Abstract
In this book, Sell argues that we are living in a post-postmodern world which is becoming increasingly globalised, and that the critical disputes which characterised postmodernism need to be set aside and replaced by a mediating criticism which he calls ‘communicational criticism’.
The opening chapter describes the reasoning for this new kind of criticism and hints at the kinds of practices it involves. The ensuing chapters proceed to offer us examples of its application to such diverse texts as Shakespeare’s Henry V, a selection of poems from Pope and Wordsworth, Dickens’s Great Expectations, The Waste Land, Churchill’s My Early Life, Orwell’s Coming up for Air, Lynne Reid Banks’s Melusine: A Mystery, and the plays of Harold Pinter before concluding with a reprise in which Sell reasserts the potential values of his critical stance.
Further, he argues that what makes the work ‘literary’ is that it leaves spaces in which the reader can enter and compare notes both with the author and with those other readers (or critics) who find the same kind of openness within the work. This openness, Sell suggests, is the result of a ‘negative capability’ which allows the text to operate in a non-coercive way. As a result, the author, the text and its readers come together to form a community in which communicational criticism can be fostered.
Of course, I cannot explore the various subtleties of Sell’s argument, but there are features of it that I find deeply problematic. At its most banal, communicational criticism would appear to involve the collegiate activity of people of goodwill. However, such people are necessarily ‘situated’ and, while Sell’s vocabulary is that of western liberal humanism (and there are frequent references to Gadamer), it is difficult to ascertain precisely what his position is.
In practice, communicational criticism is more subtle than this but it does lead to some rather surprising judgements and re-evaluations. The chapter on Henry V is both insightful and revealing. Sell makes the point that, although historically Henry was an active and a warlike king, Shakespeare shows very little of this activity on stage. Our views of Henry, therefore, are constructed largely through observing his verbal behaviour and by listening to the ways in which he is described by others. But because these voices are often in conflict, the audience is left with no certain interpretation of the ‘meaning’ of the play. The locus classicus of this indeterminacy is, of course, Henry’s rejection of Falstaff. Sell argues convincingly that this is an example of Shakespeare’s ‘negative capability’ in that he allows the audience in. Rather than by foreclosing on the argument and asserting that Henry’s action is an act of necessary cruelty, Shakespeare leaves the issue open. Thus, the play engages in a dialogue with its audience in which particular interpretations are mediated through the various uses to which language is put. And because the whole play is largely about the uses of language, Shakespeare invites us to consider with him and each other how language both creates and shapes different ‘realities’.
The chapter on Pope, though, is an altogether different matter. Sell recognises that Pope’s writing ‘did, and does tend to create communities around itself’ (p. 83) and that these communities are often in conflict. Sell’s aims in this chapter, then, are to show how Pope brought these communities into being and to mediate between them. He does this by asserting that Pope was both England’s last great Humanist poet and its first great Romantic. I have no serious qualms about the first claim. However, the second claim needs severe qualification.
While Pope’s poetry is overtly didactic, Sell recognises this by admitting that ‘[h]is frequent appeal to a shared grounding in the classics was the main ingredient in a charmingly coercive social cement, which tended to bind him and his readers together into what he was proposing as the moral consensus’ (p. 92). Sell goes on to argue that this coercion is charming because it shows that Pope was politely suggesting that his readers were capable of reaching the same ‘ethical and cultural high ground’ that he occupied. But ‘The Dunciad’ suggests quite the reverse. Here, the dunces are characterised, among other things, as those who write for money more than fame with the clear implication that the growth of a commercial marketplace in literature was a threat to the old order. In fact, his coercion is more aggressive than charming.
For similar reasons, I believe Sell to be wrong about ‘Windsor Forest.’ Pastoral and georgic poetry had precise ideological functions in the 18th century which were often contradictory. An ethically responsible criticism would surely recognise this and attempt to investigate the social tensions which led to such contradiction before assessing whether the poem manages to incorporate such contradictions in an aesthetically satisfying whole. Sell does this up to a point when he claims that Pope achieves an equilibrium between opposing points of view through his use of the heroic couplet (p. 96) but to claim that Pope is advocating the ‘spirituality and ethics of the classical via media’ is to ignore the partisan politics of most of his poetry.
Sell justifies his claim that Pope was the first great Romantic by appealing to such works as ‘Eloisa and Abelard, Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, Epistle to a Lady’ and, rather surprisingly, ‘Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot.’ These, he argues, are all poems that explore the place of emotion in society and, more particularly, reveal a sensibility towards suffering (including Pope’s own) which can be taken as an index of his own sensitivity and feelings. They are thus personal in the same way that the great romantic poems are personal. This seems to me a difficult position to sustain. What is at issue here is not so much the intersection between personal feeling and public statement but the voice through which it is mediated. My own take on such poems is that the personal references are rhetorical tropes, which Pope uses to demonstrate his skill both as versifier and public poet. Unlike the great Romantics, Pope’s apparently personal voice is in fact a disguised public voice.
Sell’s chapter on Wordsworth is far more satisfactory. Although I am inclined to disagree with him about Wordsworth not manifesting the ‘egotistical sublime’, his great poems do indeed invite us to contemplate our own psychological experiences and compare them with those explored in the poetry. Whether this should be regarded as an example of Wordsworth’s ‘communicational good will’ (p. 174) is more of an open question. It is true that Wordsworth is rarely oppressively didactic and to that extent we rarely feel that his poetry has a design on us. However, this could derive from the fact that Wordsworth often seems oblivious of the feelings of others (for example, in his communicational indifference to the speech of the old leech gatherer in ‘Resolution and Independence’).
A somewhat queasy note is struck in Sell’s discussion of TS Eliot. Responding to modern critics’ accusations of Eliot’s anti-semitism, Sell goes through a series of contortions, none of which are particularly convincing. His aim is to demonstrate that (p. 234):
a post-postmodern mediating critic’s most typical line of argument is that in debates about Eliot, Dickens, Stowe or any other writer, a readership can come into communication not only with the writer, but in effect with other readerships.
This, however, rather begs the question. That Eliot was anti-semitic is undeniable. How the critic deals with this deplorable trait is deeply problematic. Sell suggests that because he was writing nearly a century ago such sentiments are explicable on the grounds that when he was writing ‘they would not have been generally regarded as reprehensible’ (p. 232). Sell is careful not to condone Eliot’s views, but I am surprised by his use of the term ‘generally’. Following the Dreyfus affair, it seems to me far more likely that anti-semitism was on the decline, at least among liberally minded people (i.e. the kind of audience to which the author is currently appealing). Sell, I think, rather ducks the argument here and his view that the increasing heterogeneity of new readerships somehow solves the problem is deeply unsatisfactory.
Sell’s chapters on his chosen prose works appear to manifest the same felicities and faults as his chapters on poetry although I do not feel qualified to judge them. On balance, then, my final impression is that communicational criticism is unlikely to challenge any of the existing critical orthodoxies. I believe it is insufficiently rooted in a coherent philosophical ground and that its aims are, ultimately, vague and unfocussed.