The Winnowing Fan by Christopher Norris

Author:Christopher Norris
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474236331
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Notes

p. here: ‘something fucked him up’. Allusion to Philip Larkin’s well-known poem ‘This Be the Verse’.

p. here: ‘a shilling life’. See W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Who’s Who’ (‘A shilling life will give you all the facts’).

p. here: ‘his prime/Example here was Dali’. Refers to George Orwell’s essay ‘Benefit of Clergy’, where he attacks the Romantic idea that artists should enjoy some special dispensation from normal standards of moral or social responsibility.

p. here: ‘high virtues Arnold bid us use/As touchstones’. In his essay ‘The Study of Poetry’ the Victorian critic Matthew Arnold advised readers to memorize certain lines from classic texts such as those of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare and Wordsworth and use them as ‘touchstones’ – or intuitive standard-setters – for assessing the value of other poetry.

p. here: ‘that Leavis took/As a sure mark’. Refers to the (at one time) hugely influential Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis who evaluated poetry and fiction primarily in terms of moral criteria such as ‘maturity’, ‘sincerity’, ‘character’ and ‘reverent openness before life’.

p. here: ‘echt-Lawrentian Book/Of Life’. See F. R. Leavis, D.H. Lawrence: Novelist, where he takes Lawrence as a great example of the above-mentioned literary-moral virtues.

p. here: ‘that old toad, work’. Refers to Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Toads’ (‘Why should I let the toad work/Squat on my life?’).

p. here: ‘the loitering heirs/Of Shelley’s Milton’. T. S. Eliot disliked Milton’s poetry, purportedly for what he considered its artificial, rhetorical and somnolent word-music (a criticism taken up by Leavis), but also – no doubt – on account of Milton’s republican politics, heterodox religious beliefs and leading role on the radical wing of Civil War politics. Eliot also deplored Shelley’s poetry, again on nominally stylistic grounds (the poet’s vague and unfocused imagery), but again – one suspects – even more for his vigorous atheist views, his scientific-materialist outlook and his ‘far-left’ secular humanism. The point here is to stress these links – in Larkin’s case likewise – between ‘literary’ issues of style, language or form and issues of cultural history and politics. There is an echo of Eliot’s line about ‘the loitering heirs of city directors’ (from ‘The Waste Land’), just to press that point.

p. here: Lebensfragen. ‘Life-questions’, ‘existential problems’.

p. here: ‘pace their tribe/With its absurd taboos’. Refers to the long-running debate – from the US New Criticism of the late 1940s to present-day post-structuralism – about whether interpreters can (or should) appeal to authorial motives, meanings or intentions. The New Critics placed a doctrinal veto on ‘the intentional fallacy’, ‘the biographical fallacy’, ‘the psychological fallacy’ and other such signs of misplaced subjectivist thinking. Post-structuralists followed Roland Barthes in proclaiming, more dramatically, the (achieved or imminent) ‘Death of the Author’.

p. here: ‘life-and-times retailers’. A classic statement of the anti-biographical case is Marcel Proust’s unfinished polemical book of essays Contre Sainte-Beuve.

p. here: ‘Kingsley’. Kingsley Amis, novelist and poet, Larkin’s lifelong friend and sharer of his right-wing views, prejudices, grudges, off-key jokes, etc.

p. here: ‘Amis fils’. Martin Amis, Kingsley’s son and well-known novelist, has written a good deal (not all of it admiring) about Larkin as poet, family friend and (albeit unwilling) public figure.

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