There is no such thing as a ‘text’, and if there were it would degrade literature to be treated as one.

Here’s the Barbara Everett quote about “texts” which I could not find when I wrote my recent piece about literary criticism. From her review of Carpenter’s Auden biography in the LRB. My thanks to Sean Keilen for sending it to me. (Sean has a new book about Shakespeare.)

There is an academic myth (vaguely Victorian in feeling but probably, like most Victorian principles, dating back a half-century earlier) that scholars study facts whereas critics make it all up out of their own heads. It afflicts English studies as it does most others, and had a recent airing in John Carey’s inaugural lecture at Oxford which proposed that scholars handle texts whereas critics only vandalise them by reading them. This double and triple illusion usefully affords occasion for simple restatements: that, for instance, to read at all is in itself a creative and interpretative act, an evidence of mind which it dignifies human beings to perform; that scholars and critics alike read inventively, to some extent knowing what they are looking for and to some extent finding it; that there is no such thing as a ‘text’, and if there were it would degrade literature to be treated as one – and there was probably no such thing as a fact, either, until some human being invented it. The only difference is that some people are much better readers than others, whether of books or of reality, better in the sense of ‘truer’, more accurate and more revealing: and may well be helped to be so by being rid of the illusion that as ‘scholars’ they have some easy, advantaged road to the truth.

My favourite Everett essay is: ‘The Fatness of Falstaff.’ And here’s another great quote from Everett: “to be chewed over in critical prose is a fate no poem deserves.” That is from the opening of “Larkin’s Edens.”

Philip Larkin has gone down in print as saying that his poems are too simple to profit from criticism. It is true that to be chewed over in critical prose is a fate that no poem deserves. But to believe without reservations in the simplicity of Larkin’s work is another matter — except in so far as any artistry is a simplification of life, an abnormally clear noticing of human conditions that come to the rest of us fogged with the general imprecisions of the usual. To this degree, all good writing is magnificently simple. But it is unsafe for anyone other than its writer to say so. For the simple gets confused with quite different things — with the literal; with the crude; with the artless and sociological. Larkin is quite often read as a simple observer of contemporary English society, a realistic reporter whose detachment from what he sees (for even the most literal reader can see that there is some difference between ‘Here’ and a British Railways timetable) is explained as the writer’s disaffiliation of mood: for as poet, Larkin is almost universally described as ‘depressed’, his writing melancholy, his scenes a dreary summary of an England to which principle attaches him but which he cannot bring himself much to like. It seems therefore worth while to set down a different impression. Larkin’s great art is to appear to achieve the literal while in fact doing something altogether other; his three volumes of major verse are the odd reticent triumph of a self-undercutting artist whose skills make him a ‘secret poet’ as some men are secret agents or secret drinkers. And the results in Larkin’s case are so far from the sociological, and so other than the dreary, that the poet might be described as creating the most potent contemporary images of Eden.