“If Not Critical” by Eric Griffiths

This is a collection of ten of Griffiths’ lectures on literature, delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge. Griffiths’ lectures were famous for their erudition and wit. Before a debilitating stroke left him unable to speak, Cambridge students, most of whom were not even enrolled his class, would flock to his lectures for the pure entertainment of hearing him speak. Griffiths spoke often about the power of analogies and he, himself, used them freely. In one lecture, he spoke of Shakespeare’s penchant for coining new words, dressed in the style of ancient language, “Shakespeare engaged in this fabrication of the antique, this production of ‘distressed pine’ or ‘stone-washed jeans’…. So in A Lover’s Complaint and Troilus and Cressida we find new words produced by affixation, particularly with prefixes such as ‘en-’ or ‘em-’…. These affixes all have in common a strongly latinate, and especially frenchified, timbre, and they produce when they appear en masse an air of faded courtliness, a sense of outdated refinement; they have an ‘indexicality’ rather like that which attaches to certain linguistic usages in old families, or families which like to pretend to antiquity, in the Southern United States.” Griffiths manages to poke fun at the seriousness of Shakespeare and get in a dig in at the pomposity of American southern gentility, all while expounding on Shakespeare’s lexical innovations. In another lecture dealing with the reign of Louis XIV, Griffiths offers the caution, “with analogies as with kings, it is important to know how far it is safe to go.” Perhaps he does not always take his own advice (or rather he considers himself at safe temporal distance), “The king and the official imagery which surrounded him are better understood as the seventeenth-century French equivalent of Eric Cartman’s repeated cry ‘RESPECT MY AUTHORITY’, which is not something that someone who unshakeably has authority needs to cry.”

Another of Griffiths’ lectures dissects Shakespeare’s Hamlet in great detail. Griffiths speaks of the distinction between history and poetry- “the boundary between the realm of history, contingent on facts, and that of poetry, of general rules. History tells us what in fact happened, poetry lays out the pattern according to which we could have seen the event coming…. This distinction between history which ‘merely’ records what happened in all its particularity and poetry, which gives, as it were, a template for how in general things happen, the pattern or rule of events, has counted in various ways for a lot in literary history.” Griffiths takes to task much of the modern literary criticism of Shakespeare. “A principal weakness of much comment on Shakespeare’s plays is that the commentators pay little attention to what a figure in the play is doing by uttering these words at this point; commentators are often preoccupied rather with such things as imagery, or with what they take to be the philosophical suggestiveness of what is said, as if it were a secondary consideration who says what when and where to whom, whereas it is not secondary, not at all, but rather the drama itself. Some commentators are so concerned with putting across how deep the plays are that they have no energy to spare to describe how they are deep, but they are deep because of, through, their surfaces.” For Griffiths, the whole mode of much modern criticism entirely misses the point. And the point is that Shakespeare wrote plays for the stage to be spoken by actors out loud. “It is as if the words had been said by nobody to nobody in an atmosphere which exercises no pressure on what is said, or as if they had been whispered by Shakespeare himself directly into our collective ear…. So many essays about Shakespeare’s plays make him sound as if he had been occupied in writing essays rather than plays. My claim is that Shakespeare’s material as an artist is interaction, interaction of two kinds—between the figures on the stage, and between the figures on stage and the audience. These interactions are what he composes, and to neglect them is to neglect an essential of his art.”

Griffiths often speaks of appreciating the technique involved in writing exquisite literature, while impressing on his audience, in a light tone, what the purpose of literature is actually for. In a lecture on Kafka he says, “Our fictions concern individuals…. Most of our fictions concern spatiotemporally unique beings who have proper names…. [However,] in our fictions, as Proust writes, ‘the individual is bathed in something more general than himself’. That is, our fictional personages, events, objects, are not sheerly irreducible particulars, but intimations of what Marx called species-being, sketches of an as yet unrealized humanity, representatives.” Griffiths makes the case that the study of literature is every bit as much a study of humanity as the social sciences. “Realistic fiction, such as Flaubert’s or Kafka’s, is a form of human natural history, and human natural history in the Wittgensteinian sense is something distinct from social or psychological science. The realism of such writing consists in attention to overlooked general facts of human nature—to such things as our experience of time, our capacity to draw rules from instances as also to know when instances do not suggest rules, our abilities to aspire and to concede, our thwartedness…. To observe the connective tissues of realistic story, its ‘he said’s and ‘then’s, ‘at just the moment when’s, is to pay attention to elemental constituents of the fictional worlds and the world outside fiction…. These speech-markers are structural conventions of storytelling, but just because they are conventions it does not follow that they are ‘mere conventions’. On the contrary, again. To the real artist no convention is ‘mere’; convention is rather just where artistry is likely to be most challenged, most at work.”

The final lecture of Griffiths for this collection is on the theme of “Godforsakenness”. He speaks of the Passion of Christ, his last words on the Cross, and of the duality of Christ, as both man and God. Griffiths’ lecture meanders into wondering upon possible ends for this world and on the omnipotence of God. He then ties this all back to the theme of tragedy as a literary form. “In the long run, either God becomes all in all or all becomes nothing, dust and ashes as this earth falls into the sun. Tragedy is quite indifferent to either of these conclusions, not being an art of the ‘long run’ but rather of the ‘from time to time’ realities of human experience and what we believe we can find through or within that experience…. God is essential to tragedy because He is its supreme audience, and it is a fundamental process of tragic art to enable its human audience for a time and from time to time to guess what it might be like to be such a God.”

Griffiths, in speaking of the joys of experiencing literature, supposes, “this is one source of the pleasure we take in works of art, whether comic or tragic: they offer us worlds we cannot change, before which we are without recourse, as we are at times helpless in our own world, but now our incapacities have become a spectacle for us rather than a dilemma or a source of the despair.” Sometimes it is best if we can laugh or cry at our impotence, whether real or imagined.

“The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry” by Eric Griffiths

This is a collection of four of Griffiths’ essays, ostensibly about Victorian poetry, but far reaching into the depths of culture, politics, religion, and marital relations. His first essay, “The Printed Voice”, most directly deals with the differences between the spoken word and the word on the page. Griffiths writes, “No page displays a voice’s pace, its dips and rises, how some words come readily to it and others only with reluctance, the ever-varying timbres of allegiance, longing, shyness, or disdain which colour utterance and give character to a voice, give voice to a character…. Print does not give conclusive evidence of a voice; this raises doubts about what we hear in writing but it also gives an essential pleasure of reading, for as we meet the demand a text makes on us for our voices, we are engaged in an activity of imagination which is delicately and thoroughly reciprocal.” In this essay, Griffiths first quotes John Hollander, “speaking and writing are both language…. it is the region between them which poetry inhabits.” And then, almost immediately, W.B. Yeats, “English literature, alone of great literatures, because the newest of them all, has all but completely shaped itself in the printed-press.” Griffiths continues, “Whatever else poetry may be, it is certainly a use of language that works with the sounds of words, and so the absence of clearly indicated sound from the silence of the written word creates a double nature in printed poetry, making it both itself and something other—a text of hints at voicing, whose centre in utterance lies outside itself, and also an achieved pattern on the page, salvaged from the evanescence of the voice in air.” Griffiths comments on meter and form, “metre tends to ‘divest language in a certain degree of its reality’ because it provides, as it were, an alibi for the words in a poem…. The metrical form of a poem records the poet’s compositional activity which may or may not entirely square with the drift of what is said, or the state of mind implicit in that drift…. Poetic forms…. speak to the divided soul of man.” Again speaking of poetry in general, Griffiths quotes T.S. Eliot, “To be living on several planes at once/Though one cannot speak with several voices at once.” Griffiths concludes that “ambiguity, in fact, requires the concept of intention, for to detect an ambiguity is to ascribe two or more possible intentions…. If reading is to be a response to a work, then ‘what seems important’ to a reader must be influenced by what was of moment to the writer of that work. Accent is the sound of what was of moment in writing.”

Griffiths' second essay, “Tennyson’s Breath”, focuses special attention on how Tennyson’s poetry sounded read aloud. Tennyson, himself, seemed to be of two minds. He wrote, “the Poet swears no being, existent or possible can read this but himself” and “He will not admit that any one save himself can read aloud his poems properly.” But later in his memoirs, Tennyson admits, “poetry looks better, more convincing, in print.” Griffiths considers, “Every body breathes, and poems written in the rhythm of the breath must be of all others those most patent to any body, but no two bodies breathe alike…. Tennyson’s verse sounds as if the body thought.” Griffiths returns to the effect of meter in this essay as well. “Metrical stress and the stress of meaning need not be identical.” Another theme of Griffiths’ essay is Tennyson’s conceptions of mortality and morality and how those affected his poems. Tennyson wrote, “I should consider that a liberty had been taken with me if I were made simply a means of ushering in something higher than myself.” He was, at heart, an individualist. Griffiths relates, “Goethian moral evolution, quite as much as Darwin’s physical evolution, worried Tennyson because growing thus ever upward, we might outgrow each other, and find that, from the perspective of our higher selves, our past lives and those we shared them with, had become dead things…. [Tennyson] repudiates the theory of infinite development because one of the simplest reasons for wishing to believe in immortality [of the soul] is the desire not to be separated from what we have loved, including our own selves. An immortality in which we endlessly change, though, would itself be a process of separation; finite people infinitely developed would eventually become incapable of recognizing each other.”

In Griffiths’ essay, “Companionable Forms”, he touches on how the Victorians incorporated into their poems ideas of love and marriage. He speaks of how “the lyric utterance consciously idealizes the facts of the dark world it issues from as it idealizes that world’s speech.” Griffiths relates how there might be multiple audiences for the poem- the (sometimes fictional) singular lover, as well as the reading public at large. “The world crowds itself betwixt poet and the unique addressee, lover and sole beloved, yielding up to public judgement lines which the fiction pretends are an intimate exchange.” Griffiths speaks to Browning’s use of rhyme to take us out of the direct exchange between two lovers to the page, while also relating the emotions between them. “The purpose of the rhymes…. when they have purpose rather than merely signalling his own exuberance, is to set the voice on edge with the demands of the page, indicating the distinct existences of the written text and vocal renditions of it, so that we shall not think that they are altogether such as each other, nor that we are altogether such ones as the speaker whose speech the text informs us of.” Line breaks can also serve the purpose of distinguishing verse from speech. “Lineation in poetry can make at once a ‘cut’ into speech, put speech in view of its own precarious position, and at the same time hold a firm ‘line’ of regular and decent behaviour.” Griffiths relates the strain and responsibility of the reader. “Particularly when a reader faces and tries to voice an intonationally ambiguous line, he is asked to reflect on the pull one reading rather than another exerts on him, and to ask why it does so. He comes to know himself in the act of becoming convinced that he knows the fictional speaker.” Griffiths again relates the tension between writing and speech in Victorian poetry in general, “writing may be regarded by the Victorians as an idealization of the actuality of speech, its refinement and correction, or speech may be the longed-for ideal of full and vivid communion on the condition of which writing continually only verges.” Later, he continues, “One condition of conversation which follows from the facts of acoustics is evanescence; the spoken word perishes as it comes into communicative being just to make way for the next word. Written words stay on the page after we have passed over them, and we may have recourse to them at will…. Print offers such time to revolve and absorb words which were too much for us in the prime of their occurrence.” Coventry Patmore writes, “In the finest specimens of versification, there seems to be a perpetual conflict between the law of the verse and the freedom of the language, and each is incessantly, though insignificantly, violated for the purpose of giving effect to the other…. The language should always seem to feel, though not to suffer from the bonds of verse.”

Griffiths' final essay, “Hopkins: The Perfection of Habit”, relates the strain that Gerard Manley Hopkins felt in leaving the Anglican Church for Rome. In particular, Hopkins’ conversion to Catholicism was to play a large role in the subject matter, as well as the form, of his later verse. Hopkins was well aware of his new minority status in England, as well as the hostility his newfound Catholic faith often engendered. “Hopkins was an artist consciously at odds with some parts of the community of English-speakers and so needed to resist as well as to collaborate…. Part of the nature Hopkins himself strained against was that Leavisian ‘spirit of the language’, as the numerous preciosities and dare-devillings of his poems against the norms of English speech show…. We should then expect Hopkins to be wary of the language while also schooled in it and responsive to it…. Language is such a ‘part of this world of objects’…. A language essentially informs the mediacy between the self and other selves. The conduct of poetic style within language, then, forms part of the broader activity of ‘knowing one’s place’ in a culture.” Griffiths writes of Hopkins’ use of repetition, “Hopkins characteristically and purposively creates his repetitions, as also the exclamations in his verse, to have such a double aspect, at once of baffled and of heightened fluency; repetition would not of itself suggest a range of possible bearings on vocalization but the short-term density of repetition in Hopkins and its frequent occurrence at points where it interrupts syntactic cohesion or strains liaison between words often lends it this dramatic aspect.” Another technique of Hopkins was his use of silence in his poems. “Hopkins’s attempt to make his poetry vocal and for realizing that the difficult reserve of his written texts, the occasions when they do not sit easily with spoken English, represent, amongst other things, an attempt to produce in verse something approaching ‘the silence and severity of God’ with regard to the language in which they are written, to make that silence itself audible.” Griffiths continues, “In Hopkins’s work, the drama of voicing exemplifies the activity of faith in search of understanding…. The special claim of the Catholic Church was to be the living bearer of the meaning of the Scriptures, writings were not a text for the Catholic, but a voice.” Hopkins, himself, wrote, “My verse is less to be read than heard, as I have told you before; it is oratorical, that is the rhythm is so.” Griffiths relates that the success or failure of how a poem is received by the reader is often a perilous circumstance. “It baffles poets when the page yields only with reluctance their intended voices back to readers…. It strikes a poet particularly, though, because the pleasure of poetry dwells in an exactness of words, blurs show up more clearly in the reading of poetry, especially in the reading of it aloud, like stains which are the more evident the whiter the table-linen is.” Griffiths concludes, “The language is a witness, and poetic work bears witness in and to a language and the world of those who use it.”