The English Academic and the Supernatural - Glen Cavaliero at the Cusp of Culture
Cavaliero's book is an occasionally academic and dry but very useful review of what he chooses to define variously as the supernatural, the paranormal and the preternatural in English fiction. Like the donnish figure that he is, he implicitly privileges the supernatural as the numinous in literature over the attempts (as he seems to see it) of those who want to give you a good jolt or who see magic as just undiscovered science - but it has to be said that his own use of language is hardly inspiring when he moves beyond his judgements on particular authors to a consideration of theory.
This is what they might call a solid performance. There is serious value to be gained from it - if only the introduction
of new names to the non-specialist in literary studies. He has made me
want to read Charles Williams. He brings out of the closet a number of
women authors like Phyllis Paul who have been long and probably (on his
evidence) unfairly neglected. One of his more charming qualities is his
evident search in the highways and byways of literature for the
neglected author who deals with his preoccupations and who deserves
recognition. He appears to be the most generous of men and even his
negative assessments are expressed with understanding.
When I can
compare his account of authors that I have read, he is very sound. He is
excellent on the Gothic classics like Melmoth the Wanderer, on Kipling
and on Peter Ackroyd's 'Hawksmoor', for example - but also on many
others. He is persuasive in getting us to reconsider the worth of such
authors as the Scots fantasist George Macdonald. There are, in the bulk
of the book, wise judgements on many writers even if he often gets
carried away in believing that his audience is as well read as he is - a
little more background as he launched into his opinions might have been
useful on occasions.
So, why the doubts? It is partly his prose
style when he is not enthused by an author. The accumulation of precise
adjectives is not an aid to understanding. There are many sentences with
three of four latin-derived adjectives that could easily have been lost
for the sake of flow or redrafted to communicate more effectively to
those who us who do not have a seat at High Table. But the
main problem for me was that the thesis of a supernatural theme that is
embedded in the English fictional tradition, and the attempt to
privilege this over the shock of the preternatural or the hermetic,
while plausible enough, seemed forced.
Something constantly nagged at
the back of the head - is this a truth or a convenient fiction to tell a
tale? Was Cavaliero unintentionally mimicking fictional modes to tell
us about fiction by creating a narrative that was useful rather than
wholly true? Was he selecting for effect to tell that tale? It is
also never made precisely clear what the thesis is - it is more
suggested than stated when the book is taken in the round. One's
suspicion is that Cavaliero was trying to position the unique qualities
of the English novel and short story in relation to debates on meaning
in continental philosophy which he understood well enough but was not
entirely comfortable with. There is a sense of a man trying to be
generous to the oik invited to his table by history.
The book
reads like a reaching out to continental obscurities to see if English
common sense can find a middle way. The net result is something which is
undoubtedly from a man of great perspicacity and learning, and of fine
judgement, but the parts (the excellent analyses of particular writers
and the sub-thematic chapters) are vastly superior to the over-written
theory and overview that encloses those parts. This, nevertheless, remains on the bookshelf as a reference text and as a collection of
judgements that has inspired me to look afresh at some writers, to see
some things in a different light and to seek out (if the texts are
available) apparently minor or neglected writers with something to say.
In this he has done a great service.
The overall
impression I get is that he has discovered the numinous underlying the
art of fiction in a way that begs the question of what in his academic
culture stops him from seeing it self-evidenced not only in his
specialty but in all attempts to communicate an incommunicable reality
through all art. Is this book just a foot-note to the philosophy of art and
literature or is it trying to tell us something about English culture,
whatever that may be, at a time of anxiety for liberal England? It
is true that sometimes the English novel does not attempt to describe
the world or entertain but tries to trigger an awareness of another
imaginative reality, one that acts as metaphor for what we know exists
as 'felt' but which can only be described elliptically or by metaphor or
allegory.
There is no superiority of meaning in this latter
mode because it always fails. It only ever appears to succeed because it
mistakes the evocation of a feeling about knowing with any actual knowing of that unknowable
'other reality' that is the subject of many different evocations - art,
the sublime in nature, fiction, dream, ritual and so on. Graham
Greene (who is handled well if briefly by Cavaliero) would refer to some
books as 'entertainments' but perhaps all fiction is entertainment in this sense. Perhaps the illusion that we see more than is there is actually an 'entertainment' and not much more. Cavaliero's
judgements as literary critic are thus commonsensical and useful within the
English tradition that he serves but he is not a philosopher. Like the
uncanny, the supernatural requires either only a description of something in the
context of the feelings of men and women in society (i.e. what is its
purpose or its contingent meaning or its utility to the reader) or it requires deep
critical analysis at a much more profound existential level.
His general description here of the novel as a way station to the profound
falls between stools and is unsatisfying as a result - there is
some slightly creepy and conservative moral imperative hidden in such an
approach that stops permission for an immediacy of feeling at one end of the scale or the more
disturbing business of serious left brain analysis at the other. It is as if the
writer wants us to admire the spiritual - but at a reserved distance -
and not get too close to questioning things that might pull the rug out
from under the whole liberal arts project and either return it to the status of
various forms of passing the time or as an adjunct of continental ways of seeing things. This book falls into the trap of
English moderation but also implies an unconscious self-serving quality
in the liberal elite by which it privileges its own values and defends them from both too much feeling and too much thought.
It
is, in fact, rare that a good book confuses this critic. This one did
and not because I am stupid. It confused because it speaks, if not to
itself, then to a very small community of scholars and intellectuals who
may be worryingly out of touch with anything but their own culture.
The crisis of liberal
culture has deepened since this book was published. The culture of our high universities may
still (just) be that of a 'precious tradition' of the 'liberal arts' - albeit a
tradition that could do with some questioning, given that the public
purse (mostly) pays for it. The 'tuition fees' debate was a
final power struggle between those who wanted to retain that high culture
at the expense of the demotic tide and those who were happy to see it
begin to melt down in favour of new forms of investigation and learning that sadly turned out merely to be harbingers of 'ideology', a merger of irrational feeling and half-baked thought.
The
underlying attitude of the high liberal tradition is wonderfully
encapsulated in the quotation from Henry Tilney, Jane Austen's character
in 'Northanger Abbey' that Cavaliero reproduces:- "What have you
been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live.
Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your
understanding, your own sense of the probable, your observations of what
is passing round you - Does our education prepare us for such
atrocities?" Replace the English with the fashionable preference
for the global and remove the Christian as a modern embarrassment and
this could be the mentality of a troubled present ... and of most ways of
seeing on which our flailing liberal democracy is based. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities when our own liberal culture proves to be the perpetrator of atrocity?
To his
credit, Cavaliero, in noting expression of the default position of
the pragmatic and rational English elite, the materialistic view of a
nation of merchants and pirates, tries to escape from it by giving some
credence to the spiritual aspirations of many of its writers. There is a
clue perhaps to his own frustrations hidden away in a note (3) to the
Epilogue, a 'hiding away' that symbolises the embarrassment caused to
the Englishman by matters dionysiac or transcendental: "A good
deal of contemporary literary criticism reflects the working conditions
of university teachers, whose professional lives revolve around seminars
and academic conferences in an atmosphere of economic competition that
requires the publication of books and articles for purposes of tenure
and promotion. Such an atmosphere is scarcely conducive to the
consideration of matters imaginative and transcendental."
Er, yes
... precisely ... dons need (in their own eyes) to be relieved of
economic constraint and accountability. Perhaps higher tuition fees for Oxbridge might have been thought to crack
that problem for a while - or at least buy some time until retirement - but contemporary liberal arts education has been degenerating into a
position between that where a certain sort of economy could concentrate
idle intellectual pleasures on the (relative) few (the old order) and one where the
economy might permit (it does not) everyone to pursue idle intellectual pleasures because
they had the leisure and networks to do so. Our half-baked current system now sees only the factory farming of flaccidity under the jurisdiction of exhausted academic production line workers trying to maintain 'standards' that are no longer relevant, often compromising with 'ideology' in order to be 'relevant'.
Enough of the class or rather institutional politics! In fact, I found that I quite liked Cavaliero - he is understanding of
the gay sensibility and of the woman's point of view (far more balanced that the insistent attempt of the rising generation of academics who shoe horn feminist, anti-colonialist, eco and LGBTQ+ sensibilities into a complete redrafting of past realities). There is a
yearning here for the opportunity to be transcendent. There is his
understanding that the love of the preternatural is an expression of
genuine social fears. I appreciated his passing on of the fruits of
his reading to an oik like me. In these senses, he is the best of the
liberal tradition ...
But perhaps this is my problem with the
book - it is just too English and reasonable, a nice little corrective
designed perhaps to show that we English have a soul alongside our
sceptical materialism and our obsessive concern with social form, both
imbued by our grammar and public schools ... perhaps a
not-very-threatening, rather dispirited and miserable soul but a soul
nevertheless. But it struck me that this was not enough any more. That England is dead. Murdered by neo-liberalism and hubris. Things are no longer as they were. Choices perhaps have to be made - either for 'becoming' what one reads in enjoyment or thinking about what one reads as tool or weapon in a brutal cultural struggle for advantage. The former is the mode of the aesthete withdrawn from the battle and watching Rome burn from his hilltop estate and the second is engagement in the war as traditionalist legionary or 'woke' barbarian.