The heart of the matter
Rupert Christiansen
ESSAYS IN APPRECIATION by Christopher Ricks
OUP, £25, pp. 363 Yet he is never merely provocative or whimsical. For Ricks remains very much a critic in the English tradition which stretch- es back through Eliot and Leavis to Arnold, Coleridge and Johnson. He believes that a great writer has something of importance to say — something which can be called moral inasmuch as it expands our imaginative experience of the world and he believes that it is the responsibility of a critic to read the full potential into literature, not to undermine it. Essays in Appreciation indeed.
This collection spans his work and thought of the last 15 years — much of it written from Boston, where he has been based since his great falling-out with Cam- bridge in the early 1980s — and it makes a marvellously heartening and enthralling book. Significantly, the first piece deals with a problem which exercised William Empson: what the hell is going on in Mar- lowe's Doctor Faustus? In Ricks' view, the lost key to the play is the pressure of the Plague, and he proposes that an Eliza- bethan would have seen Faustus' bargain as a buying of a period of certain life against the daily threat of imminent death. Typically, the argument concludes by deftly stringing together some related texts one of Ricks' more miraculous gifts is his apparent ability to cross-reference every single word he has ever read, and here he finds echoes and premonitions not only of Goethe and Camus, but Dekker and Berry- man too. After essays on Donne's 'Farewell to Love', Clarendon's History of the Rebellion and George Crabbe (`suffocated in Suffolk'), comes a dazzling lecture on 'Jane Austen and Mothering', which explores her complex relations, or lack of them, with children, followed by an extended defence of the 'Life and Letters' style of Victorian biography. Radically, he speaks up for the propriety of its pieties and silences, show-' ing how telling and intimate the memorial- ists such as Froude and Hallam Tennyson can be compared to their tell-all, spare- none modern counterparts. He is particu- larly illuminating on Elizabeth Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, characterising it as 'a masterpiece of religious literature' and defending the later excision of the melo- drama surrounding Branwell's decline, so often regarded as an exemplary act of Vic- torian cover-up.
Passing over shorter pieces on Hardy's 'Spellbound Palace' (demonstrating his reading of Eliot, a scenario which I still find hard to credit), Lowell's translation of Phedre (which oddly doesn't mention Tony Harrison's far more imaginative stab at the dilemmas of rendering Racine into English) and J. L. Austin, one arrives at the climax of the collection, three papers which constitute a coruscating attack on an entire trend in modern literary criticism. Here Ricks is simply streets ahead, more supple and flexible and open-minded than anyone in the field, and always hitting his prey with the lightest and most lethal of touches as when he mocks Barthes' approving judg- ment of Julia Kristeva as someone who 'doubts everything' by wondering if that 'everything' includes 'the desirability of doubting everything'. He clearly relishes tripping up such smug demystifiers of mys- tification, siding with Forster over his right in an obituary to call Lawrence 'the great- est imaginative novelist of our generation'. Eliot sniffily claimed that 'unless we know exactly what Mr Forster means by greatest, imaginative and novelist, I submit that his judgment is meaningless', to which Forster retorted that no, he couldn't say what he meant and
worse still, I cannot even say what 'exactly' means — only that there are occasions when I would rather feel like a fly than a spider, and that the death of D. H. Lawrence is one of these.
Ricks applauds: he has little time for Eliot's prim sophomore finickiness. He can be stringent, as when he insists that writers of fiction ought to get their facts right, but he doesn't see literary criticism as a discipline which needs to base itself on that sort of philosophical rigour. Instead he stands for what Eliot in a wiser moment described as 'the discernment of exactly what, and how much, we feel in any given situation'. Any more enclosed theory is beside the point; what a critic needs is prin- ciples, because principles admit of counter-principles, as proverbs do. A theory, because its reputabili- ty is constituted of elaborated concatenation, cannot accommodate a counter-theory.
This is one of Ricks' rare inelegant sen- tences, but it seems to me to reach the heart of the matter, a noble statement from a critic who, for the depth and brilliance of his literary understanding, stands head and shoulders above his present kind.
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