THE MAKING OF THE READER

Transcription

1 THE MAKING OF THE READER

2 LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY Editors: Stephen Heath and Colin MacCabe Working from recent advances in linguistics, semiotics, psychoanalysis and theory of ideology, the Language, Discourse, Society series is committed to forwarding an adequate account of the effective reality of meaning, sign, subject in the relations of signifying practices and formations. That such an account must have implications and repercussions for the current terms of cultural and political understanding will be the constant edge of the series. Published titles Norman Bryson Jane Gallop Paul Hirst Colin MacCabe Colin MacCabe (editor) Christian Metz Michel Pecheux David Trotter Forthcoming titles Beverley Brown and Judith Ennew Elizabeth Cowie Alan Durant Alan Durant, Colin MacCabe and Paul Abbott (editors) Peter Gidal Stephen Heath Jeffrey Minson Jean-Michel Rabate Jacqueline Rose Vision and Painting: the Logic of the Gaze Feminism and Psychoanalysis: the Daughter's Seduction On Law and Ideology james Joyce and the Revolution of the Word The Talking Cure: Essays in Psychoanalysis and Language Psychoanalysis and Cinema: the Imaginary Signifier Language, Semantics and Ideology The Making of the Reader: Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry State of Nature: Ethnography and Origins To Represent Woman? The Representation of.sexual Differences in the Visual Media Conditions of Music Language at Issue: Practices, Institutions and Meanings Understanding Beckett Three Essays on Subjectivity The Genealogy of Moral Forms: Foucault, Nietzsche, Donzelot Pound's Nomanclo.tter: Language, Sexuality and Ideology in the 'Cantos' The Case of Peter Pan or the Impossibility of Children's Fiction Also by David Trotter The Poetry of Abraham Cowley

3 THE MAKING OF THE READER Language and Subjectivity in Modern American, English and Irish Poetry David Trotter

4 W. D. Trotter 1984 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission First published 1984 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout tht world ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI /

5 Contents Acknowledgements vii 1 THE SECRET COMPLEMENT 1 The terms of the argument: the demise of the Common Reader, and the attempt to identify an uncommon one. Methods of identification: (a) margins and marginals in the poetry of Wordsworth and Arnold; (b) the use of external reference as a rhetorical strategy in poems by Wordsworth, Hardy, Eliot, Auden. 2 THE DURATION OF MORTMAIN 21 Rites of passage decline into caricature. Religious and neurotic ceremonial in Freud and Eliot. 3 INTHECAGE 36 The choice between myth and ritual in 'modernist' literature. Sexuality and social division in 'A Game of Chess'. The language of neurotic ceremonial: 'this' and 'that'. The Waste Land: rite of passage or compulsive repetition? 4 WORDS FULL OF FAR-OFF SUGGESTION 58 Yeats's discouragement of the accidental and temporary among his readers. Robert Frost's somethings. Ritual and rhetoric in 'The Second Coming' and in the early Cantos. 5 THE SPIRIT OF ANTI-PATHOS 70 Americanism and anti-pathos: Brecht, Gramsci, William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis. Wallace Stevens's Comedian. 6 FORM-SENSE AND DICTATOR-SENSE 82 Inherent activity: Pound, Henry Ford, Mussolini. Pound's imagining of an audience: from newsprint to radio. Fetishism and the American History Cantos. Gestic utterance: Brecht, Mussolini, Pound. v

6 Vl Contents 7 GOINGOVER 104 England and Russia m the thirties: Stalin and Wells, Congresses of Peace and Friendship, The Mind in Chains, spies. Metaphors of rebirth, metaphors of going-over. The Audenesque. Four Quartets. 8 THE SERIOUS ACTION 130 MacNeice's Ireland, Greene's England. The demise of the Audenesque. Models for the identification and organisation of a readership: from political party to academy. 9 LES BLANCS DEBARQUENT 150 John Ashbery and Everybody's Reading List. Pathos and anti-pathos in the poetry of Frank O'Hara. Thesis and sidelong utterance in the poetry of Ed Dorn. 10 DECLARATIVE VOICES 177 The development of Philip Larkin's 'voice'. Seamus Heaney and the Troubles. 11 PLAYING HAVOC 196 Pathos and anti-pathos in the poetry of Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill andj. H. Prynne. 12 CONCLUSION 231 How readers are made in England today. Larkin and the Common Reader. Carcanet and the 'serious reader'. The Metaphor Men and the teaching of poetry in schools. References Index

7 Acknowledgements I am very grateful to those who read and commented on parts of this book in typescript, and will remember their courtesy. My greatest debt is to Colin MacCabe, without whose advice the book would have been worse than it is, and without whose encouragement it would probably not have been written at all. The amount of quotation has had to be reduced to a bare minimum, because of the very high fees sometimes charged for permission to quote. Since I am not sure what some estates and publishers have to gain by hindering in this way serious discussion of the writers they represent, I can only apologise to the reader for any resulting scantiness. Lines from an unpublished draft version of Seamus Heaney's 'Casualty' are quoted with the author's permission. References are given at the end of the text. To avoid breaking up the reading of the text, note markers are not used, but the page number and first words of the quotation are given in the references section. The author and publishers w~sh to thank the following who have kindly given permission for the use of copyright material: Georges Borchardt Inc. on behalf of the author for an extract from 'Parergon' in The Double Dream of Spring by John Ashbery, copyright 1970 by John Ashbery; Jonathan Cape Ltd on behalf of the Estate of Robert Frost, and Holt, Rinehart & Winston for extracts from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem; Andre Deutsch Ltd for extracts from King Log, Mercian Hymns and Tenebrae by Geoffrey Hill, and an extract from 'Soliloquy in an Air-Raid' by Roy Fuller; Faber & Faber Ltd for an extract from The Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin and extracts from The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice; Faber & Faber Ltd and Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc. for an extract from 'The Death of Saint Narcissus' in Poems Written in Early Youth by T. S. Eliot Vll

8 Vlll Acknowledgements (copyright 1967 by Valerie Eliot), extracts from High Windows by Philip Larkin, and extracts from North, Death of a Naturalist (in the US entitled Poems ) and Field Work by Seamus Heaney; Faber & Faber Ltd and Harcourt Brace jovanovich Inc. for extracts from 'The Waste Land' and 'Little Gidding' in Collected Poems by T. S. Eliot; Faber & Faber Ltd and Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc. for extracts from Crow (US copyright 1971), Wodwo (US copyright 1967) and Lupercal (US copyright 1960) by Ted Hughes; Faber & Faber Ltd and New Directions Publishing Corporation for extracts from The Cantos of Ezra Pound, copyright 1934, 1940 by Ezra Pound; Faber & Faber Ltd and Random House Inc. for extracts from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, and extracts from The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings and Collected Poems by W. H. Auden; Four Seasons Foundation for extracts from The Collected Poems by Edward Dorn, copyright 1975 by Edward Dorn; Hogarth Press Ltd and the Author's Literary Estate for an extract from the 'Fifth Elegy' ofr. M. Rilke's Duino Elegies, translated by J. B. Leishman and Stephen Spender; Alfred A. Knopf Inc. for extracts from The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara edited by Donald Allen; Marvell Press for an extract from 'Church Going' in The Less Deceived by Philip Larkin; New Directions Publishing Corporation for an extract from Imaginations by William Carlos Williams, copyright 1970 by Florence H. Williams; Oxford University Press for an extract from David Gascoyne's Collected Poems edited by Robin Skelton, copyright Oxford University Press 1965; J. H. Prynne for extracts from The White Stones and Brass, republished in Poems by Agneau 2, London and Edinburgh; Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd for an extract from Force of Circumstances and Other Poems by J. H. Prynne; A. P. Watt Ltd on behalfofm. B. Yeats and Anne Yeats, with Macmillan London Ltd and Macmillan Publishing Company Inc., for extracts from Collected Poems by W. B. Yeats (US copyright renewed 1940, 1944, 1947, 1952 by Bertha Georgie Yeats); and Wingbow Press for an extract from Gunslinger by Edward Dorn. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright holders but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity.