise it, lacking in an adult awareness and not marked by an exercise of mature intelligence applied to life and experience. And where the poet so consistently reveals such an attitude, it is indicative of—the term that Leavis uses for Shelley—‘spiritual malady.’
12It is significant to note that what Leavis seems to prize in genuine poetry is not merely the presence of thought as it exists in—in fact, the kind of thought that at one level dominates—the seventeenth-century metaphysical poetry; to appreciate the ideas invoked and follow the subtle argument in metaphysical poetry, one is forced to make a sustained intellectual effort that one usually reserves for a closely reasoned prose treatise. It is not merely the presence of thought or ideas, but feelings and emotions in a state of control by thought, that, for Leavis, is the basis of genuine poetry. A poem, thus, for Leavis, is an organic whole conceived imaginatively and artistically, shaping, in the process of creation, the experience itself.
13Also, the modern relevance of metaphysical poetry, according to Leavis, does not reside merely in the fact of its predominant thought-element. The totality that a metaphysical poem is, is conditioned by feelings and emotions, concrete and specific realisation of imaginative effects and poetically realised experience. If Tennyson’s ‘Tears, idle tears’ is criticised for cultivating emotion for its own sake, some of the metaphysical poems can be equally severely ‘rejected’ for their cultivation of thought for its own sake. The element of thought in a poem, Leavis maintains, has to be controlled by a ‘total imaginative and emotional purpose,’ as emotions, too, in a poem must not be divorced from intelligence. Thus, the best of Hardy’s highly emotional poems reveal the rigorous control of thought. When a poet of metaphysical habit is personally moved to express something profoundly experienced, as, for instance, Donne in the ‘Nocturnall,’ then we have poetry of very exceptional emotional strength, thought in Donne’s poem being controlled by ‘a total imaginative and emotional purpose.’
14Leavis’s concept of thought comes closer to the seventeenth-century concept of wit—especially in metaphysical poetry. But the metaphysical wit, in this context would have to be appreciated in the light of Leavis’s definition of it. In the metaphysical wit there is, he says,
more to it than subtle ratiocination—the surprising play of analogy, the activity of the thinking mind, the energy of intelligence, involved in the meta-physical habit means that, when the poet has urgent personal experience to deal with it is attended to and contemplated—which in turn means some kind of separation, or distinction, between experiencer and experiences. ‘Their attempts were always analytic’—to analyse your experience you must, while keeping it alive and immediately present as experience treat it in some sense as an object. (Leavis 229)
15Blake’s shorter poems are distinguished from Shelley’s verse by a robust presence of thought. The weakness of Blake’s longer poems—his major prophesies—is their weakness of thought. Leavis finds that their ‘generality’ renders them highly ineffective. The poems betray Blake’s failure to control the data that they are supposed to organise and present. ‘Instead of serving as instruments of clarification,’ Leavis believes, these poems ‘tend to function as a kind of ritual, rote, or game—a game that could have given no satisfaction to the poet if they had not blurred the experience they are meant to interpret.’ (Leavis 229-230)
16Similarly, Four Quartets owes its strength of thought, revealed in a systematic and analytic exploration of the poet’s experience, to their distinctly poetic method— ‘they are essentially and intensely poetic poetry.’ It is with the essential presence of thought in Marvell’s poetry, that both demands and provokes constant attention and an alert mind, that Leavis contrasts Lionel Johnson’s ‘sombre and rich the skies,’ the ‘impressiveness of which is conditioned by an absence of thought.’ He continues: ‘This is poetry from the “soul,” that nineteenth-century region of specialised poetical experience where nothing has sharp definition, where effects of “profundity” and “intensity” depend upon a lulling of the mind.’ (Leavis 220) This ‘alcoholic lack of focus’ and an abeyance of the mental alertness is what provokes Leavis to reject much of Victorian verse. The poets of the Victorian era largely created poetry that answered to Milton’s formula of ‘simple, sensuous, and passionate’; they wanted poetry to be ‘conceived and composed in the soul.’ Their characteristic concern was with the sublime and the poetical; what Leavis calls the peculiar otherworldliness of the Victorian verse is revealed in the very titles of the well-know poems that Leavis draws attention to: ‘Mariana,’ ‘The Lady of Shalott,’ ‘The Blessed Damozel,’ ‘The Nymph’s Song to Hylas,’ ‘A Forsaken Garden.’ If poetry for them was to be ‘the tender, the exalted, the poignant... the sympathetic,’ then the ‘wit, play of intellect, stress of cerebral muscle has no place’: a characteristic preoccupation of Victorian verse was what Leavis characterises as the creation of a dream-world. The poet became a daydreamer. Emotions are generated through loose evocative generalities and as a result, the poetry is devoid of particularity and concreteness. The poems lack specific situations. And these flaws reveal in the poet an attitude of indifference to the play of intelligence. The poet does not wish to confront an experience and relive it by analysing it intelligently and appreciating it objectively.
17It is, thus, important to appreciate that the genuineness of poetry for Leavis is closely bound up with the quality of its ‘vehicle.’ An experience not fully appreciated or confronted becomes a means to escape and reveals itself in a poem in vague generalities and infirm grasp of the dramatic ingredients of the poem. A richly wrought experience grasped and firmly held reveals itself in a concrete particularity with which it is rendered. Concretisation of an experience, the presence of thought, the presence of objectivity, an element of impersonality and disinterestedness reveal the attitude of the poet, as one of intelligent appreciation of experience.
18What, then, are the means deployed by the poet to achieve in his poetry the fullness of response to a given experience; how are the vague and evocative generalities avoided and the particularity and specificity achieved; in what way does the poet seek to ‘realise’ his experience in concrete actuality that would reflect a robust adult attitude to experience and not a desire to create a dream-world; how, in short, is that kind of poetry created that provokes us to participate in an experience both with our emotions and intelligence, and does not dull our minds and attention by provoking stock responses to certain known and familiar situations and experience?
19Leavis believes that as poetry is made up of words, and as it is ultimately an organic arrangement of words that elicits a response from the reader, the key to the complexity of poetry must lie, to begin with, with the words. Yet his concern is not merely with words as they appear to us in print, but as they are spoken—‘the idiomatic speech.’ Leavis believes that ‘the subtlety of movement in English depends upon play of the natural sense movement and intonation against the verse-structure and that “natural,” here, involves a reference more or less direct to idiomatic speech.’ Language ‘such as men do use’ is not Leavis’s aim more than it is that of Ben Jonson and Wordsworth. What Leavis has in mind is the rich muscular quality of the language that derives its strength from the spoken idiom that is also highly poetic. It is the essential poetic ‘content’ of the linguistic idiom that alone can command a wide variety of human perceptions and experience and articulate them. The language is controlled and manipulated by, and responds to, the pressure of life and experience. Analysing Hardy’s ‘After a journey’ Leavis points out how the use of the word ‘view’ [in ‘Here I come to view a voiceless ghost,’ line 1] ‘is no insensitive perversity; it is a word compelled by the intensely realised situation, and we feel it imposing itself on Hardy (and so on us) as irreplaceable.’ (Leavis 224)
20When the language employed by the poet is thus replete with a life of its own so that it actively responds to an experience, giving it a shape, rather than merely acting as preconceived counters or as accepted equivalents of experience—such a language ‘realises’ an experience with a concrete particularity. The experience is rendered in the poem not in terms of its standard linguistic equivalents—which, on account of their universality, evoke only a ‘general’ response—but is ‘realised’ ‘there on paper.’ As the poem presents a complete experience, no external reference or our invoking previous mental associations is needed to fully participate in and appreciate the poem.
21It is significant to note that when one kind of mode of speech is believed—and exploited deliberately—to be more suitable than others for a particular effect, then in such a situation, the preconceived emotive value of the words is being used to evoke a response in the readers: the words in such a context draw their life from a frame of reference from outside the poem.
22Thus, Leavis finds the language of Milton lacking in precision, particularity and concreteness and sees in its vague evocations and ‘literary’ use of words a failure to involve the reader’s completer response. Milton’s verse is cut off from ‘speech that belongs to the emotional and sensory texture of actual living and is resonant with the nervous system.’ There is, therefore, ‘a certain sensuous poverty’ in Milton’s verse. Largely, Milton seems to Leavis to focus ‘rather upon words than upon perceptions, sensations or things.’ ‘He exhibits a feeling for words rather than a capacity for feeling through words; we are often, in reading him, moved to comment that he is “external” or that he “works from outside.”’3
23Elsewhere he remarks that poets like Shakespeare, Marvell and Donne ‘seem to exhibit between them a wide range of differences and to have written good poetry in a variety of manners. But all these manners have in their different ways a vital relation to speech, to the living language of the time.’4 But Milton, he maintains, ‘invented a medium the distinction of which is to have denied itself the life of living language.’
24In a passage, surprisingly from Milton himself—‘rare and exceptional’— Leavis demonstrates how ‘the verse acts the meaning, not merely says but does,’ enacts, that is, in the language itself the experience that it seeks to convey. Leavis quotes the following lines from ‘Comus’— ‘And set to work millions of spinning worms/That in their green shops weave the smooth-hair’d silk’—and comments:
The Shakespearean life of [these lines] is to be explained largely by the swift diversity of associations that run together. The impression of the swarming worms is telescoped with that of the ordered industry of the workshop, and a further vividness results from the contrasting ‘green,’ with its suggestion of leafy tranquillity. ‘Smooth-hair’d’ plays off against the energy of the verse the tactual luxury of stroking human hair or the living coat of an animal. The texture of actual sounds, the run of vowels and consonants, with the variety of action and effort, rich in subtle and analogical suggestion, demanded in pronouncing them, plays an essential part, though this is not to be analysed in abstraction from the meaning. The total effect is as if words as words withdrew themselves from the focus of our attention and we were directly aware of a tissue of feeling and perceptions... Now, these rich and subtle effects are quite rare in Milton’s verse and these are almost absent in the grand style like that of the two epics and Samson Agonistes. The ‘tyrannical stylisation’ of Milton’s grand style is purely literary in origin. (Leavis 1936, 48)
25As against Milton’s grand style, Donne’s verse has the effect of achieved actuality: ‘. . . subtleties of Donne’s use of the speaking voice and the spoken language are inexhaustible’ and they ‘reveal the spirit in which the sinew and the living nerve of English are used.’
26Pope’s ‘greater finesse and profundity of organisation, a much greater intensity of art... [a] greater variety,’ as compared to the art of Dryden, is primarily owing to a greatly enriched, live and vital linguistic medium of his verse. ‘Above every line of Pope,’ Leavis maintains, ‘we can imagine a tensely flexible and complex curve, representing the modulation, emphasis and changing tone and tempo of the voice in reading; the curve varying from line to line and the lines playing subtly against one another,’ (Leavis 1936, 31) while Dryden’s verse in Macflecknoe, in comparison with Pope’s characteristic verse, ‘is both slack and monotonous; again and again there are awkward runs and turns, unconvinced and unconvincing, requiring the injected rhetorical conviction of the declaimer to carry them off.’ (Leavis 1936, 31)
27There is an element of inwardness in the language of Hopkins whose words and phrases ‘are actions as well as sounds, ideas and images and must... be read with the body as well as with the eye.’5 We, therefore, respond to his verse not merely with the reading eye but with an involvement that extends over our total being. If Hopkins’ best verse is characterised by a genuine fusion of inner, spiritual, emotional stress with its corresponding physical ‘reverberations’ and nervous and muscular tension, demanding a similar multiplicity of response, Wordsworth’s later verse on account of its highly formal language appears to embody experiences that are conventional and general and not felt within but externally. In his later verse Wordsworth is insensitive and declamatory as Milton’s grand style is. The verse is judged on the basis of the quality of linguistic medium— ‘a medium not felt from within as something at the nerve tips, but handled from outside.’
28In the context of the romantic-classical controversy, the image of Eliot as a latter-day ruthless classicist out to demolish the romantic aberrations with no less than a Homer-gilded sword has long persisted. Eliot expressed his counterpoints with uncompromising finality. The manner of dismissal was intended to convey the degree of misdemeanour.
29As is common knowledge, Eliot, reacting against the Romantic cult of personality, had remarked that ‘[p]oetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.’6 ‘The mind of the poet,’ he wrote, ‘... may... operate on the experience of the man himself; but the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.’ (Eliot 45)
30But, as we know, Eliot went on to modify his early uncompromising views and softened his stance. The essay on Yeats has him in confession that he may have had ‘expressed [him]self badly, or that [he] had only an adolescent grasp of that idea.’ In a comment on The Waste Land Eliot remarked that ‘To me it was only the relief of a personal and wholly insignificant grouse against life.’ A dramatic poet for Eliot dramatises ‘an action or struggle for harmony in the soul of the poet.’ Shakespeare, Eliot wrote, was ‘occupied with the struggle—which alone constitutes life for a poet—to transmute his personal and private agonies into... something universal and impersonal.’7 Further: ‘In the beginning it is the pressure of some rude unknown psychic material that directs the poet to tell that particular story, to develop that particular situation.... In the world of a great poetic dramatist... the creator is everywhere present and everywhere hidden.’8
31In ‘The Three Voices of Poetry’ Eliot wrote that in a poem ‘the poet may be concerned solely with expressing in verse [his] obscure impulse;... to achieve clarity for himself, to assure himself that the poem is the right outcome of the process that has taken place.’ (Eliot 1957, 102) ‘The author may have been writing,’ Eliot wrote in ‘The Music of Poetry,’ ‘some peculiar personal experience which he saw quite unrelated to anything outside.’9 Also:
[Poetry] may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world. (Eliot 1933, 155)
32The point that I am trying to make here is that in the larger context of Eliot an irrevocable dissociation between a personal vision, thought, idea, notion, or emotion, and its expression to achieve formal, generic impersonality was perhaps not intended to begin with, and it was obviously restated and modified with a fair degree of unambiguity and clarity. What I think is even more important is to appreciate that one would expect that the mind that conceived and created The Waste Land would not pursue, seek, and affirm that kind of full and final dichotomy.
33A useful clue to the dichotomous question of impersonality and emotions can be found when this issue is examined not only through Leavis but also through the-death-of-the-author discourse involving Barthes and Foucault, among others. Emotions here belong to the page, rather than to the author. Dissociation of the emotions from the author and their appropriation by the text on the page, and their subsequent recreation by an active and involved reader derives its strength from the distinction that Eliot draws between the ‘man who suffers and the mind which creates.’ A reader plays a role in the recreation of the text. ‘The reader’s interpretation,’ Eliot tells us, ‘may differ from an author’s and be equally valid—it may even be better.’ (Eliot 1933, 31) Of course, there will be ‘considerable variety of responses from different readers,’ but the readers will have to be ‘intelligent, sensitive, and diligent’ and the nature of the work in question too will define its expectations. (Eliot 1933, 31) ‘[A] text,’ Barthes wrote in his controversial 1968 essay, ‘is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, and not, as was hitherto said, the author.’ He continues: ‘a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination... the reader is without history, biography, psychology; he is simply that someone who holds together in a single field all the traces by which the written text is constituted.’10 Perhaps one could conclude by pointing out that the following is from Eliot: ‘A reader’s appropriation of the poem from the author when it is completed marks the final separation of the poem from the author.... Let the author, at this point, rest in peace.’ (Eliot 1957, 99)
Notes de bas de page
1 Gulshan Taneja, ‘The Function of Criticism: F. R. Leavis, ’ Yearly Review (University of Delhi) 7 (1993): 83-96.
2 F. R. Leavis, ‘Coleridge in Criticism, ’ A Selection from Scrutiny I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968) 276.
3 F. R. Leavis, Revaluation: Tradition & Development in English Poetry (1936; New York: Norton, 1963) 50.
4 F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit (1952; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963) 50.
5 F. R. Leavis, New Bearings in English Poetry: A Study in Contemporary Situation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973) 72.
6 T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent, ’ The Sacred Wood. Essays on Poetry and Criticism (1920; London: Faber & Faber, 1997) 48.
7 T. S. Eliot, ‘Shakespeare and the Stoicism of Seneca, ’ (1927) Selected Essays (1932; London: Faber & Faber, 1963) 137-136.
8 ‘The Three Voices of Poetry, ’ (1953) On Poets and Poetry (London: Faber, 1957) 102.
9 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Music of Poetry, ’ The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber, 1933) 31.
10 ‘The Death of the Author, ’ eds. Rice & Waugh, Modern Literary Theory: A Reader (1989; London: Edward Arnold, 1991) 118.
Auteur
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Gulshan Taneja
University of Delhi, India
Associate Professor at the University of Delhi. He has edited books on Rushdie and Yeats and a festschrift, Literature East and West. He edits In-between: Essays and Studies in Literary Criticism, a bi-annual journal of English literary criticism and has published, since 1992, 23 issues showcasing some of the finest scholarship in Europe and North America.
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