The commercial with the fried egg should have said, "This is your brain. This is your mind on Deleuze."And so from my fried egg I hold you this rhizome or plateau or something, concerning something totally different:A slumber did my spirit seal; I had no human fears: She seemed a matter that could not find The impact of earthly years.No effort has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees;Roll'd round in earth's diurnal course With rocks, and stones, and trees.I only take some E. D. Hirsch on historical criticism, from Validity in Interpretation.Hirsch (I keep wanting to name him "Ed")compares two critiques of Wordsworth's "A slumber did my spirit seal." One is by Cleanth Brooks, a Formalist whom I wish most dearly.The former is by F.W. Bateson, who I don't know lots about except that he doesn't like historicists.So Hirsch is comparing two critics that are not from his camp, and he makes it a contest.Hirsch believes in determinate meaning, so one of these guys (or neither) has to be "right."Hirsch chooses Bateson as the winner, not because of his optimistic interpretation, but because of the word "pantheistic."Hirsch sees that book as validation that Bateson is taking into consideration the spirit and times of Wordsworth, a Romantic poet who would make some pantheistic beliefs or motifs.Hirsch goes on to head out how the two critiques are irreconcilable and so one of them must be invalid.Pantheism seems like a ridiculous way to find a winner, but it would be ridiculous for me to kick about his choice since I don't think in determinate meaning anyway.The competition is the problem.If I ran a competition with these two, I would try to see who was the best critic, not who gave the correct interpretation.Here they are, first Bateson, then Brooks:The final impression the poem leaves is not of two contrasting moods, but of a single mood mounting to a culmination in the pantheistic magnificence of the final two lines . . . The vague living-Lucy of this poem is opposed to the grander dead-Lucy who has become mired in the sublime work of nature. We put the poem down satisfied, because its final two lines succeed in effecting a reconciliation between two philosophies or social attitudes.Lucy is really more alive now than she is dead, because she is now a piece of the spirit of Nature, and not merely a human "thing."[The poet] attempts to suggest something of the lover's agonized shock at the loved one's present want of motion - of his reaction to her mouth and horrible inertness. . . Part of the effect, of course, resides in the fact that a dead lifelessness is suggested more aggressively by an object's being whirled about by something else than by an icon of the objective in repose.But there are other matters which are at work here: the sensation of the girl's falling back into the muddle of things, companioned by things chained like a corner to one particular spot, or by things completely inanimate like rocks and stones . . . [She] is caught up helplessly into the empty whirl of the land which measures and makes time.She is affected and held by earthly time in its most mighty and horrible image.I was so moved by Brooks and form of grossed out by Bateson. For instance, the job "We put the poem down satisfied" really rubs me the incorrect way.If we take to Horace's miscuit utile dulci, maybe putting a poem down satisfied is what we should hope for?But satisfaction is not just the sami as delight.Delight doesn't take any thinking.Bateson's satisfaction is not instant or aesthetic, but apparently based on his own version which smooths out any difference in the poem.On a "rapprochement between two philosophies or social attitudes."That's pretty vague, and it hardly sounds satisfying.Certainly not delightful. It's as if he's saying the poem has satisfied its necessary to get to a resolution (as if that is a necessity of sound poetry).Bateson's pantheism angle turns Lucy's resting place into an Elysium instead of a dead stone revolving in space, but also creating some nicer imagery than Brooks' darker interpretation provides, I don't think the critique is really effective (or affective).The whole aim of it seems to be, like I said before, to shine out conflicts, to settle differences, and to scrub out oppositions without a hitch.He talks of "two contrasting moods" that are really "a single mood," without making anything out of how these moods were sublated or elevated. He talks of the dead-Lucy "opposed to" the living-Lucy but doesn'texplain the opposition, ending on a bittersweet line, theequivalent of "she's in a best place now."It's almost mawkish.Two moods becoming one, two people (who are really one) who oppose one another, two philosophies reconciled - these things all seem pretty interesting, and wish they might pass at some climactic hinging point in the text, but Batesone doesn't bring it out of the poem.He only explains it conceptually and we are alleged to take it.The curious thing is he does mention something that sounds exciting, and yet uses the word "climax" in the air at the face of the paragraph, where he claims that "a single mood mount[s] to a coming in the pantheistic magnificence of the final two lines."Sounds so exciting, and so he doesn't deliver on it.My opinion of Bateson's critique is kind of exactly that - an impression.And he still calls his own critique an opinion of the poem.But yet if his prose style moves someone more than it moves me, even if his vague impressions of the poem are adequate for somebody else to bury their teeth into, there would even be that undeniable attempt to "work" the poem there, to smooth it over, to get succour from its tensions.What that does is just turning the poem into its interpretation.We take the end result so there's no use in re-reading the text.I may not like Bateman's delivery of his critique, but more importantly I don't like his aim.It's anti-climactic.Brook's critique may be slightly amiss in its pessimism (even if we're not going to be historical, let's be reasonable - I would get into consideration that Wordsworth is not a poet of sad, dark poems, so me might avoid going down the "agonized" path), but its effectiveness is that the difference in the poem is not canceled out.It makes for a better critique when conflicts and stress are pointedout explicitly.And if a call is made that a text has a climax,something climactic should be brought into focus by the critic.Infact, the review itself should give a climax.The foremost note of Brooks's paragraph has uspicturing a cold dead body through this whole thing, a fan looking onin "agonized shock."The "impact" may be a slight over the top, but itcertainly gives us an icon to hold onto while Brooks elaborates on whatthe text does with the dead girl, and the beautifully understated "present want of motion" makes the lifeless body yet more vivid.Brooks then uses the concrete language of the poem (rocks, trees, rolling. and shows how the differences between alive and dead, still and moving, are depicted "sharply" by Wordsworth's chosen images.He also substitutes some of his own sharp, concrete words like "whirled about" contrasted with "object in repose." Brooks drives his images home, perhaps a little more than a Wordsworth poem seems to require.The last in the poem sort of washes over us and leaves us drenched in the burden of Lucy's helplessness.It's not near as "ugly" a matter as Brooks makes it out to be.But still if Brooks gets carried away, the stress he points to, and still the sorrow he alludes to, is real.Perhaps this contrast between Brooks's pointed prose (which can be quite poetic) and Wordsworth's fluid poetry makes that still more apparent.The poem is not only translated into an interpretation and left for dead, but complemented and brought to living by a just critique.In the back half of Brooks's paragraph, things are however "at play" in the poem, not reconciled.Brooks finds similar tensions to what Bateson found (although Brooks focuses on still vs. moving where Bateson focuses on life vs. death), and he magnifies them and explicates them with a close reading on rocks and trees and such. In the final two lines of the paragraph, Brooks combines the poem's concrete images with some lift and more emotional language to make a critical climax: "She is touched and held by earthly time in its most potent and horrible image."Wow.That is not a resolution, but a gorgeous predicament.And that makes the reader wishing to go backwards and focus over this poem for himself. Or, he can ever go backwards to just drinking in the poem for what it is, the "picture" of it made a little more delightful by the critic's illuminations.Since the poem is never resolved, and it is ever at work, it is always worth reading.Brooks wins!
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