Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 11:05:24 -0500
Subject: Re: BHA: murmurs, mutters and matters mystical




Gary MacLennan wrote:

> Also in the back of my mind the controversy in the Thirties between F.R.
> Leavis and Renee Wellek over the role of philosophy and critique. Leavis
> was angered by Wellek's summary of the Leavisite methodology in that it
> seemed to preclude an intuitive response to the literary work. For Leavis

> "Words in poetry invite us, not to 'think about' and judge but to 'feel into'
> or 'become' - to realise a complex experience that is given in the words.
> They demand, not merely a fuller-bodied response, but a complete
> responsiveness - a kind of responsiveness that is incompatible with the
> judicial, one-eye-on-the standard approach suggested by Dr. Wellek's phrase:
> 'your" norm" with which you measure every poet'.

Gary, ever reader develops (out of her reading and out of the critical
works which partly control that reading) a set of responses that might
be summarized as "a particular decorum." Once one has incorporated
the given decorum into one's responses, it seems as though one is
responding to a reality independent of rule or historizied response.
That seems to have been the basis for Leavis's enraged response
to Wellek. As anti-communist and rigidly formalist as Wellek was,
his central-european training had given him some sense of history,
some sense that "norms" (what I call a given decorum) were operating
in a critic's response. So as offensive as I have found Wellek at times,
I continue to feel Leavis even more offensive.

To pick an instance from my own experience nearly at random, the
following lines:

a love of science and letters
            a desire to encourage schools and academies
as only means to preserve our Constitution.
Elleswood administered the oath with great energy.
Napoleon's conquest of Italy
            created a paradise for army contractors.
whereon Senor Miranda was for making great conquests and Hamilton...
Talleyrand...Mr. A. not caught asleep by *his* cabinet
                            Canto 62

That dance of the intellect over perfect control of cadence ... a decorum
that can incorporate *anything* -- it still gets me (though it comes from
a fascist and, seen in context, expresses a fascist sensibility). But I
doubt it will particularly impact anyone who has not spent years (as I
did in the '50s and early '60s) absorbing the tradition (similar to but
in important respects different from Leavis's) from which these lines
grow and which they both enlarge and focus.

Now if you want to claim universality for that response (as in different
ways both Leavis and Wellek did), there seem always to have been
rougly two lines open: that of "intuition" in some quasi-mystic sense
or "pure reason" more or less modified (Wellek's "norms"). I prefer
my conception of multiple decorums, changing endlessly through
history, with much overlap in adjacent decorums (thus my personal
one fits both Pound and Milton), little overlap between those
widely separated (The Inca, 2d century Rome).

This kind of tolerance for multiple decorums does not extend to
tolerance, within a given historical context, of those whose theory
or whose sensibility allows them to dally, even indirectly, with those
you correctly term the "butchers of NATO." (I have just been reading
the most recent issue of the U.S. left journal, *New Politics*, and
am still in revulsion against the dance of "on this hand" and "on that
hand" in their response to the war.)

Rambling, but does it help?

Carrol




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