The Frugal Chariot: Readers, Reading, and the Case of Hopkins

By Francis L. Fennell

If you love poetry, this book is about you and for you. It doesn't matter whether you are a scholar or a lover of beautiful poetry, this book brings everyone together by responding to a current crisis: the falling interest in and support for the humanities, especially poetry. This book argues that the most fruitful place to begin to reinvigorate literary reading, and thus the humanities, is with the close and careful attention to the experience of non-academic readers. This book explores their experiences, listening carefully to what they have to say, how they--you!--respond to poetry, why you love it. The book shows, in other words, at least a partial cure for that falling interest in the humanities which gets so much attention in newspapers and on TV. The book employs the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and lets him supply the illustrative material. Hopkins is one of the seven most-read poets in the English language, but you do not have to know Hopkins well to understand the revolutionary approach to poetry and literary study that this book offers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wipf and Stock
• Release date: Dec 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666785401

Francis L. Fennell

Francis L. Fennell is professor emeritus of English at Loyola University Chicago and the author of numerous books and articles on a wide variety of topics, but especially Victorian poetry. His most recent research has been on the world-wide interest of ordinary readers in the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, an interest that expresses itself in a myriad of hitherto-unexamined ways.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Matters Introductory and Provocative

Ah! que la vie est quotidienne.

Jules LaForgue

The genesis of this book lies in a rather remarkable sentence I encountered some time ago in a collection of essays about the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. In his introduction, the editor of the collection has occasion to lament, Even so, what we do not know is how Hopkins might actually enter into the quotidian lives of real people.

Leaving Hopkins aside for a moment, the implications of that sentence are as troubling as they are amusing. First, it presumes that scholars—are they unreal people?—form an antipodal group, a group about whose interests and experiences we do know and do care. Second, real people, those others who do not read scholarly books, lead quotidian—that is to say boringly cyclical—lives, as we the scholar-authors presumably do not. And finally those quotidian lives are somehow hidden, secret, unexplorable; we have no access, no way—and perhaps no desire—to look, listen and understand. Of these three implications, the first is incontrovertibly if unfortunately true. The other two, as I will show, are wrong: it is not the case that real people lead lives any more quotidian, any more bereft of exciting ideas, including ideas about literature, than ours; and it is not the case that we have no way of knowing what real people want to say, about Hopkins’s poetry or anything else. In fact, quite the opposite. The argument forming the core of this book claims, not only that we can discover the contributions real people can make to critical discourse, but that we must if we wish to reinvigorate literary studies. Put simply: the most fruitful place to begin any re-invigorization of literary reading, and thus of literary criticism, is not with academic readers, but rather with close and careful attention to the experience of non-academic readers. We do not at present know enough about those readers to know what literature appeals to them, or why, or how. This book presupposes that we can know, and it proposes, both as method and as remedy, new ways to do so.

That unintentionally amusing sentence, through its first implication, points to the ever-widening rift between the experiences and interests of real or ordinary readers, the so-called general or common reader whose declining interest in literature is the source of so much current dismay, and the experiences and interests of academic readers, who are the implied we of these publications and who today monopolize almost all published study of and conversation about literary reading.¹ But it has not always been so. In the nineteenth century literary criticism was still vested in non-academic readers, the reviewers, critics, essayists, and men [and women] of letters who have been described so carefully by John Gross. For example, in the May 1832 issue of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine its editor, John Wilson, writing under his pen name Christopher North, attacked a presumptuous young poet for, among other failings, his puerile partiality for particular forms of expression, so that his destiny was to become truly a laughable old ram, and the ewes will care no more for him than if he were a wether.² The victim of this cruel sexual innuendo was young Alfred Tennyson, who responded in his next volume of poetry by mocking Wilson in a squib with tag-line variants of Crusty/Rusty/Musty/Fusty Christopher. Nor was Tennyson ever able to turn his cheek to such criticism, especially if his virility was questioned. Even after he became a well-established and popular poet, he felt the need to attack Edward Bulwer-Lytton for criticizing him as "School-Miss Alfred" in The New Timon, creating a masculine image much more to his liking:

And once you tried the Muses, too;

You failed, Sir: therefore now you turn,

To fall on those who are to you

As Captain is to Subaltern.³

Even as poet laureate, Tennyson had occasion to complain bitterly about comments from Apollodorus, the Scottish critic George Gilfillan, which implied that he was a good poet but not a great one.

Wilson, Bulwer-Lytton, Gilfillan: influential critics in their day, and not an academic among them. (Wilson was editor of a quarterly, Bulwer-Lytton a novelist and would-be poet, Gilfillan a minister from Dundee.) Criticism was often a blood sport, but the sportsmen almost always had no academic posts. The change was not instantaneous: in the first half of the twentieth century Hopkins’s poetry was first brought to light and praised not by scholars but by poets, first Robert Bridges as poet laureate and then the Kenyon Critics and others. However, gradually but surely, criticism has become the province of academic specialists. By the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first, to put it in terms made familiar to us by Pierre Bourdieu, academics have husbanded almost all of the cultural capital associated with such criticism. There has been no organized plot, and one should not impute malice or assign blame: increased specialization and the exigencies of professional advancement have encouraged academics to garner whatever cultural resources they could. I have done so myself and am no exception to the practice. But the effect on criticism has been that, with occasional exceptions, the voice of the non-academic reader can no longer be heard. My task will be to show how we are all impoverished thereby, because the ideas and experiences of these now-silenced readers offer a stimulus and, more importantly, a challenge to conventional thinking on important matters—in this case, as an example, on the poetry of Hopkins.

i

Given this thesis, two questions, two possible objections, come immediately to mind: Can we find out, do we really have access to, what non-academic readers think? And then, if it turns out we can and do, would such a study be worth the effort? Each question deserves a careful response.

What about the argument that we do not [i.e., cannot] know how a writer impacts those quotidian lives led by real people? Not true. In many cases we can know—we just have not looked, have not listened, have not asked. For most canonical writers a wealth of material lies ready to hand. For example, non-academic writers often make casual but revelatory allusions to a writer, allusions which one can study for patterns and underlying critical assumptions. Or one can study the habits and governing principles of certain reading groups, as Janice Radway and others have done. Or one can discern the changing patterns of editorial selections made from the works of the writer in question. Or one can analyze art works in other media based on interpretations of the writer’s work. Then there are public performances of the work, or commercialized applications of it in everything from calendars to coffee mugs. One can even search out and discover real people and ask them about their not-so-quotidian lives and experiences.

In short, there is too much material, not too little. In the chapters that follow, using Hopkins as my example (for reasons that will become clear shortly), I focus on just a few of these many subsets of information available. My intent is to widen the conversation, in this case about Hopkins, to show what can be done if one tries. So in many ways this book demonstrates a method of inquiry and shows what can be accomplished by means of it.

Perhaps the clearest precedent for this undertaking is Jonathan Rose’s call for what he called a history of audiences. Like Rose, I want to explore a vital question first raised by Richard Altick: How do texts change the minds and lives of common readers? And like him I am troubled by the scholar’s habit of assuming that whatever the author puts into a text—or whatever the critic chooses to read into that text—is the message the common reader receives, without studying the responses of any actual reader other than the critic himself.⁴ However, my focus here is not on history and its artifacts (Rose, for example, later applied his theory to British working-class readers of the last century). Rather, my concern is with the living present: with today’s readers of all classes, backgrounds, and countries, readers who share our current horizon of expectations yet do not now participate in the conversation.

But what about the second possible objection, that proving the availability of a wealth of information begs the question of whether such an effort is worth undertaking to begin with. What can we gain from such a study?

The greatest beneficiaries of a renewed attention to the non-academic reader—and from now on, borrowing from Altick, Rose, and Robert Darnton, I will use the term common reader, defined as any reader who does not read books for a living—will be academics themselves. For most canonical writers, scholarly work has fulfilled a positivist agenda remarkably well: there are excellent critical editions, publications of correspondence and notebooks, learned commentaries, painstakingly researched biographies. Academic discourse has also theorized in a wide variety of ways and then even more frequently applied those theories, so that we have studies that are feminist, deconstructive, queer, new historicist, Foucaultian, postcolonial, Marxist, Freudian or Lacanian, and so on. This large body of criticism instructs, reveals, stimulates. But now it has also, in the judgment of many, reached something of an impasse, a critical dead-end. Anyone who serves on an editorial board has had the familiar experience of being asked to read still another essay invoking issues of race, gender, or class, still another essay identifying sites of contestation, still another essay writing the body. So much of current critical discourse exercises a formula or employs a fashionable critical trope, and does so in a language inaccessible to most common readers. As we engage the twenty-first century, critical discourse seems exhausted, rudderless, a victim of what Robert Scholes calls hypocriticism, written in what John Ellis calls a prose thick with impenetrable jargon.⁵ One does not have to accept the principles of Ellis’s revanchist critical philosophy (I do not) to agree that literary reading faces a crisis. No less a figure than Jacques Derrida can say glumly of his academic colleagues and their endeavors, We feel bad about ourselves. Who would dare to say otherwise?⁶ The needs are for growth and change, but we seem bereft of ideas about where or how to begin.

Common readers offer a fresh vision, an infusion of new ideas, insights, and critical assumptions, a large untapped reservoir from which to draw that current of true and fresh ideas which Matthew Arnold went to such lengths to recommend.⁷ With them lies the hope for exactly that kind of new conversation which has always heralded the most significant changes. The conversation between classical literature and modern culture during the Early Modern period offers the signal example, but other conversations—science and literature in the nineteenth century, for example, or psychology and literature in the twentieth—suggest themselves as well. For the moment such a hope about the value of this new conversation must be taken on faith. But in the fifth and final chapter of this book, drawing together all of the information, ideas, and insights of the previous chapters, I propose a new, performance-based model of literary reading, especially of poetry, and thus a new awareness of how and why we should undertake a study such as this one. Performance connects to appropriation, and therefore to the re-imagining of the idea of selfhood. This model will, I trust, broaden and deepen our understanding of the literary reading we all love, and can tell us how to begin revivifying it.

Without anticipating too much of what will follow, let me offer one quick example of a benefit—by way of a challenge—that can accrue to academic readers from exploring what common readers say or demonstrate. Dispassionate observers would agree that much of scholarly discourse evidences a large but unacknowledged evasion. Scholarly readers are no different from any other readers: we too hear the Sayings of our texts (to borrow from Heidegger), we too experience their disruptive effects, end up sometimes owning (appropriating) them. But those experiences we rarely speak about, and even more rarely write about; they have become, out of fear about what our colleagues might say or think, the real love that dare not speak its name. Moreover this silence has always been true: as David Bleich observes, critics never did acknowledge how they were moved by the literature they wrote about.⁸ While in our publications we have no hesitation about indicting writers, especially writers from earlier eras, for their sins of omission and commission, and while we extend that same critical eye to our fellow scholars, we exercise great care in what we say, in print or in person, about our own most personal experiences of reading, their sources and effects. Our silence takes at least two forms: silence about how the writers we study affect us personally, and silence about what we think of the projects and the writers undertaken by others.

Common readers, however, do not share—in fact they are astonished by—our timidity. They speak quite freely about how texts affect them, and they frequently make aesthetic and moral judgments about what they read. We have much to learn from listening to and studying these readers, including how to liberate ourselves from a defensiveness that masquerades as objectivity. For criticism in general, and academic criticism in particular, this opening up to the common reader is—to borrow again from Arnold—the way forward, the one thing needful.

But an opening to the common reader has another, more important advantage beyond enlarging the scope of literary criticism, an advantage that touches all readers. In our age of crisis, one crisis du jour has a special poignancy. This cultural crisis, much dramatized both in the public media and in academic discussion, is the documented decline in the reading of literature, a decline which in the public sphere brings in its wake the increased marginalization of literature and of writers.

The signal document for this crisis in the US was Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, a 2004 report edited by Mark Bauerlein and commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts. What had been a modest shrinkage in the reading of literature during earlier periods became, in the decade before the report, a precipitous decline, so that by the time of the report only 46.7 percent of all US adults surveyed now could report having read any novel, short story, poem, or play during the year previous. When one considers how easily a reader can qualify for inclusion—reading one short poem in a magazine, one short-short story in the Sunday paper would do it—the figures become even more startling. Nor can comfort be found in