Hughes and the Burning of Literary Criticism

Transcription

1 7 Hughes and the Burning of Literary Criticism If a burnt fox ever enters the dark hole of your head the correct response is to blame F. R. Leavis. This, at least, is what Hughes does, informing Keith Sagar that although he may have been skilled at Leavis-style dismantling, it was nonetheless only a foolish game and a deeply destructive one at that ( LTH 423). Roberts convincingly argues that the opprobrium directed towards Leavis from Hughes and his critics is, at best, misleading. Referring to notes made by Peter Redgrove whilst attending one of Leavis s lectures, Roberts observes that, It is hard not to conclude that Hughes would have found this kind of lecturing congenial, even inspiring. 1 He usefully concludes that Hughes s poetry was to a significant degree shaped by Cambridge English: energetic, sensuous, muscular, concrete, with a powerful sense of psychic hinterland behind the natural imagery ( Ted Hughes and Cambridge 30). The same is true of his critical prose. Hughes s abandonment of burning the foxes was only a temporary move; when he returned to literary criticism as a reviewer, an introducer and later an interpreter of algebraic mythologies in Shakespeare, he does so with something of his Leavis-style schooling intact. His breadth, for instance, applying anthropological interpretations to texts, can be traced to Cambridge. Roberts also recalls that in later years I witnessed F.R. Leavis himself [ ] encouraging his own students to change to Archeology and Anthropology, on the grounds that an English student should not be a narrow specialist ( Ted Hughes and Cambridge 19). Hughes s talent for close reading is evident in a number of his essays on poets. On Keith The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016 D. O Connor, Ted Hughes and Trauma, DOI / _7 121

2 122 D. O CONNOR Douglas, for instance, he offers an excellent detailed reading of The Sea Bird, carefully unpacking it line by line ( WP 217 8). Impersonality is another facet of Hughes s relationship with Leavis (and Cambridge criticism more widely, which as Roberts notes, also includes Eliot, since his voice was so influential there). Leavis s treatment of impersonality, like Eliot s, is useful to Hughes. As we shall see below, Hughes makes a distinction between the person of the poet and the poetic Self that is indebted to Leavis s treatment of personal emotion in poetry. Leavis argues that in the successful poem, sensibility [ ] doesn t work in complete divorce from intelligence; feeling is not divorced from thinking. 2 As Hughes says in his Paris Review interview: every poem that works is like a metaphor of the whole mind writing, the solution of all the oppositions and imbalances going on at that time. 3 Eliot s similar argument in Tradition and the Individual Talent, that poetry is an escape from personality and emotion, must also have resounded in Hughes, given his preference for indirect symbolism over direct biographical treatment. Eliot s adjunct, that only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape those things applies all too readily to Hughes s long struggle with Birthday Letters. 4 It is a nuanced approach, for instance, that informs his anti-confessional readings of Sylvia Plath, where her poetry is an escape from quotidian emotion into something still personal, but at a much deeper level than that potentially facile word emotion can convey. Writing about such matters is a task that Hughes, like Leavis and Eliot, takes very seriously. Leavis is critical moralist: we come to the point that literary criticism, as it must, enters overtly into questions of emotional hygiene and moral value more generally (there seems no other adequate phrase), of spiritual health. 5 So too is Hughes; see, for instance, his comments on Popa, Milosz and Herbert: their vision [ ] is that of the struggle of animal cells and of the torments of spirit in a world reduced to that vision ( WP 221). Hughes is not only passing moral judgement here, but spiritual judgement. It is in Hughes s spiritual judgements regarding texts that we can find him most closely resembling Leavis. The literary critic s 1962 vituperation against C. P. Snow may have been after Hughes s college days, but the storm it brewed cannot have passed him by. His defence of literary culture in the face of scientific rationalism forms an argument that underpins much of Hughes s thinking. Literary culture, for Leavis, asks important questions about life that scientific rationalism, with its reductive or quantitative attitude, cannot. Furthermore, it is a spiritual pursuit:

3 HUGHES AND THE BURNING OF LITERARY CRITICISM 123 In coming to terms with great literature we discover what at bottom we really believe. What for what ultimately for? What do men live by? the questions work and tell at what I can only call a religious depth of thought and feeling. Perhaps, with my eye on the adjective, I may just recall for you Tom Brangwen, in The Rainbow, watching by the fold in lambing-time under the night sky: He knew he did not belong to himself. 6 Terry Eagleton, in his recent discussion of the death of God, quotes this passage to support his argument that literature was sought to fill the void left by God. 7 This is a position that, if Hughes does not quite adopt, certainly appeals to him greatly. His discussion of Laura Riding leads him to the wrestling match between language and truth on spiritual terms: Her pursuit is religious only in the sense that Wittgenstein s demands on and final despair with language can be called religious, which is to say that she forces poetry to the breaking point. 8 In a letter to Bishop Ross Hook that went through multiple drafts on the invitation to take part in a discussion on the Church and poetry, Hughes records that poetry seems to point [ ] towards a spiritual life of sorts ( LTH 457). Hughes s argument follows that it is only religious when poetry s healing faculty is deployed towards spiritual ends, where the pain is a religious pain ( LTH 458 9). Hughes cites Eliot s Ash Wednesday to stand alongside the poetry of the books of Job, Isaiah and Revelations. Surely the pain of the questions posed by Leavis ( what ultimately for? ) is of such a quality. His reception of poets is that of prophets. Myths, Metres, Rhythms goes to great lengths to demonstrate how poetic form is shaped by attachment to the Goddess; his version of Emily Dickinson is a bride of the spirit ( Emily Dickinson, WP 157); his Wilfred Owen finds somewhere at the bottom of the carnage, the Messiah struggling to be born ( Unfinished Business, WP 44). Even Keith Douglas, like Eliot s Tiresias in The Waste Land, presents a vision of his own early death, his own death foresuffered. 9 If Hughes s poets are prophets, the literary critic potentially plays the role of priest, ensuring the congregation of readers catch the message. But if poetry is healing, prose wounds. Late in his life Hughes lamented again to Sagar that writing critical prose destroyed his immune system [ ] nothing but burning the foxes ( LTH 719). It is a special sort of barb to gripe about the horrors of literary criticism to your foremost critic, though it appears to be intended more as a warning for the sake of Sagar s health than a snarling gesture. Before revealing the damage to his health Hughes confirms a particular reading of his work

4 124 D. O CONNOR by Sagar, as if to sanction it he was clearly well aware of the importance of the critic in cementing his reputation as he wanted it cementing. Sagar was undoubtedly integral to Hughes receiving a sympathetic reception in the toxic smokestacks and power stations of the Academe ( LTH 617). Still, the question remains: if literary criticism is so destructive, why did he write so much of it? His particular grouse with Cambridge and Leavis is countered somewhat by a recognition that this did not represent literary criticism as a whole, recognising its potential to be performed in the spirit of husbandry & sympathetic coaching ( LTH 423). His secret, he tells his sister, is that he can only write poetry when he is occupied with prose and also exercising regularly ( LTH 34). This need not be critical prose, however; the fruitfulness of Crow surely owes something to the nests of creative prose that hatched the poems. Neil Corcoran s insightful observation that Hughes s prose is often poetry by other means is perhaps one such solution, but this does not also stop him from noting that prose is also for Hughes [ ] a kind of catastrophe ( Hughes as Prose Writer, CCTH 122 & 126). The tendency of Hughes s critical prose to reach for metaphor and simile betrays the fear that he conveyed to Heaney, wondering whether Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being were not the poem he ought to have written ( LTH 704). It may even be the case that this is the match that lit his fox: that his insight, for instance, into the fine-sprung, intricate steeliness, like the structure of a flying insect of Douglas s poetry is only to the detriment of poetry in that he has produced prose that really, burning the foxes is a misdirection of time and attention, rather than flagrantly destructive ( Keith Douglas xxviii). Corcoran s conclusion that prose may operate for Hughes as both poison and cure directing us to Derrida s play with the Greek pharmakon in the process is probably the closest we can come to a solution of Hughes s tangled relationship with critical prose. Part of the public imperative of his mass of prose is to help shape the audience of his poetry. Winter Pollen is loquacious advocacy for Hughes in all but name except for the points where it is openly in defence of Ted Hughes ( Crow on the Beach, Poetry and Violence, The Burnt Fox ). It is something of a truism that all writers acts of literary criticism are auto-critical, and Hughes s is no different. This, though, is not an act of hubris. If he is a shy advocate for his own poetry, using others vicariously, it is only because he is defending a particular belief in poetry more widely. Hughes firmly believes in the spiritual value of poetry particularly in an age where God seemed dead. His critical prose belongs in the

5 HUGHES AND THE BURNING OF LITERARY CRITICISM 125 class of husbandry that he finds in opposition to the literary criticism he encountered at Cambridge. Yet, Hughes s divinely inspired poet is both of its time and an anachronism. The New Age sensibilities that caught up with Hughes s 1950s hermit spiritualism found a receptive culture for his suggestion in 1964 that, In a shamanizing society, Venus and Adonis, some of Keats longer poems, The Wanderings of Oisin, Ash Wednesday would all qualify their authors for the magic drum ( Regenerations, WP 58). But this was also the age of poststructuralism. If Leavis had set fire to Hughes s dream-fox, then surely those tyrants from across the channel would perpetrate far worse crimes against the creative spirit. THE DEATH OF THE AUTHOR It is not difficult to imagine how Hughes would react when confronted with Roland Barthes s assertion that the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the Author. 10 The tyrant s whisper is particularly challenging ostensibly, at least to the centrality of the inspired author in Hughes s work. Yet Gillian Groszewski directs us towards the subtleties in Hughes s understanding of poetry that open some space for a sympathetic Barthesian reading of the poet. She observes that though his public association of The Burnt Fox and The Thought-Fox imposes the poet upon the poem, his prior statement regarding the poem as a solution of the imbalances in his mind offers an invitation to locate everything required to interpret the poem in the text itself. 11 There is, in short, a case to be made in either direction. Barthes s theory encounters significant problems when applied to his farming poetry, for instance, where it would screen the author s practical responsibility for nature in a text which is also symbolic, mythic, as Gifford observes ( Green Voices 129). More combatively, the reception of certain literary commentators to the circumstances surrounding Sylvia Plath s death and Hughes s subsequent editing of her work led eventually to the birth of a kind of reader belligerent towards him, and openly prepared to express such sentiment at his public appearances. Hughes s treatment of the relationship between author and text is not quite as perspicuous as we are tempted to presume. Writing to Keith Sagar in response to biographical details shared in the critic s The Art of Ted Hughes, Hughes voiced concern: Whatever person I ve projected, in the body of my poems, will have to bear whatever ideas people have about him. I ve freed myself fairly successfully

6 126 D. O CONNOR from too great a concern about his fate. What does disturb me, I m afraid, is to see him identified with me in the details of my life. ( LTH 337) Clearly there are two Hugheses here: one in the poems, one out of them. Furthermore, he appears willing to allow the reader complete interpretive control. If this is not the death of the author, it is at least the abandonment of the author. Whatever person we find in the poems, however flippantly he dismisses them here, is nonetheless a profoundly important aspect of Hughes s response to poetry. This person is repeatedly taken by him to be the truest evocation of the poet s self, much more accurate than anything we can find in their biography. The person in the poem Hughes defines as the poetic Self ; much of his criticism on Shakespeare, Coleridge, Yeats, Eliot and Plath in particular is driven towards elucidating this poetic Self. He states that this person in the poem may even contain [ ] the true self, the self at the source, that inmost core of the individual [ ] the most inaccessible thing of all ( WP 275). This is Hughes under the wing of Yeats and his general introduction to his poetry, where such an idea of the author in the poem emerges of out of the tragedy of personal life as spoken to a phantasmagoria rather than someone at the breakfast table. 12 This gives primacy to a particular kind of poem; it would be a difficult task, for instance, to trace the phantasmagoric addressee of William Carlos Williams s This is just to say. In Hughesian terms, freeing himself from the person in his poems means being able to dig into the depths of the poetic Self more thoroughly. The fear is stitching the shadow back to the feet of the poet: Ted Hughes appears afraid to impose the author on his texts because then the author will have to acknowledge and live with whatever is to be found there. One would not want to meet Crow at the breakfast table. For Barthes, such an approach is not only misguided, but is a complete misunderstanding of language. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, he writes, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing ( Image Music Text 147). Barthes s argument is that a text is much more plural than the meaning of a single authorial personality could contain. In spite of his personal concerns, Hughes s criticism revels in associating text with the Author. You can understand why he felt literary criticism to be crippling, given the mass of pages he devotes to aligning Shakespeare s works with Shakespeare. His deep fascination is with the text as the myth of the Author. Barthes argues that:

7 HUGHES AND THE BURNING OF LITERARY CRITICISM 127 We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single theological meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. ( Image Music Text 146) In Hughes s literary criticism a text is exactly the message of the Author- God. Or rather, the message is the Author-God, since the text is seen to be an update from the being of the writer. In Hughes s readings, the writer s presence in the text is less of an implied author, as suggested in the criticism of Wayne C. Booth, than the truest part of the writer (hence Barthes capitalised Author is useful in conveying the sense of authority that figure has over the text). Take his essay on Coleridge, for instance: a poet s myths always are [ ] a projected symbolic self-portrait of the poet s own deepest psychological make-up ( WP 375). His discussion of Plath s poetry is consistently in terms of psychodrama. His version of Eliot s poetry is that of its Author s spiritual crisis. Once the Author is removed, writes Barthes, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile ( Image Music Text 147). Hughes is a serial code-breaker; he devotes all of his algebraic power to the mythic equation in attempting to crack the enigma of Shakespeare. He may view it as a spiritual husbandry, but Barthes associates it with New Criticism, which in turn is associated with the Leavisite dismantling against which Hughes chafed at university. Barthes conclusion as to the radical power of disposing of the Author is not, however, totally beyond the limits of Hughes s thought: In precisely this way literature [ ], by refusing to assign a secret, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text) liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity, an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases reason, science, law. ( Image Music Text 147) Hughes, conversely, thinks of literature as a spiritual practice at variance with God and his hypostases in a way that contrasts with Barthes. The ultimate meaning truth as Hughes likes to say dictates his judgement on poetry: To respect words more than the truths which are perpetually trying to find and correct words is the death of poetry. The reverse, of course, is also the death of poetry but not before it has produced poetry. ( Laura Riding CP 238)

8 128 D. O CONNOR Hughes has respect, if not support, for Riding s decision to abandon poetry on account of its potential occlusion of truth. There is even something Barthesian about the elusive truth he posits here, like a current beneath the surface of language, constantly manipulating its flow and yet completely ungraspable. The imposition of the Author is an imposition of truth, though Hughes and Barthes may not be as far apart on this matter as they first appear. The myth of the Author in Hughes s criticism is rooted into their historical moment (and this can be deep time human history as well as a particular era) and is in this sense greater than the individual author. Combine this with his evangelical attitude towards literary criticism (and a dash of Jung) and the result is pronouncements on the pyscho-biological [ ] type of Shakespeare; but if Hughes s critical energy overflows into curious, sometimes incomprehensible, pronouncements, then it is only because there is so much of it ( SGCB 86). Like the tyrannical thinkers he dismisses, Hughes is more concerned with provocative stances and leaps of critical imagination than the steady accretion of evidence; the myth of the Author is one such leap. The two come closest where Hughes makes the case for writer as shaman, as Barthes contends that where narrative responsibility is assumed by a mediator, relator, or shaman, his performance of the text may possibly be admired, but never his genius ( Image Music Text 142). Take his Shakespeare, for instance, whose shamanic initiation dream is posited as Venus and Adonis and thus found himself As a prophetic shaman of the Puritan revolution, in opposition to his role as a shaman of Old Catholicism ( SGCB 91). Much has been written on Hughes and shamanism. For Ann Skea, Hughes is a shaman able to escort the soul of his reader on this journey, and does so by using the poetic energy he creates to arouse the interest, emotions and imagination of his reader. 13 Ekbert Faas, meanwhile, defines shamanistic poetry as springing with unimpeded spontaneity from the deepest core of the mind, belonging to a tradition stretching from Hughes s contemporaries back through Whitman, Keats and Blake to the fourth-century Chinese aesthetician Lu Chi ( The Unaccommodated Universe 39). Roberts argues that Hughes would have interpreted [the burnt fox] dream as a shamanic experience where he is chosen to be a shaman by his animal-spirit emissary ( A Literary Life 20). Hughes s shaman is a mediator for a culture, his mytho-poet the voice of the tribe; but if Ted Hughes is to be the voice of the tribe, his name on the cover of his collections of poetry refuses to forget his genius. His understanding of shamanism is that the shaman plunges back into the lost

9 HUGHES AND THE BURNING OF LITERARY CRITICISM 129 animal/spiritual consciousness and returns with all kinds of things that the alienated exiled ego consciousness of his group needs ( LTH 581). Diminishing the ego in the construction of a text is a way of diminishing the author (the writer that sits down to the breakfast table), but not necessarily the Author (their mythical being). Hughes s definition of poetry excludes almost anything coming from under the ego s control ; there is, though, a caveat: I do feel there has to be some kind of ego in control to give that point of view, and its focus. The distinction I m making is between the author s regular workaday ego the one that writes his critical essays and the attendant masks, the crowd of spirits that can each assume a kind of ego, and pronounce itself I, to tell a tale very different from anything in ken of the authorial official ego. ( LTH 628) In other words, the difference between a young scholar at his desk and a talking dream-fox. The poetic ego the poetic Self is a composite of external voices. This designation is almost an exact parallel of Barthes s model of writing as that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, only on a spiritual rather than textual plane ( Image Music Text 142). Hughes s crowd of spirits are a cauldron of language into which the bold poet descends, but it does not dissolve the Author altogether. Contrasting Eliot and Yeats, Hughes ponders what the American would have made of the Irishman s crowd of spirits, that clear articulation in the air, concluding that he would have attributed it to a source located in his own subconscious mind ( WP 269). Hughes does not acknowledge the context of the Yeats quotation, which draws him closer to Hughes s version of Eliot than serves his purpose: although not now as once / A clear articulation in the air / But inwardly once again we see that he is not a clinical scholar but a literary evangelist. 14 He argues that psychology has shifted the poetic Self from the metaphysical phantasmagoria of which Yeats speaks to the measureless if not infinite question mark of the unconscious self ( WP 274). Hughes s poetic Self is a muddy roil of dissolution into otherness and a rarefied definition of selfhood: the poetic Self may even contain [ ] the true self, the self at the source, that inmost core the individual [ ] the most inaccessible thing of all, but he adds that poetry, as far as it is communion with that other personality,

10 130 D. O CONNOR is consequently healing (275). The inmost core is othered. As such, Hughes s poetic Self both removes and imposes the Author. Hughes s poetic Self sees the death of the author, since the author dissolves his or her personality into a much greater plane, and an imposition of the Author, since it is by digging away through language that they discover their true self on that plane. His criticism on Shakespeare, for instance, finds the Complete Works as a manifestation not only of Shakespeare s poetic self, but the myth of England and English history, both before and after his lifetime. Although Hughes s algebraic solution to Shakespeare has a veneer of rationalism, his methodology is otherwise fundamentally opposed to God and his hypostases, as Barthes puts it; it is, for Hughes, directed to accept the Goddess and her hypostases sensibility, myth and divine law. Shakespeare as Author is an interesting case: like Michelangelo s slave sculptures, he is only half-emerged from the unshaped mass of Early Modern history, an indistinct authorial God partially entered into Barthes s referents for the modern Author: English empiricism, French rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation ( Image Music Text 142 3). This allows Hughes more freedom than in some of his other essays to position Shakespeare as a literary Shaman. Shakespeare s personal mythic drama is modern England s creation story, our sacred book, closer to us than the Bible ( SGCB 85). It is as if some sensibility in him is attuned to a temporal wavelength that stretches far back and beyond his existence; it is the story of how England lost her soul. 15 His language is somehow nearer to the vital life of English because of his virtuoso development of the poetic instincts of English dialect ( The Great Theme, WP 104). Hughes sees this as spur-of-themoment verbal improvisation out of whatever verbal scrap happens to be lying around, a kind of primitive, unconscious but highly accurate punning ( WP 104 5). His Shakespeare is a conduit for all of the dexterity of the English language and a medium for the English soul. The Poetic Self likewise historicises the mythic Author. For Hughes, Eliot brought the full implications of World War I into consciousness ( WP 269). He argues that if it had been glimpsed, it had never before been real. Eliot found it, explored it, revealed it, gave it a name and a human voice ( WP 270). If one were to ask Hughes what exactly that elusive poem The Waste Land is about, here is his answer: the new terror of a desacralized landscape personified in T. S. Eliot. This terror only finds a language because it is embodied in the poet, as if the inescapable truths of it were inborn ( WP 270). Historical contingency plays a

11 HUGHES AND THE BURNING OF LITERARY CRITICISM 131 part in the construction of the text, but the text is only equal to the historical moment if the being of the poet matches it. The Waste Land is a remarkably Barthesian text, constructed of a blend and clash of a variety of different writings, and yet Hughes s Eliot is undoubtedly the Author. Just as Barthes The Death of the Author is an appropriate challenge to Hughes s author-centric criticism, Hughes asks a question that offers a useful challenge to Barthes: what was it about him that so fitted him for the part? Barthes s insistence on the multiplicity of the text seems to forget that the underlying unifier of this blend and clash of words is precisely the writer, whether it is half-consciously as author or in full control as Author. So whilst it is not advisable to posit the author/author as the answer to a text (indeed, Hughes baulks at the thought of his poems being too readily applied to him), the very existence of the text asks Hughes s question: what was it about him or her that found them putting words together in such a way? Mythology, perhaps, is the answer to this question and likewise a smoothing over of this shamanic weld between Hughes and Barthes. In Hughes s critical hands, the personal mythology is the communal mythology. When the shared group understanding of all members is complete, he writes in Myths, Metres, Rhythms, then a mere touching of the tokens is enough for their complete communication ( WP 310). David Jones, a poet of whom Hughes was fond, laments the loss of such tokens with the deprivation of religious knowledge and sympathy in his introduction to his poem, Anathemata : If the poet writes wood what are the chances that the Wood of the Cross will be evoked? Should the answer be None, then it would seem that an impoverishment of some sort would have to be admitted. 16 When the mythological language is complete the resulting message is we, a mighty people, are all one: I am a mighty people ( WP 310). But, like Jones, Hughes recognises the incompletion of the unifying mythological language for the contemporary poet. This is likely part of the reason Hughes devotes much of his time to criticism but only of poets he admires unfalteringly. He finds in Popa, Shakespeare, Coleridge and others, something vital for the community in the personal mythology of such poets, and yet feels likewise that this has been misread or misunderstood. Hence the reason his critical prose so often adopts a corrective position: Few of us ever get beyond the popular seven or eight plays, and when

12 132 D. O CONNOR we feel like more Shakespeare we re-read these ( The Great Theme, WP 103); The majority of readers read all verse, no matter what its tradition, as if it were of this kind ( Myths, Metres, Rhythms WP 321); or his combative review of Men Who March Away in National Ghost. The whole effort of his late criticism is an arm of his wider project of reconnection with the Goddess. As Corcoran writes: The effort of some of Hughes s prose has itself a quasi-shamanic function: its diagnostic attention is engaged as thoroughly as it is because it attempts to draw the poison of civilization and consciousness; and any potential potentially curative capacity it might have involves its author in the risk of being, himself, poisoned. ( CCTH 129) The dream foxes are at stake. Myths, Metres, Rhythms traces the manifestations of the Goddess through various figures in English poetry in the old or unorthodox metrical forms of English poetry ( WP 369). More prominently, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being uses the myth of the Bard to trace the crisis of the Goddess in English history as the nation shifted its religious attitudes. In the absence of an immediate mythological lingua franca, Hughes s critical method is often to identify the tokens of writers mythologies. For instance, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being goes to great lengths to identify the signifiers of Shakespeare s mythology the boar, for instance. As he says of Plath s Sheep in Fog : We understand it far better, because we have learned the peculiar meanings of its hieroglyphs. These drafts are not an incidental adjunct to the poem, they are a complimentary revelation, and a log-book of its real meanings. ( WP 206) In Coleridge he finds as the title of his essay suggests the snake and the oak tree. Tracing the evolution of these signifiers through networks of poems and plays, Hughes elaborates the mythology of the poet. The Snake in the Oak connects Kubla Khan, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel. In doing so he disregards the idea of the autonomous text in favour of an idea of poetry as a nexus, constructed with charged echoes from other texts and the author s life as it is determined in language. So whilst The Snake in the Oak insists upon Coleridge s mythology as the meaning of the poems, it also determines that Coleridge s true

13 HUGHES AND THE BURNING OF LITERARY CRITICISM 133 self, his poetic Self is determined semiologically. His character, lovestruck and seemingly tormented by Dorothy Wordsworth, lacked according to Hughes, strength Hughes locates a symbol for this in the oak tree. But such is the way that Hughes discusses the poet, the oak tree does not symbolise a facet of Coleridge s character but is that character itself: Hence his constant attempts to attach himself to some substitute for the missing Oak Tree ( WP 381). Coleridge, here, is defined by an absent symbol, which is to say that he exists, for Hughes, on a semiological level. Not surprising, perhaps, given that his only encounters with Coleridge are in text. He is not unlike the spirits Hughes summons in his Ouija sessions in fact, a line Hughes quotes from Coleridge s notebooks is startlingly similar to a speech from his spirit visitor: Were I Achilles, I would have cut my leg off to get rid of my vulnerable heel. ( The Snake in the Oak, WP 385) I d hack my arm off like a rotten branch Had it betrayed me as my memory. ( Ouija, CP 1078) A coincidence, perhaps, particularly since his friend Daniel Huws claims responsibility for the summoned spirit s poetry. But the underlying feature of both is that they are ghostly, textual creatures. It is in this ghostly textuality, by way of Derrida, that we can truly see the importance of attaching an author to a text for Hughes. As he says in his review of Dylan Thomas s letters: Everything we associate with a poem is its shadowy tenant and part of its meaning, no matter how New Critical Purist we try to be ( WP 81). ARCHIVE FEVER For Jacques Derrida, the archive whether that is in the sense of, say, the Hughes archive at Emory or in the sense of his body of writing simultaneously offers a trace of the author and dissolves them. Hughes s insistence on the importance of the archive in either sense as a measure of a particular poem begins to blur the presence of the Author. By positing the author not as a singular being creating the singular text, but as a spectral presence, identifiable in some glints of the poem but not all, and only truly identifiable across a range of poems or other texts as he argues for Coleridge and Shakespeare then Hughes s theory of poetry likewise diminishes the importance of Authorial presence. His literary criticism

14 134 D. O CONNOR resembles his more occult practices: it is tracing the constellations from the mass of stars, drawing horoscopes from the variables of poems. There is less of an emphasis on the author as authority over the text; rather, the poet and text are in joint authorship, locating each other. Plath s archive is seen as a particularly special case. Her poetry is a record of the birth circumstances of her poetic gift, her journals a rich account on this obscure process. 17 Barthes designates that when the principle of the Author is applied to a text, the Author necessarily comes (temporally speaking) before the text that the Author is its past ( Image Music Text 145). To relinquish the Author is to place the only point of origin in language itself. This is tantamount to Hughes s approach to the emerging poem in The Evolution of Sheep in Fog : the poem exists somewhere between Plath and an abyss of language before she finds it. Halfway through the essay the connection between poet and poem begins to sever: she tries to save the situation and give herself a hopeful outcome, rather than obey the inner laws of the poem ( WP 205). This is not quite to separate the two completely rather, it is as if the poem knows something about the poet and the two are locked in a struggle about this message. Hughes grants the poem a separate agency, almost like a Platonic form it exists perfect and true, if only the poet can uncover the words it lives in. Yet, ineluctably, it is also of the poet. His idea of poetry here is not far removed from Coleridge s maxim of the best words in the best order, but what dictates best here is those that determine the poet. This is to say that at some level Hughes sees language as bringing into being the true self of the poet, as we have seen with his symbolic reading of Coleridge. Were it not for the caveat that he sees the ultimate product of this, the poem, as reducible to a final meaning that then reveals the poet, this would be a very poststructuralist position to adopt. However intellectually appealing Barthes s argument may be, there is a compelling emotional case for maintaining ties between Author and text. The theorist s separation of text and Author would no doubt be troubling for Hughes, since Plath s poems are, for him, inescapably her either as an expression of her true being, or as evidence of her struggling towards it. We can reverse this assumption and argue that, on the contrary, Plath is therefore created by language the Author as an illusion caused by language: the author as a spectral presence, a ghost of language. This is particularly the case when we embed Plath s work in her archive (which happens, to some extent, even at the level of the published text, let alone the physical documents that bear her hand). For Derrida:

15 HUGHES AND THE BURNING OF LITERARY CRITICISM 135 The structure of the archive is spectral. It is spectral a priori : neither present nor absent in the flesh, neither visible nor invisible, a trace always referring to another whose eyes can never be met. 18 It is with this attitude that Hughes offers his critical reflection on Plath, both in his essays and in Birthday Letters (for if his prose is poetry by another name, then the obverse can sometimes be said of his poetry). Hughes deploys Plath s archive to combat her death and yet in doing so reinforces it. All her poems are in a sense by-products he writes in Sylvia Plath and Her Journals : Her real creation was that inner gestation and eventual birth of a new selfconquering self, to which her journal bears witness, and which proved itself so overwhelmingly in the Ariel poems of ( WP 189) The ouroboros of it is inscribed in Hughes s phrase: her self-conquering self. If this self-conquering self proves itself in the poems, then they are this self, since where else does it exist but in the text? But like the pockets of air in proven dough what happens to them when the body is gone? Where the poems and journals are a record of this rebirth, they are both the trace of this self and a mark of its erasure: on the one hand they testify to it having happened and on the other by the very nature of being archived by her late husband stand as evidence that Plath is absent. Derrida suggests how the archive counterpoints the Freudian theory of the death drive. The death drive relates to the archive because it is an aggression and a destruction drive : it not only incites forgetfulness and amnesia, the annihilation of memory [ ] but also commands the radical effacement, in truth the eradication, of that which can never be reduced to [ ] the archive ( Archive Fever 14). This is because the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of [ ] memory ( Archive Fever 14). Derrida argues that since the death drive is by its nature repetitive (Freud first traces it in the repeated actions of children and trauma victims), the repetitive element of the archive introduces the death drive into it. In short, the archive emerges out of, and is threatened by, the death drive. We are, says Derrida, en mal d archive : in need of archives. This archive fever is: to burn with a passion. It is never to rest, interminably, searching for the archive right where it slips away. It is to run after the archive, even if there s

16 136 D. O CONNOR too much of it, right where something in it anarchives itself. It is to have a compulsive, repetitive, and nostalgic desire for the archive, an irrepressible desire to return to the origin, a homesickness, a nostalgia for the return to the most archaic place of absolute commencement. No desire, no passion, no drive, no compulsion, indeed no repetition compulsion, no mal-de can arise for a person who is not already, in one way or another, en mal d archive. ( Archive Fever 57) Archive fever affects Hughes s poetry particularly Birthday Letters. It is in The Shot, where Hughes catches A wisp of your hair, your ring, your watch, your nightgown as tokens of Plath; likewise in St Botolph s and Trophies where the earrings and headscarf take on a greater significance in her absence. Most potently it is there in Visit, where Hughes recalls reading Plath s journal and finds her in it: Your actual words, as they floated / Out through your throat and tongue and onto your page ( CP 1048). Inscribed in it, as Derrida suggests, is a future: A pulse of fever [ ] Our future waiting to happen ( CP 1049). It is what he calls the future as ghost ( Archive Fever 53). This ghost not only haunts Hughes s memorialisation in Birthday Letters, but also his treatment of Plath s archive in his critical writing. Hughes s essay on Plath s Sheep in Fog binds text and author. He reads the poem as an ambiguous moment in her rebirth, belonging to two different phases in her work (one positive, one negative), brought on by a crisis in her marital life that touched on the nerve of her father s death. He maintains the convention of referring to the speaker, the I, but only in the process of elucidating how Plath s poetry emerges from her personal experiences ( WP 199). For someone so seemingly opposed to confessionalism right up until the end of his life (here, as elsewhere, he is infamously disguised as her husband ), Hughes has little problem in reading one of Plath s least identifiably autobiographical poems as exactly that: Everything in her life and marriage had been with her in that chariot ( WP 204). The separation of text and author implicit in his reference to the speaker is undertaken not to introduce the poet s voice as persona, but to protect the author of the essay. Plath s personal life joins her mythical life in its chariot, a symbol appropriated from the myth of Phaeton and his ill-fated piloting of the chariot of the sun. But where he locates these nodes of identity is also precisely where they dissipate. Hughes suggests that the whole mythical development that can be traced in the drafts of Sheep in Fog hinges on the word melt, introduced in a draft composed

17 HUGHES AND THE BURNING OF LITERARY CRITICISM 137 on December 2, This word dissolves the two myths that he locates in the poem Phaeton and Icarus: It dissolves one who flew too recklessly into the sun with another who did the same, as will be clear in a minute, or rather in two months ( WP 205). The event two months later occurs a little under two months later, when Plath revises the poem on 28 January 1963 but Hughes s phrase invites misreading, drawing our attention to her death a little over two months later on 11 February It is rebirth and death. In Ariel, he writes, she had fused her heart whole being into the sun s red eye triumphantly, but in Sheep in Fog that word melt has metamorphosed the sun s chariot and horses into the wax wings of Icarus who also flew [ ] too near to the sun ( WP 206). Melt through the trace of the archive reveals something integral of Plath in Hughes s reading; and in Hughes s reading it also diverts our attention to her absence. These drafts are not an incidental adjunct to the poem, they are a complementary revelation, and a log-book of its real meanings its real meaning in this essay is the Author, Plath. Hughes notes that he resisted the temptation to reproduce Plath s drafts in full in her Collected Poems, though acknowledges they are arguably an important part of her complete works: Some of the handwritten pages are aswarm with startling, beautiful phrases and lines, crowding all over the place, many of them in no way less remarkable than the ones she eventually picked out her final poem. ( WP 176) It is only, it seems, the magnitude of the resulting volume that held him back. Such is the curious nexus of their writing that Hughes s description of the absent drafts serves as a reminder of the bee poems he absented from Ariel : aswarm and crowding all over the place like The Swarm, or as in Wintering : Now they ball in a mass, / Black / Mind against all that white ( SPCP 218). What is a matter of script in the archive, or metaphor in the poetry he initially withheld, is transformed once again in Birthday Letters : Your page a dark swarm ( The Bee God, CP 1141). In a detailed letter to his German translators he elaborates on the line, referring to her handwritten pages as a seething mass and depth and compound ball of living ideas [my italics], which carried within it her self ( Poet and Critic 324). The Queen Bee of self he finds in her manuscripts he migrates to his. Yet Plath s, like all archives, is an archive of absences, a record of gaps: Searching over the years, we have failed to unearth any others, Hughes

18 138 D. O CONNOR writes in the introduction to her Collected Poems, implying that the suspicion of missing poems was at least enough to mount a search ( Collecting Sylvia Plath, WP 174). This was a suspicion partly aroused by the theft of many Plath manuscripts, but also what he refers to as the traffic terminal confusion of the years following her death, where The second novel [ ] along with quite a few other things got lost ( Publishing Sylvia Plath, WP 168). Most infamously, of course, is the journal she wrote towards the end of her life, which Hughes may or may not have destroyed. Prior to this Plath channels Hughes s burnt fox in her own conflagration, a poem that grew out of her burning some of his manuscripts: The dogs are tearing a fox. This is what it is like / A red burst and a cry ( Burning the Letters, SPCP 205). If the incident that inspired the poem was an act of wilful erasure, of a kind of forgetting, then the textual life of the poem is that of recall, reshaping the memory of the Hughesian fox. There is a vanishing point in Hughes s model of poetry where the author dissolves into the text. For him, the poet at work and their shy fox of a poetic Self meet like two asymmetrical creatures on the surface of the strange mirror that is the poem, both defined by the printed page between them. The snowprints of the fox are as temporary as the author bound by their clock, As if the first concern of poetry were to cover its tracks, but between them the poem survives as a spectral presence of both. 19 The Burnt Fox s bloody handprint is not only a warning of destruction, it is the beginning of the archive. NOTES 1. Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes and Cambridge in Ted Hughes : From Cambridge to Collected : 17 32; 28. Hereafter referred to as Ted Hughes and Cambridge. 2. F. R. Leavis, Judgement and Analysis: Notes in the Analysis of Poetry [1945] in A Selection from Scrutiny (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968): ; Drue Heinz, Ted Hughes: The art of poetry LXXI, The Paris Review vol. 37, issue 4[ Spring 1995]: 55 94, accessed at: [10/3/14]. 4. T. S. Eliot, Tradition and the Individual Talent in The Sacred Wood : Essays on poetry and criticism [1920] (7th edn., London: Methuen, 1960): 47 59; 58.

19 HUGHES AND THE BURNING OF LITERARY CRITICISM F. R. Leavis, Judgement and Analysis: Notes in the Analysis of Poetry : F. R. Leavis, Two Cultures? The Significance of C.P. Snow (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013): Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015): Ted Hughes, Laura Riding in WP : 237 8; Ted Hughes, Introduction [1987] in Complete Poems, by Keith Douglas (London: Faber and Faber, 2000): xx. Hereafter referred to as Keith Douglas 10. Roland Barthes, Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977): Gillian Groszewski, Structuralist and Poststructuralist Readings in NCTH : ; W. B. Yeats, A general introduction for my work in Essays and Introductions (London: Macmillan, 1961): ; Ann Skea, Ted Hughes : The Poetic Quest (Armidale, NSW: University of New England Press, 1994): W. B. Yeats, Responsibilities [1914] in W.B. Yeats : The Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Everyman s Library, 1992): Ted Hughes, The Great Theme: Notes on Shakespeare, introduction to A Choice of Shakespeare s Verse (London: Faber and Faber, 1971), in WP : ; 119. Hereafter referred to as The Great Theme. 16. David Jones, Anathemata, new edn. (London: Faber and Faber, 1972): Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Her Journals from Grand Street, Vol. 1 No. 3 [Spring 1982], in WP : ; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever in Diacritics, Vol. 25, No. 2 [Summer 1995]: 63; Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Her Journals, WP : 178.

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