LIDIA VIANU

Critics

ROBERT HAMPSON

There has to be a concern for the reader – something more than blinding the reader with one’s obscurity.

1. CRITICISM

Interview with ROBERT HAMPSON (born 26 November 1948), British literary critic, academic and poet
Published in LIDIA VIANU, Desperado Essay-Interviews, Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti, 2006;
http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Hampson%20interview.htm
© Lidia Vianu



 

LIDIA VIANU: You are a Professor of Modern Literature and Head of the English Department at Royal Holloway, London. What does it feel like to be an academic today?

ROBERT HAMPSON: As Head of a large department at a research-led institution in the highly-bureaucratised British system, I spend a lot of my time on administration – overseeing the various BA and MA programmes, organizing workloads, monitoring the teaching and examination results in the various programmes, writing overview reports and business plans and financial plans … and trying to keep up with the changing legal frameworks (Health & Safety, Freedom of Information etc) in order to ensure compliance, while also preparing my Department for the Research Assessment Exercise, by monitoring individual research and encouraging larger research bids and projects. I am lucky to have extremely good colleagues, conscientious about teaching and working on a range of intellectually exciting projects. I have a reduced teaching load – a third-year Conrad class; MA classes in Conrad and contemporary poetry; and a number of research students. My third-year students have always been a wonderful group to teach: the course requires them to work very hard, but they rise to the challenge – and get a lot out of it. I have also been excited by the development of creative writing in the Department, which began with Poetic Practice as a third-year course and then as an MA (taught by Redell Olsen), and we have now set up a joint degree in English and Creative Writing, an MA in Creative Writing (taught by Andrew Motion, Jo Shapcott and Susanna Jones), and practice-based PhDs. I have also managed to maintain my own research partly through the supportive research environment in the Department and partly through my involvement in international networks relating to Conrad, Ford and James – and contemporary poetry.


LV. Your criticism focuses on Joseph Conrad – who was the subject of my diploma paper, so we share, I think, a biassed love for him – but you also write about Joyce, Ford Madox Ford and Rudyard Kipling, and you have supervised dissertations on Henry James. When you write your critical essays, do you mainly converse with other critics or do you primarily convey your own opinion on the text in question?

RH. Apart from editing King Solomon’s Mines for Penguin, my research at the moment has two foci: Conrad and contemporary poetry. I am engaged on a couple of Conrad projects – one of them a book called Conrad’s Secrets; a second project on Conrad and space, and a co-edited set of essays on Conrad and Magazine Culture. I am also co-editing a volume of essays on the poet Allen Fisher. In the Conrad work, I develop my own views of the texts through dialogue with other critics. So much valuable and interesting work has been done on Conrad that can’t be ignored, and the dialogue through critical writing is just an extension of the dialogue that exists within the community … that carries on through conferences and so on. In my critical work on Allen Fisher and on contemporary poetry and poetics, I am really in conversation with other poets rather than critics.


LV. There is much talk these days about criticism having to make itself useful by invading theory, sociology, aesthetics, ethics, philosophy, etc. There is a spreading opinion (born with the European Community) that a discipline must be useful to real life or it should not exist. Utilitarianism redivivus. Does criticism talk about the quality of life? About a recipe for success, the media, other fields? Does it theoretize the facts of the work into a system? The American dream (quick fame and money, no matter how you get them) is surreptitiously taking over. Literature is – I am afraid – being forgotten in the process of conforming to a jargon of newly created – otherwise welcome and very interesting – terms. The more new concocts you use, the less intelligible, the more splendid. The best text is the text which leaves you mute – you cannot comment upon it because you feel you do not want to take the time to learn the jargon. The academic jargon is killing the pleasure of reading a critical text. Where do you think criticism is heading? Is it so changed as to forget all about the literary work and deal more with the theory on life that swallows it?

RH. I think there are two separate issues here. In the first place, there is the issue of criticism using various kinds of theoretical language. I am entirely sympathetic to this development in criticism over the last thirty/forty years. I have grown up with this, and I am old enough to remember the former criticism with its unexamined assumptions and unarticulated values. My critical work on Conrad has been influenced by ideas from psychology, feminism, postcolonialism, cultural geography – and these have formed the bases for particular projects. At the same time, I am very concerned that critical work returns to the text and close reading of the text. What I am critical of is where the text is merely fed mechanically through a theoretical model – or where pretences are being made to a reading which hasn’t been undertaken (so that references are made to Hegel and Heidegger, for example, without any effort to engage with the work) – or where the critical work moves from one theorist to another without any sense of possible conflicts between theoretical paradigms. Otherwise, theoretical approaches merely add to (and enrich) models of reading.

The other issue is that of utilitarianism. This, I think, is a serious problem and a threat to what literature represents. There is increasing pressure from the government to turn education into training – and to shift universities away from the transmission of knowledge to skills. To go with this, students are being encouraged to regard education purely instrumentally – as a matter of passing examinations and gaining qualifications for the job market. Ideas of curiosity, creativity, and pleasure – which are of central importance to me both academically and in life – are excluded from this programme. You can also see why governments don’t want to encourage the development of informed, critical intelligence – which I still think is an essential part of our larger social role as university teachers and public intellectuals.


LV. I am mostly talking about academic criticism, because I am afraid that students and professors are the most stable audience of a critic these days. One reads criticism to study or to compare/conform. It is useful and necessary to confront other opinions and learn from many minds, whether critics or philosophers, scientists. Any text which can force your intellectual limits and enrich your judgment is a blessing. My question does not start from a denial of texts other than text analysis; quite the reverse. I welcome broad minded critics. Contemporary academic criticism is losing its readership. Its audience is smaller and more specialized every day. Is that as it should be? Should we allow it to leave literature and join ‘science’? Will we, in the near future, have to learn a new language in order to understand a critical text? What do you think about the way a literary critic should use language?

RH. Given changes in the surrounding culture – not least, changes in publishing and bookselling and, in this country anyway, changes in the way people spend their leisure time – it is not surprising that academic criticism should be a relatively small, specialized field, where academic talks to academic. It is hard for us to break out of this, given that newspapers and other media are more interested in sport, fashion, and popular music than in literature and intellectual ideas. New Labour’s mantra of ‘elitism’ has also worked to strengthen the strongly anti-intellectual tendencies in this culture and to discourage ideas of informed intellectual debate. However, I think it is important that we try to break out, that we try to find a public role for academics, intellectuals, writers – and, to do that, we need to be as clear and intelligible as possible, without sacrificing necessary complexities.


LV. Students are quite confused in the philological departments of present day universities. If they do not use the jargon, their papers may get a bad grade. If they use it, there are two possibilities: either they use it intelligently (and are understood) or they use it mechanically (combining portmanteau sacred terms and hiding their lack of personal ideas behind them). In both cases, they are very likely to get a good grade. As a professor, you may be put off by a foreign language in a student’s essay and imagine he does have something to say. I think that good professors must ask their students to change jargon into intelligent, accessible critical discourse. Must the language of criticism become specialized to the point of departing from the path of a common instrument of communicating an idea about a work (of decoding a text which is already coded – with another convention, true – not further encoding it into newspeak)?

RH. As I suggested above, I am sympathetic to the intelligent and intelligible use of theoretical language, but I also share your critical view of the mechanical production of theoretical language. What is important is that students learn to think critically and independently. This doesn’t rule out the use of theory, but the marshalling of theoretical terms and allusions to unread philosophers are valueless. I try to train students to think about, question, and support any statement they wish to make. I also try to insist that students should have read widely in an author before they start making generalizations about him/her. If you have read only ‘Heart of Darkness’, you can’t generalize about Conrad. Similarly, if you have read only Freud’s essay on the Uncanny, you can’t pretend to understand Freud.


LV. Is the growing abyss between academic and non-academic criticism (merely a matter of audience, after all) a good thing? Should we feed students only dry jargon and keep for the stray reader the real charm of the critical discourse? Do you teach your students to comply with the arduous terminology (parroting words invented by gurus) in order to get a good grade? As a professor, do you grade the method/jargon or the personal reaction to both? When personal reaction comes without the method, how do you correct the approach? How much of the student’s enthusiasm for the work are you willing to sacrifice to the method? Is the method unaccompanied by feeling for the text satisfactory?

RH. Within the academy, I certainly wouldn’t want my students to parrot anybody’s words. I would expect them to come to terms with contemporary critical and theoretical discourse, to have an understanding of both and be able to use various discourses or a particular critical/theoretical discourse in their own essays. A personal reaction as such is of little value – over the years, I have often heard ‘personal reactions’, which are entirely predictable and the product of uniformed and unexamined assumptions and prejudices. I.A. Richards long ago, at the very start of practical criticism, drew attention to the danger of ‘stock responses’ as the ‘personal responses’ of the uninformed reader. As a teacher, I want my students to have informed responses – and that ‘informed response’ might require historical knowledge, biographical knowledge, knowledge of related literature, knowledge of other works by the same writer, knowledge of the critical tradition, knowledge of contemporary theoretical approaches. I don’t lose sight of the text, and close reading of the text, and of the importance of the personal response to the text, but the personal response also has to be an informed response. In my third-year Conrad class, the students’ enthusiasm comes partly from engaging closely with a large number of works by Conrad so that they really feel familiar with the body of writing, but also partly from approaching that work through a variety of critical and theoretical approaches, some of which they make their own. I don’t see theory and enthusiasm as opposed, but as capable of feeding each other. In the Poetic Practice class, which focuses on contemporary experimental practice (which is often theoretically informed), what has been interesting is to see how the students take ownership of theoretical ideas they have encountered elsewhere in the course through practice. For example, Barthes’s idea of the self as constructed from a wash of texts and codes challenges the notion of the lyric ego as the source for the poem and moves towards various kinds of constructivist and collage approaches to poetry in a way that the students find very liberating. Here, instead of parroting a theoretical language, they are encouraged to understand the practical implications of theories they have encountered – and how those theoretical positions might produce new models of writing.

My (limited) experience with non-academic adult readers of fiction is of an aggressive attachment (on their part) to a limited model of reading through identification which is assumed to be ‘natural’. Because this model of reading is assumed as ‘common sense’, there is no possibility of engagement or nuancing through other models and approaches, and very limited possibilities for dialogue. Non-academic adult readers of poetry can be more open to other models and approaches. I don’t have a sense of the ‘charm of critical discourse’ outside the academy – except through my contacts with non-academic writers and readers of poetry


LV. I consider the literary critic to be a writer of the second degree, a writer with an agenda, possibly. We often start from one view on the work and, while formulating it, we see the light, and we realize we have reached an unexpected conclusion, which was not very obvious to us before we had started writing the critical essay. Words do have a way of helping us understand our own reaction to the work. Criticism, then, is creative, in a way. It moulds language, too. It wields ideas. It can please, it can seduce. Eliot’s criticism, Valéry’s criticism did. Why is it so wrong to state that the critic is a writer, that criticism is literary creation of a different kind from fiction or poetry? Consequently, that it must take care of how it uses language? Do you think the language of criticism is free from the need to communicate clearly, which informs literary style?

RH. Yes, the critic is a writer, and literary criticism should be conscious of its reader and should take care of its language. Criticism needs to be clear and well-written, but that doesn’t rule out theoretical and philosophical language. Like poetry, the language of criticism needs to be adequate to the complexity of its subject. Neither Eliot nor Valéry in their poetry avoids the abstraction and complexity of philosophy.

The criticism written by poets is also an interesting genre. Its functions are often quite different from those of academic criticism – often performing the function of clearing the way for the poetry, providing a framework or a new model of reading. There is also a form of poetics written by poets which is a literary creation – there are works by Bob Perelman, Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian that fall into this category.


LV. Is criticism going to survive? A colleague of mine remarked the other day that no one who rejected the heavy artillery of critical jargon in their essays would be read any more. Is the readable, enjoyable critic an obsolete species? Do we have to be difficult in order to prove we are worth reading?

RH. Again, I don’t see that criticism is opposed to theory: I would want to aim for a theoretically informed criticism. There are places for various forms of criticism – the highly theoretical, the academic, and the intelligent criticism written for the intelligent, non-specialist that occasionally appears in journals and reviews.


LV. Theory is the way to go these days, but can it be the only one? Has criticism become that exclusive? Is text analysis and the study of the project of the work, of its author’s intentions, interpretation of the author’s view such a sin as it is said to be now? I realize modernist literature rejected objective narrative in the same way that contemporary critics reject what they call impressionism today, and I agree that we must have an approach, tools with which to deconstruct and reconstruct the work. But must we use them in such a narrow-minded way? Can they not coexist with the traditional intuition of the work? Why is the critic so strongly denied access to creation? I feel that in criticism everything is out but the mechanistic inventory of the work, which is death to the old charm of literary criticism. How must criticism behave now, in your opinion?

RH. I think theory has changed the paradigm: criticism can’t proceed as if theory never happened. If by text analysis, you mean editorial theory and the genesis of the text, I think these are also valid approaches, but I would also want to include the new bibliography and the sociology of the text, the work of MacKenzie and Jerome McGann. The collection of essays I am co-editing on Conrad and Magazine Culture looks at Conrad’s relations with each of the magazines in Britain and North America in which his work appeared, the cultural and political agenda of the magazine, and considers why did they want to publish him and why did he want to appear with them. Authorial intention was already problematic before theory arrived – and I think the new bibliography makes that intention problematic in other ways. Who is the author? Arguably ‘Joseph Conrad’ is a construct of J. C. Korzeniowski and various editors, typesetters and printers whose work contributed to the published texts that appeared under that name.


LV. What should we teach our students first, to dissect the work or to understand it? The method or the substance, the form or the content (if – old dispute – they can be separated)? As in literature proper, the two separated are mere fiction. The traditional, intuitive critic (whom Eliot so hated) has been punished. Who will punish the excesses of the cotemporary critic, who thinks his demolition of the mystery of creation is all that matters?

RH. Again, I think understanding the work and dissecting it are a reciprocal and unending process. Can the text be finally understood? Is there anything apart from successive readings with their subtle differences and shifts of emphasis – and sometimes, even, radical re-visionings?


LV. I feel very awkward when a very smart student writes a dissertation in which his sentences alienate me as a reader, destroy my pleasure of reading. His ideas are sometimes interesting, at other times specialized language kills all meaning. I feel like telling him he should respect language more, but I am afraid that might turn against him. He is better fitted than me to survive in the present world. How do I teach intelligent students to strike a balance between newly coined terms (usually other critics’ terms, parroted more or less in the know) and the need to communicate, which is why language was born in the first place? One can create a term occasionally, but criticism should not be about creating (sometimes defacing) words; it should be about making them vehicles of meaning. Could you – who always make sense – advise a student to forget about creation and be ‘scientific’ all the way, sacrificing meaning to the pride of using only the right words, the words which are now ‘in’?

RH. I think contemporary students have to be able to understand and use the contemporary critical and theoretical idiom, but they have to be using it – making it their own, serving the purpose of their own reading. There is no point merely repeating theoretical formulae. There is no point producing a collage of contemporary theories, reaching out for another name or term. The emphasis has to be on thinking and thinking through the language and theory used. The trick also is to write stylishly and pleasurably while using the most up-to-date theory. As you suggest, there has to be a concern for the reader – something more than blinding the reader with one’s obscurity.


June 2005