8/13/2019 Literary History. Non-Subject Par Excellence http://slidepdf.com/reader/full/literary-history-non-subject-par-excellence 1/9 Literary History: Non-Subject Par Excellence Author(s): F. W. Bateson Source: New Literary History, Vol. 2, No. 1, A Symposium on Literary History (Autumn, 1970), pp. 115-122 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468592 . Accessed: 01/03/2011 17:14 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup . . Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New Literary History. http://www.jstor.org
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8/13/2019 Literary History. Non-Subject Par Excellence
Literary History: Non-Subject Par ExcellenceAuthor(s): F. W. BatesonSource: New Literary History, Vol. 2, No. 1, A Symposium on Literary History (Autumn,1970), pp. 115-122Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/468592 .
Accessed: 01/03/2011 17:14
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at .http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jhup. .
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].
The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to
par excellence? For two reasons: one (the topic towhich this essay is principally devoted), because it glossesover a logical contradiction between two opposed modes
of thought; two, because literature and history are both excellent
things in themselves-provided they are considered (and practiced)
separately. Literary history is merely a by-product, a disreputable
though not entirely useless by-product. It can be compared to the
Philosophers' Stone. Though the medieval alchemists never discovered
how to transmute lead into gold, the science of chemistry is directlydescended from their failures. In the same
way literary history, thougha futile occupation in itself (one of the jokes of modern academic life),has had its own valuable by-products. For one thing, it has sharpenedour chronological sense; Old Style is no longer confused with New
Style, as Thackeray confused them in the evening preceding the duel
in Esmond. 1 Literary history has also played its part in encouraginghabits of accurate documentation and a general consciousness of the
relativity of critical values; we would never say-as Lytton Stracheydid in a review of Birkbeck Hill's edition of The Lives of the Poets in
19o6-that "Johnson'saesthetic
judgmentsare almost
invariablysub-
tle, or solid, or bold; they have always some good quality to recom-
mend them-except one: they are never right."2
Against these incidental blessings must be set certain incidental
scandals. Literary history has provided an umbrella of respectabilityunder which are still crowded teachers of literature who, have out-
grown their adolescent enthusiasms without acquiring a mature critical
sense. It was against these unfortunate misfits that the New Criticism
I Esmond and Lord Castlewood set out for London on "Monday morning, the
I th of October, in the year I700" (Book I, chap. xiv). In fact the Iith of Octo-ber was a Friday (O.S.). The confusion between their arrival "at night fall" and
Esmond's proposal over an hour later that they should have "half an hour's prac-tice before nightfall" seems to reflect a muddle about sunset in O.S. and N.S.
2 Books and Characters (London, 1922), p. 68.
8/13/2019 Literary History. Non-Subject Par Excellence
of its composition be determined to affect its aesthetic content? Any
year between I6oo and 1630 would be equally plausible if that play is
regarded primarily as an aesthetic construct that is still available to amodern reader. The aesthetic conditional is crucial. In the process of
responding to the play as literature the modem reader will ignore such
historical facts as the difference between the Jacobean pronunciationof English and that standard today, or the difference between the publictheatre in which The Revenger's Tragedy was originally performed
(no lighting, no scenery, no curtain, and an "apron" stage) and its
modem equivalent.
Uneasily aware of the irrelevance of historical "facts" we tend to
take refuge in grandiose generalities. T. S. Eliot is typical:
The poetry of a people takes its life from the people's speech and inturn gives life to it; and representsits highest point of consciousness,its
greatest power and its most delicate sensibility.3
Similar dicta are scattered through Eliot's critical essays. In the
"Baudelaire" (1930), for example, the poet is said to have to "expresswith individual differences the general state of mind-not as a duty,but simply because he cannot help participating in it."4 Such proposi-tions receive our general assent. They are at least more reputable than
those of the Art for Art's Sake critic. Writers do not live in ivory towers
(if they did they would starve to death). On the contrary, they are
members of society, with the obligations, conscious or unconscious,that such membership implies, and they are dependent for their words
on the language that is current at the moment.
The difficulty is to reconstruct the evidence from which such gen-eralizations must depend if they are to carry any conviction. Literary
history,as we have seen, is a feeble crutch because of its bias towards
differentiation. What is perhaps needed is a series of interlinking parallel
disciplines-political, economic, linguistic, cultural-which might be
subsumed under some such label as Social Studies. In this way as much
attention might be paid to similarities as to differences.
Literary history as it was practiced until recently concentrated its
attention on the discovery of new "sources." When I was a graduatestudent at Harvard I remember the indignation with which Lowes
repudiated the imputation: "Gentlemen, I am not a source-hunter "
And the little man's enormous voice thundered round the room. It
was a Chaucer class, but I had just read The Road to Xanadu and rec-
ollecting that masterpiece of source-hunting I scribbled a note to my
3 The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticism (London, 1933), p. 15.
4 Selected Essays (London, 1932), p. 386.
8/13/2019 Literary History. Non-Subject Par Excellence
neighbour: "The lady doth protest too much, methinks " It may be
said, of course, that The Road to Xanadu is concerned with similarities,
the echoes of the travel books Coleridge had been reading before writ-ing "Kubla Khan" and "The Ancient Mariner," and does not qualify
accordingly as literary history. This, however, is to ignore the differ-
ences of genre and context that separate the matter-of-fact travel-books
and Coleridge's brilliantly fantastic poems. The travel-books, in spiteof Coleridge's repetitions of phrase and image from them, do not explainthe poems. They are not in pari materia-as some of the ballads in
Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry can certainly be said to be.
And what about chronological order, that other idol of the literary
historian? R. B. McKerrow's Prolegomena for the Oxford Shakespeare(1939) is specific on this point. He tells us in his preface that the con-
clusion he had reached, after many years work on the Oxford edition
(still unpublished), was that "any satisfactory study of the works of
Shakespeare, or indeed probably of any other author, must take full
account of the order in which they were written, and . . . it is ad-
visable actually to study them, so far as possible, in that order."5 Must
it? Is it advisable to read an author's works in the order of their com-
position? The recommendation has a certain specious plausibility. If
a work of literature is essentially a temporal artifact, one in which theauthor invites you to begin with his first stanza, act, or chapter, it mightseem reasonable to extend the same principle to the whole body of his
writings. The objection that McKerrow's formula starts one off with
the juvenilia, which are often silly as well as immature, may be con-
sidered frivolous. This is a risk that the conscientious literary student
must be prepared to run; there may be nuggets even in the earlier
version of Spenser's "Visions of Bellay" that was printed in A Theatre
for Worldlings (1569), though I have not detected them.
But there is a more cogent refutation in wait for McKerrow. It is
simply that a writer's juvenilia may not qualify as literature at all.
The sensible thing to do surely is to begin with the works that are
generally considered his masterpieces. (One begins Spenser with The
Faerie Queene.) Literary history has a "value" element built into it.
Since it cannot be the history of all the books ever written, a process of
selection must be a necessary preliminary. And if the selection is not to
be merely conventional or mechanical, a critical reading is the first
necessity.The test
properto a
temporalartifact can be
summarizedin a sentence: to qualify as literature the work under consideration must
invite a reading backwards as well as a reading forwards. In less
technical terms, it must be memorable. But, because of his initial pre-
5 P. vi-
8/13/2019 Literary History. Non-Subject Par Excellence