I choose as the focus of my work here the critical debate between Cleanth Brooks and Douglas Bush, a debate which raged around what Brooks called an "examination of some of the relations and interrelations of the historical approach and the critical approach" to the interpretation of poetry ("Ode" 324). Within this debate of how one is to read Marvell's "Horation Ode," I find one of the most unexamined issues in the three essays, yet one which seems to be a presupposition for most of the argumentation that goes on between both parties, is Brooks's careful caveat early in his essay that his project is not to "reveal triumphantly that what it [Marvell's poem] really says is something quite opposed to what we have supposed it to be saying" ("Ode" 323). For Bush, what the poem is supposed to have said is key, for his argument will rest around such suppositions and commonalities, or unprejudiced readings as he might call it; and among his final arguments will be that "Marvell's poem means what it says" (348), which will be arrived at by looking at the poem in "its common and natural sense"(341). But Brooks is not necessarily strict in sticking to traditional interpretation, so it is intriguing he would begin with what we might call at this point an interpretational warning label to insure that the reader does not misinterpret him and think that he is trying to merely find a new interpretation for an old poem.
While he will later argue that the New Critic is indeed in debt to the historicist, and we might accept this initial warning as a part of that debt to "proper norms" (326), it is with other interests in mind that Brooks ends his "Notes on the Limits of'History' and the Limits of 'Criticism."' Invoking Matthew Arnold, Brooks concludes his essay dealing with Leslie Fielder's call to "interpret literature in relation to the rest of man's concerns" (qtd. in "Limits" 354). To this, Brooks is "in hearty agreement" ("Limits" 354), and with this ending it is clear that there are implications to this argument, that it is not a matter of certain individuals and their individual interpretations. There are, for instance, widespread employment concerns for educators and the political camps with which they align themselves, not to mention pedogogical questions of what is taught and how it is taught, but Brooks frames for this discussion the problem that in matters of interpretations there are politics that deal with, to return to Fielder's words, "the rest of man's concerns." Though Brooks will argue that the pursuit of religion and the pursuit of literature cannot and should not be collapsed into the same pursuit, I nevertheless take from Brook's conclusion, as well as the entire argument itself, that in terms of politics and pedagogy, it fundamentally matters if he "triumphantly" says that the poem is saying something different from what we have assumed it to say after decades of intellectual study. There is for Brooks consequences for such an interpretation. And Brooks notes that Bush is "stalking bigger game," that he has not "written his reply merely to argue over a few niceties of interpretation of a poem ... [but] to vindicate the biographer and historian against the mere critic"(351). But aside from defining which intellectual position is highest on the hierarchy of academic role-players, it is possibly for that final reason of the moral implications of interpretation that Brooks is so careful to note that he does not want to do just this sort of troublemaking.
He notes for instance that his interpretation of Marvell's attitudes towards Cromwell is merely a "qualifying element" rather than a "sole or dominant element" ("Limits" 350), and in this way tries to avoid tampering with established interpretations. Nevertheless, it is precisely for troublemaking that Bush criticizes Brooks, and in this frame, Bush's criticisms of Brooks are multiple, and indicate a number of institutional implications; this is something I would like to take a few moments to explore. Bush begins his essay laying out his general complaints regarding Brook's argument, which is, as I take it, that there are a number of ambiguities in Marvell's poem (which he illustrates with such examples as the difficulties with the word "froward") and that the best way to solve these problems is by carefully restricting ourselves to how the poem is organized, "what the poem is," and not "how the poem came to be" ("Ode" 324). As Brooks points out, “There is surely a sense in which anyone must agree that a poem has a life of its own, and a sense in which it provides in itself the only criterion by which what it says can be judged" ("Ode" 322), and therefore he later adds, "I have insisted that the poem has to be read as a poem - that what it 'says' is a question for the critic to answer, and that no amount of historical evidence as such can finally determine what the poem says" ("Ode" 338-9). On this, Bush's initial criticism is that it is the "critic's obligation ... to use all helpful evidence of any kind" (340), that the critic should not be restricted to using only one tool in the processes of exegesis. Thus Brooks is essentially arbitrary in that he chooses only one method to interpret, but to this Bush further complains that Brooks is hypocritical, and inconsistent, in that "Mr. Brooks himself, when he wishes, goes outside of the poem" (340).
But it is in terms of common sense, and the politics of historical interpretation and representation, that Bush's criticism is most acute. Brook's argues that it is the historicist who forces evidence and is restricting, with the example of dating Marvell's "Tom May's Death":
If we limit ourselves to historical evidence, it is possible to suppose that "Tom May's Death" was actually written on the Hill and Grove at Billborrow; and Margoliouth chooses early 1651 as the possible date for Marvell's arrival at Appleton House only because, as he says, "Tom May's Death is not the sort of poem Marvell would have written under Fairfax's roof. ("Ode" 323)
But Bush argues that it is Brooks who "is forcing the evidence to fit an unspoken assumption - namely, that a sensitive, penetrating, and well- balanced mind like Marvell could not have really have admired a crude, single- minded, and ruthless man of action like Cromwell" (340). In terms of "traditional claims" (346), Bush argues that Brooks seeks after such "desperate solutions" (347) as arguing that parts of Marvell's "Ode" are ironic, and in this way introduces the idea of what Brooks defines in his response to Bush as "sinister implications,"- as Brooks puts it, "Mr. Bush finds me choosing each time the more sinister implication and avoiding the normal and obvious meanings of the words ("Limits" 350). Thus Bush continuously refers, instead, to his argument that, as I take it, we should read the poem with common historical sense, rather than Brook's prejudiced reading. Bush questions, for instance, what the "unprejudiced reader" (341) would do with certain lines, looking towards what Marvell "unmistakably says" (342), thinking of "the common view of history" (343), that Cromwell is "unquestionably the instrument of God" (344), and thus Brook's argument is nothing but "indulging in some wishful thinking" (347). We might begin to question this View of unquestionability" when it comes to both appreciating and interpreting art, and whether there can be "normal and obvious meanings" for the words in a poem, but for Bush, Brook's fundamental problem is that while interpreting Marvell's text he has found a "greater degree of complexity than the text warrants," and furthermore, "There is surely a line between legitimate and illegitimate ambiguity, a line to be respected by both poet and critic, and Mr. Brooks seems continually to overstep that line" (349).
Here we not only see what Bush finds in Brooks to be "fallacies and distortions in what purports to be a critical and unprejudiced analysis" (349), but it also appears at least superficially that in appealing to “a certain line between legitimate and illegitimate" interpretation that Bush argues that Brooks, in terms of the poem, has done exactly what he did not want to spend all his time doing, revealing "that what it really says is something quite opposed to what we have supposed it to be saying" (323), that he has done an illegitimate interpretation. This is not to say that Brooks attempts to come up with exactly what he's not supposed to, that any critic would set out to do that, nor I am arguing that Bush would require all interpreters to come to the same accepted conclusions, as much as I am arguing that it is intriguing that Bush frames all his complaints against Brooks in terms of commonly accepted history, or commonly accepted interpretive conclusions. In other words, what I take from the discussion above is that in many ways Bush assumes a generally acceptable interpretation for this poem, an interpretation based on common sense and a reasonable historicality with limited linguistic ambiguities, and by choosing one tool to look at the poem, ignoring common sense, and in arriving at a controversial conclusion, Brooks is making trouble in pinning a meaning to a poem that does not naturally contain that meaning. It is historical conditioning, for Bush, that has a "positive value," not the sort of criticism Brooks advocates. Bush, for instance, begins his response to Brooks praising Marvell's poem, arguing that "Marvell was able to contemplate both him [Cromwell] and King Charles with a mixture of warm admiration and cool analytic detachment" ("Ode" 340), yet Brook's interpretation of ambiguity and irony in the poem "raises a much more difficult problem, within the problem, than the one it seeks to explain" (348); it is here, for example, that I most clearly read Bush's feeling that Brooks is just causing trouble. And it is intriguing that Bush frames this complaint in terms of Brook's attempt to "turn a seventeenth-century liberal into a modern one" (349), particularly in terms of what seems to be a debate that centers around politics, and the politics of interpretation.
What intrigues me here is the notion that Bush, aside from purely thinking that Brook's interpretation is faulty to begin with, is troubled by Brook's troubling of what seems to be an obvious and traditional definition. To ascertain the exact reasons why Brooks would want to do such a subversive act would be to fall into the traps of authorial intention that he tries desperately to avoid, but I find it helpful to think of this problem in terms of Judith Butler's definition of "trouble" with which she begins her work Gender Trouble. For Butler, "To make trouble was, with the reigning discourse of my childhood, something one should never do precisely because that would get one in trouble" (vii). Yet she speaks of the "subtle ruse of power": "The prevailing law threatened one with trouble, even put one in trouble, all to keep one out of trouble. Hence I concluded that trouble is inevitable and the task, how best to make it, what best way to be in it" (vii). This sort of positive "troubling" for Butler is at least a interesting way to begin to look at Brook's project, for in the attempt to trouble the traditional and historical interpretations of Marvell's poem, can we assume that trouble is negative because it does not eventually reinforce what is the absolute truth of the poem? Or is Brook's New Critical approach, the trouble he makes, an attempt to reach a merely different objective truth, which arises out of his desire to rescue Marvell's poem from being a "heap of fragments" ("Ode" 325), and his overall "concern for the universal in the poem" ("Limits" 353).
Of course there are a number of obvious initial questions that come from this discussion which should be raised in conclusion here: can there be an obvious reading of a poem and is it created by studying the poem with all of our interpretive tools instead of restricting ourselves to a purely critical reading? And if there is that obvious reading, an absolute truth, if you will, does it establish itself against a marginalized knowledge such as the "indulging in wishful thinking" that Brooks is trying to create? Must interpretations, therefore, always be moral and political matters, or are there ways to escape the kind of concern for the "other aspects of man" suggested by Leslie Fielder or the religious paradigms of literary scholarship as advocated by Matthew Arnold.
I have not tried to prove here that Brooks is explicitly trying to make trouble in his interpretations, nor that this is necessarily a valuable interpretive tool. My premise rather, was that it is intriguing that Brooks so quickly mentions in his essay that he is not out to create an interpretation of Marvell's poem that is an antithesis to how it has been interpreted, while it is equally intriguing that Bush situates so many of his criticisms of Brooks in terms of how he looks for "desperate solutions" that stray from a common sense reading of the poem. This idea that the type of critic that Brooks advocates makes trouble for the type of interpretation established by a historical reading of the poem raises such questions as the role of the critic in a society, and whether this critic is obliged to make trouble or not, and who is to be the focus of his troublemaking energies.
Brooks, Cleanth. "Criticism and Literary History: Marvell's Horation Ode." Class Handout ENG 415. April 9th, 1996.
"Notes on the Limits of'History' and the Limits of ‘Criticism’." Class Handout ENG 415 April 9th, 1996.
Bush, Douglas. "Marvell's 'Horation Ode'." Class Handout ENG 415. April 9th, 1996.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.