SOURCE: Perl, Jeffrey M. “Passing the Time: Modernism versus New Criticism.” In The Future of Modernism, Hugh Witemeyer, pp. 33-48. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Perl studies the relationship between modernism and New Criticism, focusing on the use of these theories by academic institutions in both England and the United States.]

If modernism—“palaeomodernism” in Frank Kermode's vocabulary, “The Pound Era” in Hugh Kenner's, “The Kenner Canon” in Carolyn Heilbrun's—is to have a future, it will need to be freed from the embrace of loved ones. The New Critics portrayed themselves as friends of the aesthetics and critical theory established by Eliot, Joyce, and Pound; it was thus natural that, when the overdue rebellion against New Critical orthodoxy occurred, academic opinion would turn against modernism. Yet the New Critical reading of modernism was impossibly wrong. Eliot, who appears as founder of New Critical formalism in the Baedekers of the 1990s, was by 1956 annoyed by this presumption. While he held, of course, that the critic must attend to “poetry as poetry,” he also wanted it known that “any critic seriously concerned with a man's work should be expected to know something about the man's life,” that there is no “reason why biographies of poets should not be written,” and that

I have recently noticed a development, which I suspect has its origin in the classroom methods of Professor [I. A.] Richards, which is, in its way, a healthy reaction against the diversion of attention from poetry to the poet. It is found in a book published not long ago, entitled Interpretations: a series of essays by twelve of the younger English critics, each analysing one poem of his own choice. The method is to take a well-known poem … without reference to the author or to his other work, analyse it stanza by stanza and line by line, and extract, squeeze, tease, press every drop of meaning out of it that one can. It might be called the lemonsqueezer school of criticism … and, it must be admitted, to study twelve poems each analysed so painstakingly is a very tiring way of passing the time … an exercise for pupils.¹

It would not be easy to miss Eliot's condescension in this lecture to methods of which it was and still is said that he approved—and “missed” is not, in fact, the best way to describe what happened next. F. R. Leavis asked of the volume in which the lecture was collected how it was “possible for a book of criticism to be at once so distinguished and so unimportant.”² William Wimsatt remarked, in the same spirit, of Eliot's first collection of posthumous prose, that it was “recantatory” and that its author “has not had the right or power to subvert his own image.”³

In light of Wimsatt and Leavis's resentment of Eliot's resentment, image is an interesting piece of diction here—a word en route in 1966 from what Margaret Anderson or Amy Lowell meant by it to its 1990s sense: PR. Eliot's PR was by the 1950s out of his hands; his image was the responsibility of firms in New Haven and in Cambridge (U.K.), firms capable, long before Eliot's late admonitions and recantations, of ignoring his more inconvenient maxims. “Hamlet and His Problems,” for example, was a favorite essay of New Critics on both sides of the Atlantic for its insistence that the audience attend to the play—its structure—more than to its central character. But the crucial feature of Eliot's essay was, rather, this assertion:

Qua work of art, the work of art cannot be interpreted; there is nothing to interpret; we can only criticise it according to standards, in comparison to other works of art; and for “interpretation” the chief task is the presentation of relevant historical facts which the reader is not assumed to know … critics have failed in their “interpretation” of Hamlet by ignoring what ought to be very obvious; that Hamlet is a stratification, that it represents the efforts of a series of men, each making what he could out of the work of his predecessors.⁴

These are, one would think unmistakably, the words of an Old Critic—the word “interpretation” so far outside his parlance, he could use it only in scare quotes. Eliot's description of the critic's job was not for a Richards, Leavis, or Wimsatt to apply but for someone trained on E. R. Curtius or Bernard Berenson or W. W. Greg. Eliot's philosophical papers and dissertation of 1911-16 argue strenuously that meaning is conceivable only in developed contexts, that no thing has meanings, or even reality, of itself⁵—and this argument is the basis of Eliot's commendation, in “Hamlet and His Problems,” of three non- or antiformalist approaches to literature: that of literary historians (who place works in intertextual contexts), that of connoisseurs (who place works in the context of established taste), that of textual scholars (who place texts in the context of later, coeval, and prior variants). And for interpretation—for what New Critics meant by criticism—Eliot's contextualist argument leaves, simply, no room. There is “nothing to interpret.”

Why, why on earth, would New Critics take for their mentor a man who believed interpretation a philosophically naive practice (though helpful in getting teachers through the day—Eliot once compared teaching with laboring on a herring trawler), a man who lamented the decline of Latin and Greek learning, paleography and bibliography, intertextual study, a man whose longest essay on his favorite English poet (Herbert) is mostly biographical, a man, in other words, who, if anyone, had earned the dreaded New Haven epithet “antiquarian”? Worse: in poems that became New Critical anthology pieces, Eliot portrayed as diseased or immature the kind of mind that views the work of art as independent of society, history, audience, and author. Prufrock sings his love song to nobody: the epigraph from Dante—which, like “Alfred” in the title, should have warned non-intertextualists to anthologize some other poem—suggests that Prufrock would not sing if he thought a love song implied a lover. This creature (“zone of consciousness,” Kenner calls him) prefers poems, were he to write poems, written not in a social but a private language (a language to which Eliot in his dissertation denied the possibility). “Shall I say,” Prufrock begins an attempt at verse,

          I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?

Should he, in other words, adapt Baudelairean, urban poetry conventions to the needs and expectations of Anglo-American society? To which, his response is:

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

Hamlet too—who Prufrock is not (“nor was meant to be”)—utters gibberish about a crab, gibberish of such force that an addled philistine gets the message (“Though this be madness, yet there is method in't”). But Prufrock, who identifies with the addled philistine (“Am an attendant lord”), concocts a gibberish expressing, principally, his own disease. His crab is soundless, bodiless, unreachable on the sea floor. Prufrock's solipsism and his aesthetic—aestheticism—are at one.⁶

Even poésie pure follows from the mess that is the poet's life. This recognition is where the career of each paleomodern started and where their founder gave up the ghost:

Those masterful images because complete,
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start,
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

Deliberately near to naturalism (the “raving slut” and “refuse” invoking the Zola milieu), “The Circus Animals' Desertion” identifies the foulness at the heart of Yeatsian symbolism—the escape from loved ones into art:

Players and painted stage took all my love
And not those things that they were emblems of.

Yeats's personae emerged from his private life and then, antisocially, replaced it. That Symbolist aestheticism is dangerous to living things is a recognition traceable to Mallarmé; the frozen swan of “Le Vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui” is a portrait of the failed man who takes refuge in art. Thus, no Symbolist was ever really an aesthete (so Eliot argued in the volume Leavis thought “unimportant”), and the New Critical formalist of my essai is something of a strawman (Leavis was a hectoring social moralist).⁷

But my subject here is image, not what is seen but when and how. And in the microsaga of how and when modernism and New Criticism are and have been seen together, the decisive turn was taken when scholars of modernism first saw that the application of Old Critical methods to the work of Eliot, Joyce, and Pound would yield a very new image of modernist literature. John Espey was the pioneer. His study of 1955, Ezra Pound's “Mauberley,” was, as he said,

an experiment in criticism, focused on the question of how effective the traditional academic method of attack, with its full panoply of textual collation, identification of sources, and historical method, would prove when used in analysing a piece of contemporary poetry.⁸

Espey's relevant conclusion was that New Critics such as Leavis had misconstrued Pound's assignment of Poundlike interests to Mauberley (“His true Penelope was Flaubert”) as a sign that Pound was, like his protagonist, an aesthete. Espey demonstrated how the poem, instead, effects the “separation of Ezra Pound from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley,” effects Pound's definitive break from Swinburne and the Pre-Raphaelites, Lionel Johnson, FitzGerald, and Dowson—to which insight Espey added that “such insights into Mauberley as these explorations provide are indications of a method that could be profitably used elsewhere.”⁹

Similar methods have in fact been used in studying Eliot and Joyce, and evidence has been accumulating for decades that the New Critics should not have liked modernism. I have myself labored in this vineyard, showing, for example, how much intertextual knowledge Eliot's “Portrait of a Lady” presupposes—how much Arnold, Ruskin, Pater—for the reader even to begin to see that the young man of the poem (the closest Eliot came to self-portraiture) is not what New Critics would have had a man of letters be. Eliot's stand-in deems aesthetic talk a tiring way of passing the time, and the “objective correlative,” he worries, may be ultimately inferior to discursively direct communication.¹⁰ Were it not for the New Critics' packaging of Eliot's poems as Symbolist monads, organic, subtle, and sophisticated, readers would not have had to wait for publication of The Waste Land manuscripts or for Kenner to term The Waste Land “a joke” to realize that Eliotic discourse can be direct in the extreme.¹¹ Written sous le signe de Charles Dickens (“I will show you fear in a handful of dust” is spoken, surely, by Jacob Marley), The Waste Land is didactic, mawkish, and (if I may quote myself) “virtually a piece of journalism”¹²—well-wrought, of course, but not an urn. Noteworthy in this respect is that Philomel, the victim of family violence, shrieks whenever, and only when, someone—an aesthete voice—remarks formal features of the awful or awesome. Appreciation of Verlaine's chanting children, admiration for a picture of the tragic nightingale—each is followed by a twit or jug.¹³

As for the Four Quartets, which appears to be the most self-contained, the least intertextual, the most urnlike of Eliot's works, it is, respectively: least, most, and least. Kenner's model for the Quartets suggested (1949) that the third of every four-part structure is a false synthesis of the first and second, in some measure shown to be resolvable in the fourth. Donald Davie, reading Kenner, was relieved: “The Dry Salvages,” Davie found, was not a bad quartet (he had harbored that belief) but the third of four, a poem “spoken through a mask, spoken in character,” a poem of Whitman's unlovely century.¹⁴ Davie thus discovered an entry into the historical and intertextual dimension of the Quartets. My contribution, rather later, to this conversation was to propose that every movement (every line, I would say now) of each quartet is spoken in character and in period dress.¹⁵ The tendency of the poem as a whole is to move from considerations of Time as a timeless category to considerations of History qua specific histories, from explanation out of temporal context to the understanding that explanations are themselves historically placed. Eliot's last major work is so historical, in other words, so contextually and intertextually thick, that there is, I have come to think, scarcely a text there, in the New Critical sense, at all.

A small but tenacious miracle of postmodern criticism has been its capacity for not noticing: not noticing that the New Critical view of modernism was simply that, a view; not noticing that one or two modernists lived past 1945 and had views of their own, negative and condescending views, about the New Criticism; not noticing, above all, that, while Harold Bloom and Geoffrey Hartman were revolutionizing the study of romanticism, the study of modernism was revolutionized by, well, not their students. Eventually, the angel behind the miracle of not noticing will have (in cabalistic idiom) to be named, but there is a last preliminary task to perform. There is a piece of unfinished business from the 1960s, from a moment when the New Critics' ability to render “unimportant” events and monuments inconsistent with their doctrines failed them. It was then that formalist methods failed decisively to expose the moral judgment at the heart of Joyce's Portrait: its rejection of formalist aestheticism and of the aesthete personality as immature.

In 1961 Wayne Booth and S. L. Goldberg made good on Kenner's intuition of 1947 that Joyce's first novel is about an aesthete's limitations—“limitations sufficient to make it implausible that an extrapolated Stephen had managed to write” A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.¹⁶ I was some nine years of age when The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Classical Temper were published and, from the distance between my generation and that of Booth and Goldberg, they appear as close to New Critics as a critic of prose fiction may be. Goldberg owes “much of his own critical sensibility,” as William Chace remarks, “to F. R. Leavis.”¹⁷ And Booth has said of himself (“even myself”) that he might be included “among the New Critics,” were the category broadly defined.¹⁸ Booth identified himself in 1961 with the New Critics (“most modern critics”) as preferring “internal rather than external evidence” when interpreting a work of literature—the exception, for him as for Goldberg, was Joyce's Portrait, which, Booth argued, could not be understood apart from prior and even later works of Joyce.¹⁹ Booth noted that no critic had observed Joyce's irony against Stephen or against Stephen's aesthetic theorizing until the arrival of Ulysses in 1922 and, especially, of the Stephen Hero fragment in 1944. But, rather than undertake the labors (which he termed “homework”) required to establish what Joyce in 1914 thought of Stephen's aesthetics, Booth, concluding that “the book itself is at fault,” despaired of our ever knowing “the pattern of judgments” that Joyce presumably intended.²⁰

Still, Goldberg attempted to do exactly what Booth despaired of anyone's accomplishing. Since Stephen Dedalus in A Portrait is “obviously not to be identified with [Joyce] as an older man,” Goldberg sought “to detect where, and how, Joyce qualifies the attitudes of the artist as a young man.”²¹ Making use of Stephen Hero, “The Day of the Rabblement,” “Drama and Life,” the 1902 “James Clarence Mangan,” the Paris/Pola notebooks, and the evidence of Ulysses, Goldberg came to the conclusion that Stephen is the very portrait of “a late nineteenth-century aesthete” and that his aesthetic theory reveals “not so much the nature of art as the nature of Stephen Dedalus”:

Joyce clearly limits Stephen's understanding of art just as he limits his understanding of life; what Stephen does not see about the one is what he does not know about the other.²²

Much further than this into Booth's neverland Goldberg did not tread, except to speculate, without mustering evidence, that Stephen's “rejection of kinesis seems all too like a rejection of emotion … it hints at a fear of reality.”²³

Hints? It is worth additional homework to bring to light what this disclosure may conceal. First, we must be definite and explicit that, if Stephen Dedalus was the portrait of a late-nineteenth-century aesthete, so was James Joyce himself, in the very late nineteenth century (1901-4). The Stephen of 1914 represents the Joyce of Paris/Pola and of “Rabblement,” the prig (the “callow youth,” in Richard Ellmann's phrase) who wrote in 1901 that the artist must abhor the multitude and, “though he may employ the crowd, is very careful to isolate himself.”²⁴ In the notebooks of 1903-4 Joyce articulated the aesthetic principles that Dedalus defends in Stephen Hero and A Portrait: that any theory of beauty must encompass (à la Baudelaire—though Joyce professed not to like Baudelaire) the conventionally ugly; that art is neither immoral nor amoral but beyond conventional morality; that the work of art should be a wholeness, “selfbounded and selfcontained”; and that the third of Aquinas's three phases of aesthetic apprehension must be understood (or changed) to mean not enjoyment but stasis, “the luminous silent stasis of esthetic pleasure.”²⁵ As a young man, Joyce saw art as ill favored, supraconventional, independent, and related if at all to an audience that like itself is static, self-possessed, and cold.

By the time that Joyce was writing Dubliners, in 1904-7 (at an age an American literatus today would be reading Joyce in graduate seminars), he was already showing signs of dissatisfaction with the aesthetic of adolescent withdrawal. Throughout the stories are characters—aesthetes at heart but free of talent—who live on fictions that remove them from the social mainstream. Citing the evidence of Stanislaus Joyce's reading, A. Walton Litz has proposed that Corley and Lenehan, in “Two Gallants,” reenact in their lives “the stock responses and illusions of romantic fiction,” such that their lives are not their own; and Kenner has described the “fiction in her head” on which Eveline in “Eveline” subsists as “a daydream of escape,” owing “nothing to observation.”²⁶ The most obvious case is Little Chandler of “A Little Cloud,” a protopoet of the Celtic Twilight, who relishes the fact that he “would never be popular” (his work will contain “allusions”). Like the fictions of escape on which many Dubliners subsist, Little Chandler's is stilled by a fear of Experience, that foreign place where “rich Jewesses” live.²⁷ His destiny is Dublin and more Dublin.

Little Chandler is afraid of flying (more than falling), and it is a good idea to remind oneself periodically that Joyce did not name his self-portrait-as-a-young-man Icarus. Even in his Stephen Hero incarnation Dedalus is not quite Little Chandler. When Dedalus expounds the Paris/Pola theory, he does so before an audience; an aesthetic valorizing stasis is given a kinetic exposition. Granted, it is unclear whether Joyce intended this as author's irony or character's self-irony. Dedalus-1922 has no recollection of Daedalus-1904 as capable of a joke at his own expense:

Remember your epiphanies on green oval leaves, deeply deep, copies to be sent if you died to all the great libraries of the world, including Alexandria? Someone was to read them there after a few thousand years, a mahamanvantara. Pico della Mirandola like. Ay, very like a whale.²⁸

The Stephen of Ulysses remembers Stephen Hero's Stephen as an embarrassing, grandiose, obnoxious child. An even younger Joyce condemned the practice of “setting up a standard of maturity by which to judge” aesthetics, but, clearly, Joyce in his maturity changed his mind about that also.²⁹

And the Dedalus of A Portrait? There are two. Joyce abandoned Stephen Hero for A Portrait in large part to resolve whether Stephen was to be self-ironic or the object of the author's irony—a nice problem (in Henry James's sense of “nice”), given that the author signed, for instance, Nora Barnacle's copy of “The Sisters” Stephen Daedalus. To be free of this obtuse problem of epistemology (subject/object), Joyce required in A Portrait a pair of Stephens. There is the denizen of sections 1 through 5, whom Joyce sentences to Flaubertian justice, and there is the Stephen of the diary coda, who writes like Joyce (at least, like Giacomo Joyce), regains his natural voice (am I alone in hearing echoes of baby tuckoo in the diary?), and exempts himself from authorial irony by directing irony against himself:

Asked me, was I writing poems? About whom? I asked her. This confused her more and I felt sorry and mean. Turned off that valve at once and opened the spiritual-heroic refrigerating apparatus, invented and patented in all countries by Dante Alighieri. Talked rapidly of myself and my plans. In the midst of it unluckily I made a sudden gesture of a revolutionary nature. I must have looked like a fellow throwing a handful of peas into the air.³⁰

The self-ironic Dedalus of the diary is substantially the Stephen whom we meet at the opening of Ulysses. But Joyce has chosen in Ulysses to distribute—aiding readers to observe the change in Stephen—Dedalus's unpleasant Portrait qualities to foils: to Mulligan most especially and, in “Scylla,” to AE as well. The suitors in the Odyssey are fake versions of Odysseus; so Mulligan is a fake Stephen, his function in Ulysses to make obvious what Stephen is not (or no longer is). Mulligan absorbs the harsh, mocking, chilly, self-regarding, unsympathetic irony of a prior Stephen; and AE, his ethereal airs. Thus Joyce required only one Stephen in Ulysses (though in “Circe” there are briefly two—one Drunk, one Sober) and made Dedalus precisely Joyce's age at the time that Joyce himself began to disavow that “callow youth.”

But in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, in all but the first two and last seven pages, the author is as distant from his protagonist as Flaubert is from Madame Bovary, and distant for the same reason (“Madame Bovary, c'est moi”). Joyce devotes the greater part of his first novel to showing that the aesthetics and aesthete's life he had abandoned were—in terms of taste, history, and personality—immature (cf. Prufrock, cf. Mauberley). Stephen Dedalus's aesthetics in A Portrait correspond to the shape of his emotional underdevelopment. He describes the work of art as self-bounded, self-contained, a wholeness lacking nothing, and the narrator describes him as in “troubled selfcommunion”.³¹ Stephen Dedalus

was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone.³²

The infected-narrator technique that Joyce stole from Emma Bovary's assassin permits the reader to know both the mendacious spin a character puts on her or his life and the verdict of the assize: here “He was alone. … He was alone … alone” is the narrator's judgment (the rest is adolescence). Stephen, of course, rejects the novel's summary judgment: “Dedalus, you're an antisocial being, wrapped up in yourself.”³³

“Antisocial” is a friendly understatement. Stephen's theory about the purgation of pity from and through art echoes his general lack of fellow feeling in prior chapters and foreshadows his pitiless rebuff of Cranly. Joyce brings to its epiphany Stephen's version of catharsis in a story, produced for Lynch, of a suffering that, in Stephen's view, is neither pitiable nor tragic:

—A girl got into a hansom a few days ago, he went on, in London. She was on her way to meet her mother whom she had not seen for many years. At the corner of a street the shaft of a lorry shivered the window of the hansom in the shape of a star. A long fine needle of the shivered glass pierced her heart. She died on the instant. The reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions.³⁴

Stephen and his aesthetic would qualify as, simply, inhuman were it not that Joyce has cast elements of the theory as the alibis of pitiable symptoms. Stephen the intellectual holds that aesthetic emotions must be “more than physical” because Stephen the neurotic stands “in dread … of the mystery of his own body.”³⁵ (“Non serviam” in this novel means, effectively, “I will not bathe.”) The sight of others' “nakedness chill[s] him to the bone,” and he is incapable of expressing lust except as language: a prostitute's lips become “the vehicle of a vague speech.”³⁶ “Only those,” as Eliot remarked, “who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.”³⁷ Stephen Dedalus's desire to escape—escape from problems for which, at the time, Freud was inventing names—manifests itself in an aesthetic and a metaphysic of transcendent condescension to experience:

The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.

—Trying to refine them also out of existence, said Lynch.³⁸

A reader of this passage who identifies with Lynch, with his deflation of Stephen Dedalus (and this is the best litmus I know), is an Old Critic, a neomodernist, or both. The preference of “most modern critics” for “internal rather than external evidence”—these are, again, Booth's words—was not the preference of most modern artists. The modernists had, then outgrew, that preference, outgrew it publicly, in poems and novels that are basically exorcisms. The modernists were born in the nineteenth century, and each came to find, in the first years of the twentieth, that the milieux on offer were “shallow and premature.”³⁹ Joyce's Portrait, in a dry run for “Oxen of the Sun,” imitates in chronological sequence prose styles that parallel the stages of his protagonist's emotional development: the styles of Stendhal and Dumas translations, George Eliot, the English Symbolists and Decadents, and, finally, the style of Giacomo Joyce. The author of A Portrait and his allies concluded that those who cling to l'art pour l'art and the artwork-as-monad are fixed in the fin-de-siècle, historically, and, developmentally, in the time of adolescence—the time when, without a firm parental hand, a youth will find ways to avoid homework. The conclusion that Booth reached in 1961 was that A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is not susceptible to New Critical reading, another way of saying (hence, homework) that the novel is unteachable in a seminar and, if taught properly, in biographical and historical and intertextual lectures, would expose both one's students and one's colleagues to the knowledge that Joyce would not, much, have liked them.

The New Critics were teachers, academics; the modernists were artists with small use for the teaching profession. Pound was infamous on the subject: “academic stink” was a favored insult. The most telling of Eliot's many insults to Matthew Arnold was that the Professor of Poetry (Oxon.) was an academic poet and an academic critic, and Eliot expressed doubt that English literature should be taught at Anglophone universities.⁴⁰ Eliot had good reason for suspecting the motives of contemporary teachers. Their critique of the intentional fallacy, while aiming to direct attention away from the poet's foibles, redirected it not on the poem but on the interpreter's classroom—its needs, its limitations and practices. A sociological explanation of why Joyce scuttled Stephen Hero and, in A Portrait, made the discussion of poetics more ironic is that he realized that ascribing to art a status independent of history and psychology left one's lifework in the hands of mere nine-to-noon pupils. Booth believes that Joyce's demanding his reader's lifetime for the comprehension of Ulysses and A Portrait was meant “playfully”—but I wonder.⁴¹ Joyce was aware that, even before Plato wrote of the poet's irrationality, the Muse Theory implied that the poet's is not the last (or best) word on his own work. The idea that the real significance of a work is unavailable to its author—a notion held by New Critics and other formalists, Marxists, Freudians, feminists, structuralists, deconstructionists, New Historicists, by definition every one of us in the academy—is a difficult idea to hold in the face of Ulysses, out of the question when we are lying prostrate before Finnegans Wake.

The new academic schools of criticism, by enforcing a division between author and work, mandate for literature an entrepreneurial economy in which the critic/teacher is the intermediary. The Old Critical intermediary was, primarily, a linguist and archivist, on the monastic or (in the true sense) the humanist model. To join the severe order of Old Critics required an education in classics, history, and bibliography that had been traditional at European aristocratic universities since the humanist Renaissance. The newer critical approaches—the New Criticisms, one might term them—have been united, whatever their apparent disputes, in doing away with old mandarin learning and with the disciplines that it sanctioned. As for the New Criticism proper, it was (I quote Edward Said),

for all its elitism … strangely populist in intention. The idea behind the pedagogy, and of course the preaching, of Brooks and Robert Penn Warren was that everyone properly instructed could feel, perhaps even act, like an educated gentleman … the New Critics aimed at nothing less than the removal of all of what they considered the specialized rubbish—put there, they presumed, by professors of literature—standing between the reader of a poem and the poem.⁴²

“Like an educated gentleman”—as a definition of the bourgeois—is the trope by which power has, since the Renaissance, been wrested from aristocrats. Claiming to be disciples (“the sincerest form of flattery is imitation”—another useful trope), when in fact they were the opposite, the New Critics proper, to the benefit of all the academic New Criticisms, read Eliot, Joyce, and Pound out of existence. The passing of the New Critics has had small effect on this result, which after all serves the interest of academics (as teachers, democrats, and nonantiquarians). Each attempt to recover the modernists' view of themselves has been rendered, if distinguished, unimportant; and, if workmanlike, imperceptible. It will exact a traumatic disinterest, and a new Booth (or Booth), to bring the New Criticisms to take notice.

Notes

1. T. S. Eliot, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” On Poetry and Poets (New York: Noonday Press, 1957) 123-26. Rehearsed as a talk before the Authors' Club, London, “The Frontiers of Criticism” was delivered as a lecture at the University of Minnesota, 30 April 1956, published by U of Minnesota P then reprinted, interestingly, in the Sewanee Review 64:4 (Autumn 1956): 525-43.

2. F. R. Leavis, “T. S. Eliot's Stature as a Critic,” Commentary 26 (October 1958): 399.

3. William Wimsatt, “Eliot's Weary Gestures of Dismissal,” review of To Criticize the Critic, Massachusetts Review 7 (Summer 1966): 589.

4. T. S. Eliot, “Hamlet and His Problems,” Selected Essays (1932; New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1978) 122.

5. For the arguments of Eliot's philosophical papers, see Jeffrey M. Perl, Skepticism and Modern Enmity: Before and After Eliot (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989) chaps. 3-5.

6. On Prufrock and solipsism, see Jeffrey M. Perl, The Tradition of Return: The Implicit History of Modern Literature (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989) 90-93.

7. All Western poetics, Eliot was arguing by 1944, uphold the doctrine of “edification,” even the Symbolist poetic, which appears to contradict it: “‘art for art's sake’ is only a variation under the guise of a protest” (T. S. Eliot, “Johnson as Critic and Poet,” On Poetry and Poets, 211).

8. John Espey, Ezra Pound's “Mauberley” (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1974), preface.

9. Ibid.: “separation,” 21; “insights,” preface.

10. Perl, Tradition, 92-94.

11. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1972) 440.

12. Jeffrey M. Perl, “Penelope without Ulysses,” Southwest Review (Autumn 1991): 551.

13. Verlaine: “The Fire Sermon,” 202-6. Nightingale: “A Game of Chess,” 96-103.

14. Hugh Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T. S. Eliot (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1959) 289-323. Donald Davie, “T. S. Eliot: The End of an Era,” Twentieth Century (April 1956): 350-62. Kenner's argument concerning Four Quartets appeared first in an article of 1949 (“Eliot's Moral Dialectic”), to which Davie's article refers.

15. Perl, Tradition, 94-108; Skepticism, 61-62.

16. Hugh Kenner, Dublin's Joyce (1956; rpt., New York: Columbia UP, 1987) preface to the Morningside ed., xii. Kenner's evaluation of Stephen Dedalus first appeared in a 1947 essay in the Kenyon Review.

17. See William M. Chace, ed., Joyce: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1974) intro., 5-6.

18. Wayne C. Booth, Critical Understanding (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1979) 78.

19. Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1961) 330.

20. Ibid., 335.

21. S. L. Goldberg, The Classical Temper (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961) 43, 42.

22. Ibid., 43, 63.

23. Ibid., 64.

24. “The Day of the Rabblement,” in The Critical Writings of James Joyce, ed. Ellsworth Mason and Richard Ellmann (New York: Viking, 1959) 69.

25. Baudelaire: Joyce, “James Clarence Mangan” (1902), in Critical Writings, 75. “Selfbounded”: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916; rpt., New York: Viking, 1962) 212. “Stasis”: Portrait, 213. On Joyce's revision of Aquinas's usus (enjoyment), see Jacques Aubert, The Aesthetics of James Joyce (1973; rpt., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992) 106.

26. A. Walton Litz, “Two Gallants,” as reprinted in “Dubliners”: Text, Criticism, and Notes, ed. Robert Scholes and A. Walton Litz (New York: Viking, 1969) 372; Kenner, Pound Era, 34-35.

27. Dubliners, ed. Scholes and Litz, 74, 83.

28. James Joyce, Ulysses (1922; rpt., New York: Random House, 1986) 34.

29. Joyce, “James Clarence Mangan” (1902), in Critical Writings, 74.

30. Joyce, Portrait, 252.

31. Ibid., 160.

32. Ibid., 171.

33. Ibid., 177.

34. Ibid., 205.

35. Ibid., 206.

36. Ibid., 168, 101.

37. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Selected Essays, 10-11.

38. Joyce, Portrait, 215.

39. T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London: Faber, 1933) 81.

40. Ibid., 108, 36.

41. Booth, Rhetoric of Fiction, 336.

42. Edward Said, “Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies and Community” (1982), in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983) 138-39.