Читать книгу Doing Criticism - James Chandler - Страница 13

I have juxtaposed a trio of canonical American poems with a cult film that perhaps a small fraction of my readers may have seen. Such a gesture ought to prompt a question: What kinds of works are relevant to doing criticism in the sense I have been developing here? My brief in this book will cover the literary arts, the dramatic arts, and the narrative screen arts. As it happens, these inclusions and exclusions also conform to the standard institutional arrangements of higher education, at least in the UK, North America, and the rest of Anglophone world. For in literature departments like the ones we call “English,” not only are drama and theater often taught alongside poetry and fiction but so are film and other screen arts. English departments, of course, have been a home for film studies in many institutions for many years, even at places that have a separate program or department for, say, cinema and media studies. It is fair to say that the study of screen narrative is increasingly incorporated under separate institutional auspices, and under various rubrics: Film Studies; Cinema Studies; Screen Arts; Theater, Film, and Drama; Film and Television; Media Studies; and so on. It is also fair to say, however, that over the course of a decades-long pursuit of disciplinary autonomy, a certain tendency has arisen among scholars in the CMS fields to push away from any strong connection with literary criticism. It has become almost a rite of passage for these disciplines.⁴²

Conversely, literary criticism has had its own issues with film studies, not least because of the position taken by the most important voice in establishing the academic terms of that discipline in the post-cinema era, I. A. Richards. Richards’ founding of his program for practical criticism in academia on a deeply inimical conceptualization of poetry and cinema has had far-reaching consequences for how study of the humanities has developed in the modern university. It was so far-reaching at Cambridge, indeed, that even a force like Raymond Williams, the most important British Marxist critic of his era, long had difficulty in overcoming it there. Williams’ early, forgotten championing of cinema studies, like his later and more familiar championing of drama studies, were both carried out on behalf of a challenge to Cambridge English as Richards helped to establish it, a critique of that program as a “theorization of reading” rather than a “theorization of composition.” Film, like drama, offered objects to criticism and theory that demanded attention to issues of “composition,” which in turn, presumably, had implications for the study of poetry. Working on such objects, as he put it, posed a challenge for practical criticism as it had been increasingly naturalized at Cambridge (and elsewhere), because when working on drama—as with cinema—one is “inevitably brought up against problems of form in the most direct way.” That is, one is made to address “basic problems of stance and mode which were never really posed at all” within the more narrowly literary confines of the Richards program.⁴³

One indication that things need not be so, that they might have been otherwise, that they still might be otherwise, can be found in a remarkable encounter in Paris during the same year in which Richards published Practical Criticism. This is the meeting between Sergei Eisenstein and James Joyce, seven years after Joyce published Ulysses (1922), and four years after Eisenstein made Battleship Potemkin (1925). Far from an occasion for mutual turf defense, the conversation that day, according to both artists, was mutually productive. Eisenstein had acquired Ulysses the year before, when he called it “the Bible of the new cinema”—a cultural role Eisenstein would later, in effect, reassign to Dickens.⁴⁴ After the meeting with Joyce, he experimented with stream-of-consciousness writing and began to associate Joyce’s formal techniques with his own ambitious project to make a film of Marx’s Capital.⁴⁵ Joyce, for his part, later wrote to a friend that Eisenstein was one of two directors to whom he could entrust a film version of Ulysses.

It is in the adventurous spirit of this encounter between Joyce and Eisenstein that I choose to discuss how to do criticism in a field with loose but I hope intelligible parameters: defined narrowly enough for intellectual purchase but not in so constrained a way as to exclude areas of intersection. The decision to go this middle route with Aristotle poses both challenges and opportunities: challenges, because studies of film and literature have been too isolated from each other; opportunities, because it offers a chance to make new links while respecting large distinctions. I do not intend to impose connections between the literary and screen arts where they do not exist. Running against the grain of Richards’ influential strictures against cinema, however, there is a counter-tradition dating from Richards’ own time for thinking about the poetics of cinema itself: I have already mentioned the example of Jean Epstein. Conversely, Eisenstein himself famously proposed that his understanding of montage extended not only to dramatists like Shakespeare but even to as relentlessly textual an author as John Milton, whose Puritan commitments would have led him to be wary of theatrical productions. Eisenstein went so far as to call Paradise Lost “a first-rate school in which to study montage and audio visual relationships,” and he illustrated the point with passages he made a point of citing in English on the grounds that the “direct delight in the beauties of composition” would be lost if he were to analyze, say, Pushkin in translation. As a maker of epics himself, Eisenstein is especially interested in the grand-scale effects in Paradise Lost, especially in the passages narrating the war in heaven. He later wrote that, had he read Milton before he made one of his own great epics, Alexander Nevsky (1938), it would have been a different and better motion picture.

T. S. Eliot complained that Milton’s poetry was insufficiently vivid in its visual description,⁴⁶ but Eisenstein treats it not as describing something but rather as prescribing a set of montage procedures to be, in effect, reenacted by the spectator, who necessarily “experiences the dynamic process of the emergence and assembly of the image just as it was experienced by the author.”⁴⁷ Eisenstein goes on to illustrate how this process works by staging an analysis of some passages from Milton’s war in heaven (just as he had previously done for a passage from Pushkin) as providing rhythmically sequenced images and (as it were) camera set-ups. Since I began with the theme of tasting forbidden fruit, it might be fitting to examine the famous opening passage of Paradise Lost, in order to see how it might lend itself to Eisenstein’s montage analysis.

The theme of forbidden fruit is not long in making its appearance in this invocation of the epic muse:

Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,

Sing heavenly Muse, that on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed,

In the beginning how the heavens and earth

Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion hill

Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed

Fast by the oracle of God; I thence

Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous song,

That with no middle flight intends to soar

Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

And chiefly thou O Spirit, that dost prefer

Before all temples the upright heart and pure,

Instruct me, for thou knowst; thou from the first

Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread

Dovelike satst brooding on the vast abyss

And mad’st it pregnant: what in me is dark

Illumine, what is low raise and support:

That to the height of this great argument

I may assert the eternal providence,

And justify the ways of God to men.⁴⁸

There are certainly features of this passage that we could follow Eisenstein in calling montage effects. One could point, for example, to the shift from the tight focus on the fruit of the forbidden tree in Paradise to the invocation of the elevated prospect from the peaks of Mount Horeb, where divine inspiration was given to Moses, the presumed author of the book of Genesis on which Paradise Lost is based. There is also a visual repetition (or “match cut”) between this mountain top and that of Sinai, repeated in the invocation of Mount Zion in the clause that begins after the conjunctive “or” in line 10. Eisenstein’s expansive idea of montage might also apply to the “adventurous song” that means to “soar above the Aonian mount,” transcending that pinnacle, as the transcendent divine Spirit broods dove-like above the primordial abyss before the creative imperative “let there be light.” Most striking of all these montage effects, however, might be the juxtaposition of this first light of the world, brought about by the divine Word, and the light that the poet seeks to bring into his dark mind. This latter light, in corresponding to the first one, forms part of Milton’s Puritan belief in the “inner light” available to the “upright heart and pure” of the elect.

As a filmmaker, Eisenstein was famously attentive to the rhythm that governs the succession of images and sounds in cinematic montage, and rhythm is likewise crucial to what Milton has in view when he speaks of his ambition to pursue “Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.” After all, Paradise Lost is written in blank verse, a verse form that is not prose (since it involves lines regulated by iambic pentameter, five repetitions of unstressed and stressed syllables) and has no rhyme scheme. Blank verse is a metrical form nonetheless in which the line matters in two important ways: first by an adherence to the iambic pentameter norm, and second by implied principles of construction for what a line can be (since a blank-verse line cannot end or begin just anywhere). In blank verse, importantly, the unit of the line has little to do with the unit of sense, understood as a clause. And yet, although none of the first six lines are end-stopped—none ends with the completion of a sentence or independent clause—all conclude with a noun that completes a noun phrase: “the fruit,” “immortal taste,” “all our woe,” “one greater man,” “the blissful seat,” and “the secret top.” In each case, a strong monosyllabic noun follows an unstressed syllable, thus lending a kind of closing cadence to the line even as we look beyond it for the completion of the clause or sentence. We have to wait until line 7 to find a line that does not end with a noun phrase set to this particular rhythm, and there we are delivered an important single verb—inspire—that provides the same cadence for line closure, in spite of the fact that it is a transitive verb still awaiting its direct object: “That shepherd” (i.e., Moses). The noun phrases then reappear to close lines 8–10.

Even in the absence of rhyme schemes or syntactical end-stopping, therefore, Milton’s “adventurous song” begins by reinforcing the iambic pentameter norm. This means that we can register, not just on the page but also in our ears, the forward push beyond the end of a given line, an effect known as enjambment. A relatively strong instance of enjambment occurs when the line break falls between a transitive verb and the direct object that it calls for. As noted above, “inspire / That shepherd” is one such case. “Pursues / Things” is another. Slightly less strong is the enjambment across the line break when the verb and direct object are inverted: “What in me is dark / Illumine.” Sometimes, even when there is enjambment across a line break without any closing punctuation, Milton continues things in such a way as to give a line a kind of sense in itself, within or apart from the overall syntax. The very opening line of the poem works this way. Despite the forward push of the enjambment—“the fruit / Of that forbidden tree”—it is possible to read in the opening line by itself a full announcement of this epic poem’s subject matter: “man’s first disobedience and the fruit.” That is, its fruit, the fruit of that disobedience. It is after all the case that Paradise Lost goes on to deliver an account not only of the motives and circumstances of Adam and Eve’s sin, but also its far-reaching consequences: not only the loss of paradise, but also all the implications of original sin, including, by a wondrous mystery, the eventual redemption of that sin by Jesus Christ, the “greater man” whose coming is foretold to Adam and Eve in the final books of the poem.⁴⁹

The kinds of effects that Eisenstein finds in Milton’s verse recall his discussion of Dickens’ fiction, even closer to home for this filmmaker, whereby an image seems to linger from one scene to another, even as the sense of words does across line breaks in Milton. Not all of the rhythmic and formal features that criticism reveals in Paradise Lost, or in Dickens’ novels, have close analogues with cinema, and not even Milton’s opening sequence of juxtapositions, which I have described as Eisensteinian montage effects, are straightforwardly analogous to montage in cinema.⁵⁰ The point is rather that the formal effects based in repetition and variation that govern the literary arts and the screen arts are alike traceable in a critical analysis that enriches our experience of both.

I noted at the start that the art of doing criticism has been around for a long time and is something we are not likely to do without anytime soon. I suggested that the kinds of critical discussion that have been staged within popular cinema in recent decades amply attest to that point. Though this is a book that means, finally, to help students of literature and cinema (students in the broadest sense) to think and write well about what they find in their reading and viewing, I hope at all points to preserve the sense of vital connection with the kind of issues that Randal and Dante argue about in Clerks, the kind of issues that any number of readers of this book might find themselves arguing about after an evening of reading or viewing. In Dante and Randal’s exchange, we have a fine example of Mencken’s critical exuberance. It is not only something wonderful to behold. It is even more wonderful to undertake, to do ourselves. How indeed could we ever imagine doing without it?