Foot on Shelley

This is my last comment, for a while at least, on Paul Foot. It deals with his venture in literary criticism, Red Shelley - a subject that I touched on only briefly in my general post assessing Foot's work. I give it a separate post, for the book needs to be considered in context in order to appreciate how misconceived it is.

For a number of commentators on Foot's writings, Red Shelley represents a bravely heterodox work. Here, again, is Nick Cohen:

Red Shelley, published in 1980, remains one of the finest interventions in literary criticism of our time. Shelley, another revolutionary who came from the establishment, was a comrade. Foot rescued his reputation from the critics and syllabus setters who sought to portray him as a love poet and showed him to be what he was, a poet of rebellion.

This is certainly what Foot liked to believe. Appropriating Shelley as a precursor for the socialist tradition, he claimed that the poet had been subjected to 'a hundred castrated editions' that threw out the politics. And he saw his task as:

... restor[ing] to Shelley the political ideas without which his poetry loses its magic, its music and its meaning. I want to pass on Shelley's political enthusiasms to today's socialists, radicals and feminists.

The trouble is that Foot's picture of Shelley criticism isn't even a caricature so much as a fallacy. The political issues that concerned Shelley have lost their salience, but critics do acknowledge the centrality of his political ideas. Foot is not even a pioneer in claiming Shelley for his own form of politics. There is a cottage industry in claiming Shelley for diverse radical political traditions: I have on my shelves one particularly ambitious attempt called Shelley and Non-Violence, written by a radical pacifist of the Students for a Democratic Society a generation ago. ("In the nonviolent philosophies of Shelley and Gandhi, Truth is God and Love is God." This may be meaningless mush, but the author, one Art Young, at least gives a more faithful account than Foot of Shelley's ideas on political violence.)

But Shelley's political ideas debilitate many of the larger-scale works. Foot is so busy hurling imprecations at those he considers reactionaries, that it doesn't occur to him that editors of Shelley may be engaged in something other than censorship of radical politics. He declaims that 'the castration of Shelley at British places of learning has not been confined to rowing oafs' - but fails to draw the inference that there may in that case be some problem with his own understanding of the critics.

The case against Shelley has never been better put than by his contemporary, William Hazlitt. Foot cites Hazlitt's radical judgements on politics approvingly, but apparently (for they are nowhere mentioned in the book) he is unfamiliar with Hazlitt's observations on Shelley. In his review of Shelley's volume of Posthumous Poems, in the Edinburgh journal in 1824, Hazlitt noted:

[Shelley] has single thoughts of great depth and force, single images of rare beauty, detached passages of extreme tenderness; and in his smaller pieces, where he has attempted little, he has done most.... but give him a larger subject, and time to reflect, and he was sure to get entangled in a system.... The success of his writings is therefore in general in inverse ratio to the extent of his undertakings; inasmuch as his desire to teach, his ambition to excel, as soon as it was brought into play, encroached upon and outstripped his powers of execution.... he was crushed beneath the weight of thought which he aspired to bear, and was withered in the lightning-glare of a ruthless philosophy.

Ever since Hazlitt, critics have maintained that Shelley's poetry is undermined by its lack of metaphors adequate to expounding a complex philosophical scheme. So far from 'castrating' Shelley by ignoring or denouncing his political ideas, this criticism treats the political ideas as central. That indeed is the problem with the large-scale poetry (though not the smaller-scale works, as Hazlitt notes). Characteristically, Foot can't believe there is a genuine issue of literary criticism here. He says of the critic F.R. Leavis:

His objection to Shelley was not, as he pretended, purely literary. It was political. And because his criticism refuses, in the name of literary objectivity, to engage Shelley in the real argument which Leavis had with him, it is criticism by subterfuge.

This is a nice illustration of what makes Red Shelley such a bad book. Failing to grasp the literary objections to Shelley's more ambitious work, Foot imagines a political sub-text where none exists, even accusing those he disagrees with of 'subterfuge' in conveying their opinions. The irony is that Foot himself 'refuses to engage Shelley' in textual exegesis. In my main post on Foot's work I alluded to what I believe to be his serious misreading of Shelley's most celebrated achievement, Prometheus Unbound. To Foot, the poem has a central and, to him, congenial purpose:

Reform, the poem concludes, is impossible without revolution.

He bases this judgement on an allegorical interpretation of the role of Jupiter's vanquisher, Demogorgon, whom Foot identifies as the masses:

Who was Demogorgon? One answer, a very obvious one which is often overlooked, is that he was who his name said he was. Shelley was always making up names from Greek words. Demos in Greek means the people; gorgon, the monster. Demorgon is the 'people-monster'.

In case it isn't obvious enough, Foot also cites (following, but not crediting, E.P.Thompson) a radical paper started in 1818 called Gorgon. The trouble is that this idea is nothing like as obvious as Foot makes out. Prometheus is generally held to be a symbol of the poet or intellectual; in his prose works written at the same time, Shelley depicts the masses as having exactly the opposite effect on the reforming zeal of the poets, 'the unacknowledged legislators of mankind'. As he wrote to the novelist Thomas Love Peacock in August 1819, political reform should be driven by those in the higher orders, lest it lead to anarchy and thence despotism. Foot has no real evidence for his thesis (which is not to say that it must therefore be wrong), but that isn't the main objection to the way he treats the poem: rather, by fitting the poem to his own political scheme, he attributes to it a dramatic quality that it doesn't possess, and overlooks the significance of Prometheus's curse and recantation.

My objection to Red Shelley is not primarily to its interpretations, few of which are as forced as this one. Rather it is the idle accusation of censorship levelled at those who take Shelley a lot more seriously as a poet than Foot himself does. Poetry is a medium, not an instrument, of ideas. If your interest in poetry is the cogency of the ideas, then you might as well be reading prose.

Comments

[B.Fink]

'Demogorgon' is not a Shelley neologism. See, for example

Spenser Faerie Queen.IV.22: "O thou (Night) most auncient Grandmother of all... Which wast begot in Daemogorgon's hall."

Milton P.L.Paradise Lost.II.965, 966: "And by them stood Orcus and Ades, and the dreaded name of Demogorgon."

Surely Foot knew this?

[e.a]

You seem to spend a great deal of time reading - and writing long, detailed reviews of - 'tracts' you regard as 'worthless'. Perhaps you need to rethink your criteria for selecting reading material, so as to avoid having to trawl through such unenjoyable stuff and then feeling duty bound to inform the reading public in rigorous detail how and why they should avoid repeating your pleasureless experience.

[David Duff]

At least Oliver finishes those 'worthless tracts', unlike the rest of us who would toss them in the bin after two chapters, or throw them at the dog, or even volunteer to paint the mother-in-law's kitchen rather than grind our way through such turgid crap. Thus, he is able to educate us all with admirable brevity at second-hand, and I for one am deeply grateful. In fact, I feel his dedication to duty should be brought to the attention of Her Majesty!

(WAKE UP, e.a, your Communist Manifesto just fell in the bath!)

[James M]

The "gorgon" reference carries more weight than you give credit: "The Gorgon" newspaper was established by John Wade, a London woolsorter, with financial assistance from Jeremy Bentham. It was specifically set up to push a strongly "rationalist", utilitarian line in a working class movement still heavily imbibed with irrationalist practices: secret rites, cowls and mummeries of all sorts. It soon attracted contributors like Francis Place and other Westminster reformers. (See Iorwerth Prothero, "Artisans and Politics", 1979: p.173-174) The Gorgon, then, was engaged in presenting sophisticated liberal philosophy as devised by "great men" to a resolutely "unsophisticated" audience; it mirrored the tensions evident in Shelley's own positions on reform and democracy.

It also true enough, as Paul claimed, that gorgons, Medusas, "Philanthropic Hercules" and others occur frequently in radical politics at the time, as part of what seems to have been a well-understood cultural matrix: see Cole and Filson, "British Working Class Movements: select documents 1789-1875" for numerous examples.

[Joe Geoghegan]

e.a., do you think Oliver is in the business of reviewing summer novels for the casual reader? He's not subjecting himself to sloppy thinking for the "pleasure" of it. His self-appointed task (if I may presume to have sussed it out) is to disassemble and expose the shoddy and potentially harmful political philosophy of some of our more prized intellectuals, as well as that of high-profile fringe characters, in hopes that the democratic argument will not be waylaid by proposals that a meticulous analysis and faithful memory can show to be wanting. He's not warning his readers away from unrewarding written works; rather, he's engaging those works seriously and critically, and pointing out the shortcomings of the ideas contained therein. I trust you now see the difference.

[Phil Jackson]

"Shelley depicts the masses as having exactly the opposite effect on the reforming zeal of the poets, 'the unacknowledged legislators of mankind'. As he wrote to the novelist Thomas Love Peacock in August 1819, political reform should be driven by those in the higher orders…"

The Telegraph gave Foot a pretty good send off, portraying him as a likable eccentric who remained socially most at home with his original peers. And WF Deedes said: ‘He might have been a socialist revolutionary, but I never met a man with whom I so disagreed politically and found it easier to get on with’.

The upper class socialist is an interesting type. I’ve recently read ‘The Lost Literature of Socialism’ by George Watson, who makes a case that socialism’s origin is to be found in a conservative reaction to capitalism. I am not quite convinced (being myself a Thatcherite conservative - with anarchist roots), but if we view the gentry traditions of the Right in isolation, then it’s feasible to see some strong parallels with socialism. Both types:

- believe in the authority principle that governs through hierarchy; one through traditional class structures, the other via the mechanisms of state planning and central control;

- abhor what they perceive to be the chaos of the market;

- hold in contempt the middle class ideals of self-help and individualism, preferring a kind of dependent collectivism as the ideal of true community (so long, of course, as it is under their guiding spirit);

- profess to be champions of the weak against the strong and thus make the moral case for their own ascendancy.

Despite the last above, neither type sees fit to transfer power, responsibility or political leverage into the hands of the underdog, though, to be fair, we must assume that at least some Marxists truly believe that their state will one day wither away.

The relative ease with which some upper class people take to socialism is well illustrated by the pre WW1 Bolsheviks: although the gentry made up only 1.7 % of the Russian Empire’s population, no less than 22% of the Bolsheviks had been born into this elevated class (Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution). As Watson comments: ‘socialism naturally attracted the patrician mind’.

So, politically speaking, Foot may not have been so out of kilter with his origins after all, but: ‘the essential condition’, said Al Ghazali, ‘in the holder of a traditional faith is that he should not know he is a traditionalist’.

[e.a.]

James -

Point taken. I think you're right that Shelley may well be cleverly investing an old symbol with more contemporary significance. I do think, though, that Demogorgon is an interestingly 'overdetermined' signifier. A couple of articles you might find useful:

http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/4/suvin4art.htm

http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj75/keach.htm

[e.a.]

Joe,

re: 'I trust you now see the difference.' I saw it before auld fella, I was just being a tad facetious. And thank you for explicating Mr Kamm's 'self-appointed task' [tres bon mot] in prose that the meister himself would have been proud of - almost uncannily so.

[Joe Geoghegan]

e.a., I'm certain your comparison is as irritating to Oliver as it is pleasing to me; I can practically hear him muttering about my uninspired vocabulary choices. Believe me, I don't write that way on Yahoo message boards. Anyway, sorry for missing the joke. Thanks for responding to my error graciously.

[Ben Ramm]

'The Liberal' - a periodical devoted to poetry, politics and culture.
'The Liberal' was originally formed by Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt in 1822 to challenge the consensus of conservative publications with a selection of original poetry, prose fiction and reviews. In the short time the periodical was alive (four issues), contributors included Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, William Hazlitt, Horace Smith and Thomas Jefferson Hogg, as well as Byron and Hunt themselves.

The re-founded 'Liberal' will continue to publish poetry and short prose fiction, but will also act as an organ for the political, social and cultural debates within modern liberalism.

For info. about how to contribute, subscribe or to find out more, please visit www.theliberal.co.uk.

[Albion4Ever]

Only this blog could be spammed by a little magazine called "The Liberal". Where's the usual US penis enlargers, pirated Microsoft XP, incest pics, promises by Third World crooks to share $50m, etc?

[e.a.]

'Characteristically, Foot can't believe there is a genuine issue of literary criticism here. He says of the critic F.R. Leavis:

'His objection to Shelley was not, as he pretended, purely literary. It was political. And because his criticism refuses, in the name of literary objectivity, to engage Shelley in the real argument which Leavis had with him, it is criticism by subterfuge.'

This is a nice illustration of what makes Red Shelley such a bad book'

It is no such thing. Anyone who believes that F.R. Leavis's criticism was apolitical is just being plain ignorant. See Francis Mulhern's book 'The Moment of Scrutiny' among numerous others. If ever there was a critic with an agenda, quite explicitely so as it happens, it was F.R. Leavis.