SOURCE: “Fair Art's ‘Treach'rous Colours’: The Fate of ‘Gen'rous Converse’ in An Essay on Criticism,” in Quests of Difference: Reading Pope's Poems, The University Press of Kentucky, 1986, pp. 16-38.

[In the following essay, Atkins identifies a number of thematic relations between reading, language, and texts in An Essay on Criticism, focusing on the differences among them that structure and unify the poem.]

How better to begin a critical reading of Pope's poems than by attending to what he writes about reading? Though he thematizes reading most prominently in the moral epistles and satires of the 1730s, Pope's first major poem, An Essay on Criticism, already offers clear insight into a range of related issues. Here Pope treats not only reading but also language, the relation of language to thought, the relation of readers to texts, and much more. In discussing the Essay, I shall focus on this matter of relations, particularly the kinds of relation obtaining within the various differences that serve to structure the poem.

ON READING GENEROUSLY

The remarkably rich commentary published on An Essay on Criticism both provides the occasion and prompts the desire to reread it. I begin with one of the strongest recent readings of the Essay, that by David B. Morris. Entitled “Civilized Reading: The Act of Judgment in An Essay on Criticism,” this study is important not only for its carefully considered argument that Pope's poem merits a place of some distinction in the history of literary theory but also for its own sensitive—and civilized—analysis of the poem as poem.¹ As he perceptively focuses on the role of generosity in the poem and in the theory it elaborates, Morris reminds us of Pope's important use of the parts-whole problem,² particularly in directing attention to the reader-text relationship thematized in An Essay on Criticism. Though he does not develop the point, Morris suggests that the poem, in discussing the act of reading, tells us how it itself is to be read.

Morris's account runs somewhat as follows: Interpreting pride as the virtual opposite of the generosity Pope advocates, Morris claims that the “effect of pride, within the context of Pope's Essay, is always a pressure toward partiality and fragmentation, blocking comprehensiveness of vision. In its pressure against wholeness, pride radically constricts understanding by attaching us to cherished opinions and to favored fragments.”³ Generosity plays the hero to the villain pride in this critical story, permitting the necessary attention to the whole. It makes possible “an equitable judgment by consciously rejecting whatever is incomplete and partisan.”⁴ Questions remain, however, as Morris recognizes. How, he asks,

can the critic gain access to the author's mental processes and undeclared purposes which are required for understanding the “Whole” work? Pope's answer to this difficult question is the power of sympathy. Sympathy, like friendship and virtue, is a necessary characteristic of the generous critic. As an aspect of generosity, it permits the critic to achieve a close emotional and intellectual kinship with the author under study: “No longer his Interpreter, but He.” The generous critic reads with a sympathetic understanding, which, when perfectly attuned, allows a presumptive reconstruction of authorial plans and purposes and processes which complement a judicious study of the text.⁵

In Pope's own words: “A perfect Judge will read each Work of Wit / With the same Spirit that its Author writ” (ll. 233-34). Even if the idea is parodied in A Tale of a Tub,⁶ all authors devoutly wish for such sympathetic involvement on the part of their readers.

This “civilized” position may be as attractive to readers as to authors. The call for generosity and sympathetic understanding suggests humanity as it entails a subordination of the individual (or to use Pope's term, the part) to the whole, a giving of the self to something outside and larger. Certainly it is consonant with Pope's thematic focus, not only in An Essay on Criticism but also in An Essay on Man and the later Dunciad, as well as with his insistence on the moral qualities of the poet, all of which links him to that humanism that Aubrey Williams and others have ably described. As Morris argues, the task that Pope holds out for readers is the difficult one of subordinating oneself to and melding with the “Spirit” of the author. This “generous” position perhaps calls to mind what I wrote in the opening chapter concerning the need to attend to authorial declarations, first of all reading with the grain. But if the parallel initially appears close between the two positions, it soon ends, since I go on to propose what is evidently contrary to Pope's theory. Indeed, the opposite of such generosity of spirit as Pope advocates would seem to be not only the partiality, prejudice, and pride that he explicitly condemns but also the (apparently) correlative effort I manifest, whereby, after first attending to authorial declarations, we proceed to read against the grain. If the strategy I labeled, immodestly enough, reader-responsibility criticism first reads “With the same Spirit that [the] Author writ,” it later sets out deliberately to violate that spirit. Ungenerously perhaps, it turns against the “Spirit” with which the author wrote, reading contrary to it, in fact.

If we read deconstructively, proceeding as I have urged, are we not then implicated in and convicted of the pride that Pope attacks? An answer to that question may not be so easy as supposed by those polemicists who regard “speculative” or “creative” criticism, and deconstruction in particular, as proud and overbearing, if not actually Satanic. This is not the place to debate the issue, but in passing I direct attention to, among other contexts for understanding deconstructive strategies and desires, Richard A. Lanham's account of “the rhetorical ideal of life,” defined as both dramatic and competitive.⁷ Here I shall argue that if we limit our reading of An Essay on Criticism to Pope's own declared “Spirit” and the principles he supports, we will not only miss much but also end with at best a partial—and impoverished—sense of the considerable achievement that is the Essay. At the same time, I insist that Pope has much to teach all readers about reading, including deconstructionists and traditional scholars. Reading “With the same Spirit that [the] Author writ” remains essential (at least as a first “step”).

THE STYLE IS THE MAN

I begin with what we might call, borrowing terms from Pope, the poem's “Gen'rous Converse” (l. 641). This phrase, which the Twickenham Edition glosses as “well-bred intercourse,” occurs toward the end of An Essay on Criticism as Pope describes the “ideal critic,” one who, while avoiding the pride and partiality the poet has lashed, bodies forth those qualities he has praised throughout. “Unbiass'd” and “Blest with a Taste … unconfin'd,” the “ideal critic” enjoys “A Knowledge both of Books and Humankind” (ll. 633, 639-40). A whole person himself, in other words, such a critic effects an intercourse between qualities not always found combined in one man: he is “Still pleas'd to teach, and yet not proud to know,” and “Tho' Learn'd, well-bred; and tho' well-bred, sincere; / Modestly bold, and Humanly severe” (ll. 632, 635-36).

An Essay on Criticism works toward a similar wholeness, blurring some distinctions too easily assumed to be absolute and seeking “Gen'rous Converse” between the various dichotomies it develops, including wit/judgment, poetry/criticism, sense/sound, and thought/language. The exacting scholarship on the poem has, of course, long pointed to the complementariness Pope works hard to establish between the poles of such dichotomies. Characterized by an apparent flexibility and a preference for “the complications rather than the simplifications of artistic truth,” Pope's poem may be said “to harmonize the extremes and variables of critical thinking,” aiming toward a “critical synthesis” and “the reconciliation of conflicting critical moods.”⁸ Complementariness, as well as generosity, appears when Pope declares, for instance, that “The Sound must seem an Echo to the Sense” (l. 365) and that “The gen'rous Critick fann'd the Poet's Fire” (l. 100). Similarly, to take one more example, Pope writes that, even if “often … at strife,” wit and judgment are “meant each other's Aid, like Man and Wife” (ll. 82-83).

Pope's entire effort in the Essay may stem from a perceived threat to such “Gen'rous Converse,” That is, Pope addresses situations, mainly critical ones, of course, where complementariness has deteriorated into opposition. Thus he charges, for example, that if in a better past “The gen'rous Critick fann'd the Poet's Fire, / And taught the World, with Reason to Admire,” the present is different, indeed “fallen”:

Then Criticism the Muse's Handmaid prov'd,
To dress her Charms, and make her more belov'd;
But following Wits from that Intention stray'd;
Who cou'd not win the Mistress, woo'd the Maid;
Against the Poets their own Arms
they turn'd,
Sure to hate most the Men from whom they learn'd.

[ll. 102-7]

Against such antagonism Pope directs his efforts in the Essay, not only arguing, as we have already glimpsed, that wit and judgment are bound together, but also demonstrating that fact in writing criticism as poetry.

Noticing such attempts to effect complementary relations between dichotomous pairs, we approach an intellectual controversy that serves as a crucial backdrop against which An Essay on Criticism should be read. As is apparent in Pope's criticism of various tendencies to separate wit and judgment, language and thought, he challenges the attempts, in the work of philosophers and of members of the Royal Society alike, to drive a wedge between res et verba. As Aubrey Williams has written, “Slighting the theory that sense informs words, like the soul the body, the [seventeenth] century moves from Bacon's view that ‘words are but the images of matter’ to the Royal Society's repudiation of words in favour of things. From being the means to wisdom, words become obstacles, to knowledge.”⁹ The tendency to divorce words from things, leaving language only a secondary and decorative function, received powerful support from Peter Ramus's influential re-definition of rhetoric. Ramus diverted invention and disposition from rhetoric to logic, which left the former only the diminished duty of “gilding the matter, the function of mere ‘style’ and delivery.”¹⁰ In philosophers like Hobbes and Locke, the powerful drive to sunder words and things takes the form of a debate over the respective capacities of wit and judgment, though the result is the same: an implicit “trivialization of poetry itself.”¹¹ In such philosophers, according to Williams, “the faculty of Wit and the figurative language it inspires are seen as unrelated to truth and real knowledge, to ‘things as they are.’ Since figurative language is of the essence of poetry, the denial of its ability to express truth is the denial of the value and dignity of poetry. At best, the main role of Wit or of poetry becomes (as in Ramistic theory) the mere ornamentation of those truths provided for it by the judgment.”¹² Since the humanist considered “the ‘word’ as ‘wisdom’ expressed,” it was most important that any effort be confronted that would “empty eloquence of its wisdom, squeeze out of the word the thought it was believed to embody.”¹³ The way in which the humanist-rhetorical tradition regarded the word-thought relationship appears with particular clarity in the mid-century British Education, written by Thomas Sheridan, Swift's godson and father of the famous playwright. Stressing the “intimate connection between ideas and words,” Sheridan claims that “the union of the soul and body are [sic] not more necessary for any useful purpose in life, than the union of oratory and philosophy for their mutual welfare.” Somewhat more specifically, he writes, echoing Pope's particular concerns in An Essay on Criticism, that there is “such an intimate connection between ideas and words, language and knowledge, that whatever deficiency, or fault, there may be in the one, necessarily affects the other. … [May not the] corruption of our understandings [be owing] to those of our style? Are not our minds chiefly stored with ideas by words, and must not clearness or obscurity in the one, necessarily produce the same in the other?”¹⁴

In Dunciad IV, Pope presents as an accomplished fact the “decline of rhetoric into mere verbalism,”¹⁵ critic, schoolmaster, and Dulness herself joining together in proudly proclaiming that “on Words is still our whole debate” (l. 219) and that they thus wage “war with Words alone” (l. 178). In An Essay on Criticism it is, less dramatically, a real and present danger. Directly addressing the perceived threat to wit, poetry, and figurative language, Pope pointedly defines “True Wit” as

                                                            … Nature
to Advantage drest,
What oft was Thought, but ne'er
so well Exprest,
Something, whose Truth convinc'd
at Sight we find,
That gives us back the Image of our Mind.

[ll. 297-300]

He is unsparing in lashing those who “unskill'd to trace / The naked Nature and the living Grace, / With Gold and Jewels cover ev'ry Part, / And hide with Ornaments their Want of Art” (ll. 293-96). Similarly, Pope rebukes those who “for Language all their Care express, / And value Books, as Women Men, for Dress” (ll. 305-6). Frequently employing the familiar metaphor of dress, which in fact becomes in the Essay the metaphor of metaphor, Pope follows a long and distinguished line of critics who so depict expression, Dryden, for one, writing that “expression … is a modest clothing of our thoughts, as breeches and petticoats are of our bodies.”¹⁶ In the Essay, Pope defines “true Expression” as that which, “like th' unchanging Sun, / Clears, and improves whate'er it shines upon, / It gilds all Objects, but it alters none. / Expression is the Dress of Thought” (ll. 315-18).

Reading such declarations in the context of the humanist-rhetorical tradition and the various contemporary assaults upon it, Aubrey Williams finds only complementariness. For Pope, he maintains, words embody thought. On this argument, the same notion informs bodies, Nature itself, and “expression”; that is, just as Nature figures forth God, so,

In some fair Body thus th' informing Soul
With Spirits feeds, with Vigour fills the whole,
Each Motion guides, and ev'ry Nerve sustains;
It self unseen, but in th' Effects, remains.

[ll. 76-79]

Claiming that “the style is the man,” Williams evidently means that style, or “expression,” mirrors perfectly and reflects accurately what one is, just as words incarnate thought. By no means mere ornamentation (as Hobbes, Locke, and others had recently proposed), despite the inside/outside, contained/container dichotomies that the metaphor of dress implies, words and the expression they constitute are, in this rather “Christian” formulation, not detachable from thought, sense, and meaning, even if thought can somehow exist without, and precede, language.

THE SKIDDING OF MEANING

But is the relationship one of embodiment and incarnation, as has been supposed? It is certainly true that at least at times in An Essay on Criticism Pope insists on the inseparability of thought and language, as well as of inside and outside. In one important passage, however, occurs a description establishing not the embodiment of preexistent thought in language but their interimplication. I refer to those verses in which Pope parallels poetry and painting, detailing the catastrophic effect of time on both media.¹⁷ As in one, so in the other, Pope declares; since we have only “failing Language,” “such as Chaucer is, shall Dryden be”:

So when the faithful Pencil
has design'd
Some bright Idea of the Master's
Mind,
Where a new World leaps out at his
command,
And ready Nature waits upon his Hand;
When the ripe Colours soften and unite,
And sweetly melt into just Shade
and Light,
When mellowing Years their full Perfection give,
And each Bold Figure just begins to Live;
The treach'rous Colours the
fair Art betray,
And all the bright Creation fades away!

[ll. 482-93]

Though time initially exerts a positive effect on the artistic media, in fact mellowing “Colours” to “full Perfection,” they eventually “fade” and ultimately disappear. As the “Colours” do so, Pope admits, they “betray” and, indeed, un-create the art that they make. Such destruction is possible in written texts, “fair Art's” “Colours” being equally “treach'rous” in them, only if, of course, language and its figures do much more than enhance, dress, or gild thought. Rather than body forth a preexistent thought, “Colours” are inseparable from it because they create it.

But the interimplication described in this passage does not principally characterize the relationship that obtains between language and thought in the Essay. If it is not one of interimplication, it is not unproblematically of inseparable links, either. Consider carefully the frequent dress metaphor that we have already noted. This particular metaphor clearly suggests a dichotomy and, indeed, an opposition of words and thought, with the latter existing as the inside, the former the outside. This opposition appears in Pope's remark in 1726 in a letter to Broome that “the most poetical dress whatever, will avail little without a sober fund of sense and good thought.”¹⁸ Paralleling various comments in An Essay on Criticism, this statement points to a hierarchical opposition in which thought is not only depicted as distinct from language but also privileged as prior to its formulation and expression in language. As a “fund,” thought comes first, lies at bottom, and serves as ground. Repeating this familiar position, Williams writes that in the understanding of the humanist-rhetorical tradition “speech reproduced thought in words” (my italics).¹⁹ No matter the argument elsewhere concerning the inseparability of words and thought, this statement reveals not only the logo- and phonocentric privileging of speech but also the assumption that thought is distinct from, prior to, and possible apart from language.

Even if “'tis hard to say” (l. 1) what certain differences are and to make necessary discriminations, it is clear that Pope regards thought and expression as distinct, albeit related, entities. Consider, first, some lines I quoted earlier, perhaps Pope's clearest statement on the relationship of language and thought: “true Expression, like th' unchanging Sun, / Clears, and improves whate'er it shines upon, / It gilds all Objects, but it alters none.”²⁰ To echo Paul de Man writing in quite a different context, these lines must be read, not simply paraphrased.²¹ To begin with, note that, even if, in clearing, improving, and gilding the objects it shines upon, the sun does not “alter” those objects, it obviously changes their appearance and thus inevitably our perception of and reaction to them. With expression, in any case, the situation is different: to claim either that expression does not “alter” or that it does amounts to the same thing; it assumes that expression and thought or meaning are distinct and separable and that thought is prior to its “expression” in language.

Essentially the same position appears in the following couplet: “Launch not beyond your Depth,” Pope advises, “but be discreet, / And mark that Point where Sense and Dulness meet” (ll. 50-51). When read “analytically,” as de Man recommends, Pope's assumption emerges clearly: it is that such differences as those between sense and dulness are absolute and that, though at some point they meet, they remain distinct. If they meet at some point, it is only because they are absolute distinctions. Were they each other's différance, as Derrida has argued concerning all binary oppositions, they could not meet at a point. For Pope, clearly, the desire is to mark the place where meeting occurs, and his act of creating the opposition sets meaning in place and keeps it from what might truly permit “Gen'rous Converse” and fruitful (if not well-bred) intercourse.

There are, though, no clear, distinct, and absolute lines of demarcation between dulness and sense (which is not to say, of course, that they are indistinguishable). Meaning refuses to stay still and in place; instead, it skids, and so no “point” exists where sense or dulness is simply “itself” or where these differences meet as distinct entities, let alone oppositions. I am reminded of the blind/insightful Hack who comments in A Tale of a Tub upon “how near the frontiers of height and depth border upon each other,” how “one who travels the east [eventually runs] into the west,” and how “a straight line [is eventually] drawn by its own length into a circle.”²² It is not, then, that sense and dulness, like those other pairs of difference treated in An Essay on Criticism, are simply linked, for the idea of linking presupposes distinction and, ultimately, separation. Rather, they are always already interimplicated, bound together, and cross in a constant movement. That this is so, that meaning refuses to stay in place, becomes clear in the second verse of the couplet we are reading: “Mark,” Pope advises, “that Point.” A mark is, by definition, “a visible impression or trace upon something,” and “to mark” is, for example, not only to notice or to heed but also (therefore) to single out, to make distinct, to put a mark on, “to trace or form by or as by marks” (Random House Dictionary). If one marks a point, does that point exist prior to the act of marking? The point marked may be, in other words, constituted and brought into “being” by the mark. The mark is, of course, writing, and as mark, writing is creative in a manner and to an extent that Pope certainly does not declare. Pope's language establishes, however, that marking, that is, writing, is performative, as well as mimetic. Pope creates the point between sense and dulness.

Another couplet in the Essay makes even clearer the power of performance. I refer to lines 574-75, where Pope grants the performative nature of his own earlier claims that knowledge and “the Seeds of Judgment” are born with human being, though “by false Learning is good Sense defac'd” (ll. 20, 25): “Men must be taught as if you taught them not; / And Things unknown propos'd as Things forgot.” Rather than a faithful mirroring of reality, Pope's claims regarding inherent judgment and knowledge are propositions: one proposes that the unknown is what one knew but forgot. The inside thus loses its privileged status, for performance, supposedly an outside perhaps analogous to “dress,” emerges as creative in the same way as language.

PLAYING THE PART

The power of performance, as of language, appears in the textual description woven by An Essay on Criticism. Pope's declarations, however, constitute quite a different story. They tell, often at least, not of a complementary relationship, as has been claimed, but of a particular kind of ungenerous relationship between thought and language. That relationship Derrida depicts as characteristic of our familiar dichotomies. “In a classical philosophical opposition,” he writes, “we are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but rather with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms governs the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), or has the upper hand.” Crucial to dichotomies, according to Derrida, is “the conflictual and subordinating structure of opposition.”²³

The dichotomies that structure An Essay on Criticism participate fully in the situation that Derrida describes. Not only thought/language but also sense/sound, wit/judgment, poetry/criticism, and (hardly surprising) whole/part reflect this characteristic hierarchical and oppositional structure. Thus, if in “proper” poetry, “The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense,” the latter is privileged, given priority (both metaphorically and literally), and made dominant over sound, whose function is simply to repeat. The relationship Pope stresses between parts and whole captures that operative in the other dichotomies. That is, as he does later in both An Essay on Man and Dunciad IV, where the issue also figures prominently, Pope reverses the hierarchizing that installs a favorite part in the privileged position: “Most Criticks,” he writes in An Essay on Criticism, “fond of some subservient Art, / Still make the Whole depend upon a Part” (ll. 263-64). What matters, Pope insists, “Is not th' Exactness of peculiar Parts; / 'Tis not a Lip, or Eye, we Beauty call, / But the joint Force and full Result of all” (ll. 244-46). The part must, then, sacrifice itself and submit to the whole.

Even if at first it appears generous and complementary, the relationship of wit and judgment is characterized by the same hierarchical structure. Though Pope claims that they are “meant each other's Aid, like Man and Wife,” he precedes this complementary account with the somewhat less generous statement that wit contains within itself the judgmental faculty or ability: “Some, to whom Heav'n in Wit has been profuse, / Want as much more, to turn it to its use” (ll. 80-81). That judgment is thus subordinated to wit is perhaps even clearer in the version of these lines that appeared in the poem from 1711 to 1743: “There are whom Heav'n has blest with store of Wit, / Yet want as much again to manage it.” Unlike Hobbes and Locke, as well as certain of Pope's enemies who decried the alleged confusion in these lines, he obviously refuses to divorce wit and judgment. But the relationship between them is not so generous as is sometimes supposed.

Nor is that between poetry and criticism. As we have seen, Pope declares the complementariness between them: in ancient Greece, at least, “The gen'rous Critick fann'd the Poet's Fire.” But if “Criticism the Muse's Handmaid prov'd, / To dress her Charms, and make her more belov'd,” its function was nevertheless subordinate, subservient, and so parallel to that involving expression and thought. The dress metaphor establishes criticism as, like language and expression, an outside whose task is to enhance an inside. Criticism thus seems marginal.

Pope himself is, of course, writing criticism, but he does so—the obvious perhaps bears repeating—in poetic form, which indicates the privilege he affords poetry. Just as wit includes judgment, so poetry thus encompasses criticism. Indeed, from the beginning of the Essay, Pope contends that only those skilled in writing (poetry) should evaluate writing or teach others how to write: “Let such teach others who themselves excell,” Pope declares, “And censure freely who have written well” (ll. 15-16). Writing well is, then, for Pope a necessary license for a critic. In this regard, the ideal is Horace:

He, who Supream in Judgment, as in Wit,
Might boldly censure, as he boldly writ,
Yet judg'd with Coolness tho' he sung with Fire;
His Precepts teach but what his Works inspire.

[ll. 657-60]

Moreover, in writing criticism, Pope brings together wit and judgment, exhibiting wit in performing the critical function and demonstrating—indeed, embodying—the proper way to make critical judgments. As a matter of fact, Pope draws in the attributes of the “ideal critic,” amassing to himself the qualities he praises. If any doubts remain that the “speaking voice” of An Essay on Criticism embodies those features Pope singles out as crucial in a critic, they are surely dispelled as he ends the poem with an explicit account of himself. Acknowledging the support of his friend Walsh, Pope recalls the earlier portrait of the “ideal critic”:

The Muse, whose early Voice you taught to Sing,
Prescrib'd her Heights, and prun'd her tender Wing,
(Her Guide now lost) no more attempts to rise,
But in low Numbers short Excursions tries:
Content, if hence th' Unlearn'd their Wants may view,
The Learn'd reflect on what before they knew:
Careless of Censure, nor too fond
of Fame,
Still pleas'd to praise, yet
not afraid to blame,
Averse alike to Flatter, or Offend,
Not free from Faults, nor yet too
vain to mend.

[ll. 735-44]

Made clear in the poem's ethical appeal is Pope's intention to achieve in and by means of it what he describes Longinus as accomplishing:

          Thee, bold Longinus! all the Nine inspire,
And bless their Critick with a Poet's Fire.
An ardent Judge, who Zealous in his
Trust,
With Warmth gives Sentence, yet is
always Just;
Whose own Example strengthens all
his Laws,
And Is himself that great Sublime he draws.

[ll. 675-80]

The ideal is, then, inside An Essay on Criticism. The implications of this fact require careful consideration, especially as they bear on the parts/whole relationship. That fact, in turn, is related to the way the poem imperialistically seeks closure and totality. The Essay not only tells us how it is to be read (with the “Spirit” with which Pope wrote, properly subordinating parts, however interesting and compelling in themselves, to the whole), but it also closes in upon itself, reflexively. What is involved as a result we need now to consider.

As it aggrandizes, privileges, and celebrates poetry, An Essay on Criticism becomes what Cleanth Brooks has called, referring to another poem, “an instance of the doctrine which it asserts.” Like Donne's “The Canonization,” which Brooks discusses, the Essay, in other words, “is both [an] assertion and the realization of the assertion.”²⁴ If we read the poem, as Pope evidently intends, as a self-reflexive embodiment of its own theoretical principles and thematic assertions, we perform, according to Jonathan Culler, the critical move “in which the text is shown to describe its own signifying processes and thus said to stand free as a self-contained, self-explanatory aesthetic object that enacts what it asserts.”²⁵

For the New Criticism, of course, whose contribution to Pope studies has been quite impressive, a poem's performance, dramatization, or embodiment of its own doctrines and themes signals its wholeness, totality, and “organic unity.” Brooks's image for the free-standing, complete aesthetic object, which almost religiously fuses being and doing, is, of course, the well-wrought urn. Against such a possibility, Derrida, de Man, and others have recently mounted compelling arguments denying that discourse can ever fully account for itself, or become present to itself, in an act of self-referentiality or self-possession. Performative and constative, doing and being, it has been claimed, cannot coincide. Either an excess or a lack always prevents closure.

Why this is so, and one reason (out of two or three we shall consider) why An Essay on Criticism does not achieve the closure and totality it seeks, becomes clear with the help of Culler's discussion of Brooks's essay on “The Canonization.” Culler shows how, in Donne's poem, an excess prevents it from closing itself in. With “The Canonization”—the point applies equally to An Essay on Criticism—the excess occurs in the poem's becoming what it asserts and thematizes. The apparent unity and totality that Brooks labels a well-wrought urn exceeds “itself,” for in celebrating itself as whole, the poem incorporates into what it is that very celebration. It may even be, as Culler claims, that “if the urn is taken to include the response to the urn, then the responses it anticipates … become a part of it and prevent it from closing.”²⁶ At any rate, a self-reflexive text like An Essay on Criticism becomes other than—because more than—that whole it celebrates itself for being. Produced is self-difference: as Culler puts it, “The structure of self-reference works in effect to divide the poem [from] itself.”²⁷

Such self-reflexivity as characterizes Pope's Essay is produced by folds, by the poem's folding back upon itself, trying to fold itself up. When a text engages in such an effort, as Derrida has shown, “it creates … an ‘invaginated pocket,’ in which an outside becomes an inside and an inner moment is granted a position of exteriority.”²⁸ Invagination Derrida defines as “the inward refolding of la gaine [sheath, girdle], the inverted reapplication of the outer edge to the inside of a form where the outside then opens a pocket.”²⁹ The process of invagination is so complex that Derrida proceeds to “situate the place, the locus, in which double invagination comes about, the place where the invagination of the upper edge on its outer face …, which is folded back ‘inside’ to form a pocket and an inner edge, comes to extend beyond (or encroach on) the invagination of the lower edge, on its inner face …, which is folded back ‘inside’ to form a pocket and an outer edge.”³⁰ Adopting Derrida's formulation, we might say that when An Essay on Criticism seeks to do and be what it describes and advocates, folding back upon itself, it creates an invaginated pocket. The outside thus becomes an inside, but if the outside comes inside, the inside is, then, not simply an inside. Nor is the outside merely an outside. As Derrida writes, putting the copula “under erasure,” “The Outside Is the Inside.”³¹ The implications should be clear as well for such oppositions as thought and expression, which enlist under the inside/outside figure. Since the parts of such dichotomies function not as opposed absolute distinctions but as each other's différance, a “trace” of the “one” always inhabiting the “other,” there is no point at which completion or closure is or can be attained.

One need not, however, subscribe to Derrida's deconstructive insights (as compelling as they seem) to reach the same conclusion. From quite another angle, in fact, we can appreciate how An Essay on Criticism fails to achieve wholeness and closure. Recall, to begin with, that as David B. Morris and others have suggested, the Essay instructs the reader in how to read it. But if it does so, in one sense as writing it violates its own instruction in reading. Despite, that is, Pope's reiterated insistence that the reader “Survey the Whole,” the poem fails to do what it asks the (its) reader to do: it does not subordinate all its parts to the whole. Indeed, the Essay as we have it could not have been written on Pope's declared principles, and if it is read only according to them, as Morris for one suggests, much is missed—so much that Pope himself obviously relishes. The point has to do with the purposiveness/play opposition that Pope sets up, and the best example of what amounts to a subversion (or deconstruction) of that opposition as well as of the whole/parts hierarchy occurs, ironically enough, in the poem's second section (lines 201-559). I say “ironically” because the whole/parts opposition is itself the center of discussion and in fact the organizing principle of the entire section, serving to link the seemingly disparate topics treated. Here the pyrotechnical display of wit and “expressiveness,” offered by an ambitious young poet, calls attention to itself, with the effect that the reader inevitably looks at it, rather than through it to some putative whole to which it contributes and supposedly submits.³² Interestingly, just before he discusses and demonstrates the “expressiveness” poetry can achieve, Pope criticizes those “Who haunt Parnassus but to please their Ear, / Not mend their Minds; as some to Church repair, / Not for the Doctrine, but the Musick there” (ll. 341-43). I quote the most strong-willed and unsubmissive lines:

These Equal Syllables alone
require,
Tho' oft the Ear the open Vowels
tire,
While Expletives their feeble Aid do join,
And ten low Words oft creep in one dull Line,
While they ring round the same unvary'd
Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.
Where-e'er you find the cooling Western
Breeze,
In the next Line, it whispers thro' the
Trees;
If Chrystal Streams with pleasing Murmurs creep,
The Reader's threaten'd (not in vain) with Sleep.
Then, at the last, and only Couplet fraught
With some unmeaning Thing they call
a Thought,
A needless Alexandrine ends the Song,
That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length
          along.
Leave such to tune their own dull Rhimes, and know
What's roundly smooth, or languishingly slow;
And praise the Easie Vigor of a Line,
Where Denham's Strength, and Waller's Sweetness
          join.
True Ease in Writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learn'd to dance.
'Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offence,
The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense.
Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows;
But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore,
The hoarse, rough Verse shou'd
like the Torrent roar.
When Ajax strives, some Rock's
vast Weight to throw,
The Line too labours, and the Words
move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours
the Plain,
Flies o'er th'unbending Corn, and skims along the
          Main.

[ll. 344-73]

These verses obviously problematize Pope's criticism of those who privilege language, conceits, numbers, and so forth, sacrificing a poetic whole to such parts. They in fact become excessive, Pope's own “part” here refusing, despite his repeated declarations, to subordinate itself to a reigning purposiveness. A purpose does, of course, exist for Pope's display of “expressiveness,” but no such purpose can account for the extent of that effort. Like the Alexandrine Pope ridicules, at least much of what he writes in the quoted verses is “needless.” In them, at least, play triumphs over simple purposiveness. But I do not suggest that this play represents some failure of critical judgment, that Pope “wanted, or forgot, / The last and greatest Art, the Art to blot” (Epistle to Augustus, ll. 280-81). Far from it; failure to appreciate the excess the lines represent is an impoverishment of Pope's achievement, which transcends any simple sense of unity and wholeness. One final point: The view of language implicit in this “excessive” passage differs from that Pope declares in the poem. Whereas he generally privileges thought and sense over “expression” and sound, here, in looking at rather than through language, he approaches the Dunces' concentration on words as such.

WILL EQUIVOCATION UNDO US?

Of course, as we have seen, Pope typically reverses the hierarchy being established by philosophers and scientists and privileges wit at the expense of judgment, poetry at the expense of criticism. Yet at the same time he elevates thought above language and “expression,” which contradicts the “at” view of language implied in the long passage I just quoted. Indeed, the privileging of thought looks in a direction different from that implied in the privileging of wit and poetry; it looks away from poetry, in fact, and toward philosophy, the very position Pope is concerned in the Essay to confront and repudiate. Does Pope end up, then, doing what he indicts others for doing, threatening the very existence of poetry, in spite of himself?

The answer, confusingly enough, seems to be both yes and no. That is, an answer depends on whether you refer to the declaration or the (different) description. It would, I believe, be an oversimplification as well as a distortion to assume, therefore, that the equivocation or ambiguity results from Pope's immaturity, lack of control, or intellectual confusion, with all of which he has been (unfairly) charged and damned. The bottom line is that An Essay on Criticism equivocates; more, it oscillates, from one position to its supposed opposite. Even if such equivocation and oscillation are both more prominent and more blatant than in certain other texts, equivocation characterizes all texts, though the particular features and operation differ considerably. And even if Hamlet claims that “equivocation will undo us” (V.i.120-21), equivocation may be unavoidable.

Most important to grasp is the essential structure in all such oppositions as function in the Essay and Western thinking generally: the opposed pairs are not separable and distinct but interimplicated. Lest some misunderstanding remain, I repeat what the best scholarship on An Essay on Criticism has long maintained: at the “level” of declaration, Pope refuses to divorce wit and judgment, poetry and criticism, thought and expression. At the same time, however, the relationship between the “poles” in each dichotomy is not altogether complementary or simply generous. In each instance, in fact, a hierarchy appears, Pope normally reversing the privilege that at the time was being increasingly accorded to judgment and straightforward, referential language. With the dichotomy thought/language, however, Pope seems, in spite of his declarations to the contrary, on the side of his philosophical and scientific opponents. The latter position becomes clear through the kind of close reading that takes us beyond or behind Pope's declarations to the “counter” story being told by the textual description and that leads us not simply to a confirmation of Pope's declarations (i.e., oppositional terms are not separable) but to a position different from the declared one: namely, that the oppositional terms are not distinct but, rather, related as each other's différance. It is not, then, that wit and judgment can be combined and should be in order to prevent certain disastrous consequences. Rather, they always already are related, bound together, a “trace” of the “one” inevitably appearing in and inhabiting the “other.”

Notes

1. David B. Morris, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984).

2. I have elsewhere discussed the prominence of this problem in the Essay, especially the way it structures the second section; see “Poetic Strategies in An Essay on Criticism, Lines 201-559,” South Atlantic Bulletin, 44 (1979), 43-47.

3. Morris, Alexander Pope, p. 67.

4. Ibid., p. 68.

5. Ibid., p. 69. The quotation is from Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, An Essay on Translated Verse (1684).

6. See the Hack's advice that “whatever reader desires to have a thorough comprehension of an author's thoughts, cannot take a better method, than by putting himself into the circumstances and postures of life, that the writer was in upon every important passage as it flowed from his pen, for this will introduce a parity and strict correspondence of ideas between the reader and the author” (Jonathan Swift, “Gulliver's Travels” and Other Writings, ed. Louis A. Landa [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960], p. 265).

7. See Lanham's recent books The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976) and Literacy and the Survival of Humanism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983). I do not mean to imply that Lanham is a deconstructionist, only that he and the rhetorical tradition he defines have affinities with deconstruction. Viewed in the light of Lanham's discussions, the refusal to rest satisfied with purposiveness alone is simply characteristic of the “rhetorical ideal.”

8. Aubrey Williams, ed., Pastoral Poetry and “An Essay on Criticism,” the first volume of the Twickenham Edition of the Poems (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 212, 209.

9. Aubrey Williams, Pope's “Dunciad”: A Study of Its Meaning (1955; n.p.: Archon, 1968), pp. 114-15. This classic study provides a valuable account of background pertinent to the Essay as well as to Pope's last major poem.

10. Ibid., p. 115.

11. Williams, ed., Pastoral Poetry and “An Essay on Criticism,” p. 217.

12. Ibid.

13. Williams, Pope's “Dunciad,” p. 112.

14. Thomas Sheridan, British Education (London, 1769), pp. 107, 217, 220; quoted in Williams, Pope's “Dunciad,” pp. 113-14.

15. Williams, Pope's “Dunciad,” p. 112.

16. Essays of John Dryden, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1926), I, 193.

17. Cf. Wendy Steiner, The Colors of Rhetoric: Problems in the Relation between Modern Literature and Painting (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982).

18. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), II, 378.

19. Williams, Pope's “Dunciad,” p. 112.

20. For Derrida on “expression,” see, for example, Positions, pp. 31-33 and 45, and Margins of Philosophy, esp. pp. 157-73.

21. de Man, Foreword to Jacobs, Dissimulating Harmony, esp. pp. ix-x.

22. Swift, “Gulliver's Travels” and Other Writings, pp. 324-25.

23. Derrida, Positions, p. 41.

24. Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1947), p. 17.

25. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), pp. 138-39. I am indebted, in the next few pages, to Culler's always illuminating discussions.

26. Ibid., p. 204.

27. Ibid., p. 205.

28. Ibid.

29. Jacques Derrida, “Living On: Border Lines,” in Harold Bloom et al., Deconstruction and Criticism (New York: Seabury, 1979), p. 97.

30. Ibid., p. 98.

31. This is the title of a section of the text Of Grammatology, pp. 44-65. Derrida both uses and crosses out the copula. See also Derrida's “The Supplement of Copula: Philosophy before Linguistics,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 82-120.

32. Here I use, and am indebted to, Lanham's important distinctions. See note 7, above.