The slow death of Cambridge English
Peter Ackroyd At a time when frenzied letters are being written to the Times about the state of contemporary art criticism, it is as well to remember that there are far more severe critical problems elsewhere. Literary criticism—to take the most important but least discussed example—is now all but paralysed; this has nothing to do with book reviewers, who perform a useful public function and who, in any case, would never aspire to the dizzy ranks of 'the critics'. I am referring to those critics in the universities, who publish long articles in specialised journals, who write books about Henry James or Samuel Johnson; who, in short, are a cut above Grub Street and its environs. There has been nothing original from them in ten years. I have yet to read a contemporary academic critic who could write more intelligently, or read more carefully, than a good book reviewer. And I have yet to meet one who was not a willing slave to whatever ideological fashion currently holds the academies in thrall.
Cambridge University is a case in point. It was here that the 'study' of English literature was established, and where it has now degenerated into a number of academic squabbles over one trend or another: leading to confusion among the students and a general failure of nerve among the staff. Cambridge had, until recently, been the quiet home for liberal, humanist critics who wrote essays about The Tempest and, as far as I know, never did harm to a living soul. But their humanism got sloppier and sloppier, and the atmosphere changed. Socialism and sociology became fashionable, and there was a spate of Marxist critics who discussed books as though they were an adjunct to social theory. And now the French, or at least the disciples of the French, have arrived, armed with texts and meta-texts, ready to swear that theirs is the only way to read books. And when everyone else has lost their nerve, what could be more attractive than a fearfully rigid and complex set of instructions on how to read and how to write? For beleaguered academics, who don't know what they're doing or why they're doing it, it comes as an unexpected blessing. Why, it's like having Anglo-Saxon on the syllabus again.
This is, of course, an abbreviated history but something very much like it is the context for two books by two academics: Explorations by L. C. Knights (Chatto and Windus, £4.50) and The Unnatural Scene, a study of Shakespeare's tragedies by Michael Long (Methuen
£6.50). There is one thing in these books which runs deeper than any differences of tone and method, although both men might deny it—it is Cambridge. The books are conceived, born and nurtured within that atmosphere, and it shows.
The central problem can be stated quite simply: what is this 'literature' which we take for granted, and what are its particular characteristics that make it susceptible of being taught and lectured upon ? These questions lurk somewhere in most books of academic criticism, with the nagging doubt—that perhaps, after all, English literature is not really a university discipline—which must continually be allayed. So Mr Knights,. in this civilised collection of essays upon a variety of literary topics, feels constrained to describe literature as a 'form of knowledge' and as 'an irreplaceable way of arriving at truths that are of the highest important to us'. People who might then ask, what are these 'truths', need not stay for an answer because there isn't one. 'Truth' and 'knowledge' are suggested and never defined; they lend a spurious force to the critical argument, without at any time illuminating it.
Of course literary academics have always relied upon this imprecision to bolster their claims for their study, and in fact clumsiness and confusion can often be mistaken for virtues; it is the peculiar characteristic of literary studies that it can make large claims for itself as a 'form of knowledge' at the same time as it rejects any generalised or specialised investigations as being not concrete, not finely rendered, not humane. But the problem is larger than this. To describe literature as a form of knowledge, and then to leave the matter as vague as Mr Knights does, is to make a hostage to ideological fortune. A 'form of knowledge', which actually has no form whatever, is woefully ill-equipped to resist the blandishments of whatever sociological, ideological or critical fashions drift upon the scene. So it is that Marxism, structuralism, formalism, practical criticism, and even plain, old fashioned humanism are purveyed in turn, according to the particular college, the politics and the age of the tutor, and the intelligence of the student.
Mr Knights is, I suspect, a plain oldfashioned humanist himself; his ideology comes out of Coleridge and Arnold and it is one that asserts such things as the 'unity' of a creative work and—more importantly—its moral usefulness. As Knights says, 'what, to put it crudely, its uses— moral, educational and even political— are.' Or, to put it even more crudely, if students come up to Cambridge to study literature, and I am being paid to teach them literature, well, goodness me, it has to be useful. If it were not, the English faculty would fall like a pack of cards.
There is a larger point here, too, but it is difficult territory to cross within a short article: however much lecturers may discuss subtle moral complexities and delicacies of response, and however much Mr Knights may apologise in his book for seeming too 'cut-and-dried', to draw moral lessons or moral exempla—which, however refined and carefully phrased they may be, is exactly what academic critics try to do and like to do—is to devalue the written language and to turn it into a simple vehicle for the communication of certain human truths and human values. As Knights says of The Tempest, 'It helps us to face with something that is neither wistfulness nor despair the intractability and the limitations of life'. No wonder the academies are in confusion when literary critics can indulge in trite sermonising, when a play is used as an anodyne, and when criticism becomes some sort of adjunct to moral philosophy. As long as creative writing is seen in this context, it remains subservient to any bright, new entertaining theory which is imposed upon it; it is given no form of its own.
Michael Long is not a humanist, as far as one can tell these days, but he has adopted a quasi-scientific vocabulary which is very closely aligned to Knights's more urbane style. In Mr Long's book, there is again that constant emphasis upon the usefulness of what he and his colleagues are doing: 'making the experience of his [Shakespeare's] tragedies a kind of training in keenness of feeling, refinement of emotional response'. There was a time when only priests and psychologiss performed this impractical task. ,‘ id for Long, again, literary criticism becomes a vague substitute for sociology and ethical theory: 'The plays contain a finely realised understanding, basic to their tragic vision, of social distance and stratification systems, of ethnocentrism . . poor Shakespeare; for Knights he becomes a theologian and for Long he turns into a sociologist. And creative writing, when seen in such aesthetic and moralistic terms, falls bound and gagged into the hands of academics with a job to do. No wonder that literary studies are falling apart; the sooner, the better.
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