456 GERMAINE WARKENTIN Censorship and Interpretation GERMAINE WARKENTIN Annabel Patterson. Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and ‘Reading in Early Modern England Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 1984. x, 283. $22.50 The central thesis of Annabel Patterson’s new book is an arresting one: ‘it is:to censorship,’ she writes, ‘that we in part owe our very concept of “literature” as a kind of discourse with rules of its own.’ This thesis is not so much argued as it is stated and restated in the study of a series of episodes in early modem literature where the interests of power and writing were in conflict. Crucial to the conflict is the issue of interpretation: Patterson’s project is ‘to show how the historical condition of an era of censorship united writers and readers in a common interest as to how interpretation in fact worked, how it could be carried out in any given sociopolitical situation, how the interaction between writers and readers could be formulated in ways that were intelligible (in law) and useful (in politics).’ Thus, for example, the Spanish marriage crisis of the 1620s found Massinger, Middleton, Dekker, and Rowley all indirectly discussing the controversy in their dramas in such a way as to attract the interest of the prince himself (or so Patterson contends), and in the case of King Lear a decade earlier even the king had subtly but definitely concerned himself with evolving the conditions of discourse for a public debate on the union ef Scotland and England. To achieve her goal Patterson is required to adopt two positions. The first (regrettably to me, since I share her view of its necessity) is still vulnerable to theoretical attack: the insistence that intentionality in writing can be discussed critically. If followed to its conclusion, this argument requires some sort of agreement as to what constitutes verifiability in literary interpretation, if not Positivistic (which Patterson rejects) then some other sort. Her second position is that to understand the binary structures which become evident in a study of such power relationships, we have to avoid privileging one over the other, political power over the literary sensibility it is apparently repressing, or vice versa. This seems to imply that both discourse and interpretation are the result of a con- tractual agreement between writer and reader, and in fact her study is concerned with the genesis of just such an agreement, in this case between power-holder and writer. A contractual theory of discourse would seem to mean one whose strategies are neither objectively determined nor wholly self-creating. Patterson never puts it quite so directly, but significantly her culminating instance is Rousseau, who is given a fiery defence in the concluding essay, along with the values of ‘liberal humanism’ which he represents. Patterson is clearly attempting to rescue liberal humanism from its enemies by co-opting certain of their strategic terms, chief of which is the concept of ‘indeterminacy’ central to post-structuralism. And her volume in fact has a double subject, for throughout the book a polemic is conducted against the very discourse of modern academic criticism, which she insists has vitiated itself by separating UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1987‘CENSORSHIP AND INTERPRETATION 457 text from context in such a way as to isolate the values of human society from the order of discourse in which they can perhaps be most powerfully articulated, that of literature. In other words, academic discourse, so intensely preoccupied with ‘interpretation,’ has paradoxically broken the contract by means of which interpretations have historically been worked out. Determinacy, she proposes, is not the theoretical consequence of a certain line of argument, but a social reality with a history that can be demonstrated, and specific and identifiable cultural consequences. Furthermore, these consequences cannot be avoided in our own cultural and political lives. She charges the members of the academic profession with ‘complicity in a new form of censorship, imposed from within the academy. By discarding the time-honoured tradition of literature as a privileged medium by which matters of grave public concern could be debated, by allowing the logic of a philosophical enquiry into the indeterminacy of language to erase the social function that indeterminacy once had, we have handed over to others the absolute control of the public discourse of our time. We have made our writing and reading irrelevant, not merely to the awesome policies that threaten our physical survival, but even to the question with which this book directly deals — the role of the intellectual in the national and international consciousness. We have developed the only truly effective system of censorship in the modern world - the one that is self-imposed.’ This grave and courageous plea to the literary academy itself emerges from a specific situation in the history of literary criticism: the Romantic and modernist insistence that the making and discussion of cultural artifacts is value-free, and that ‘values’ are more or less peripheral to creative life. Few modernists, asserting this elegantly detached critical doctrine, are prepared, however, to accept its converse: that what is value-free may be itself fundamentally peripheral. But this is in fact the public condition of literary discourse, and the arts in general, today. The sign-making systems of the arts are operative everywhere - in advertising, in political rhetoric, in the popular story-making of films and television — but (except by Marxists) are effectively excluded from the concern of those who claim responsibility for the authoritative interpretation of those sign systems. Though she does not push her analysis into these areas, Patterson insists that discourse can never be detached from concern, and that we have committed a ‘trahison des clercs’ in believing that it can. Thus her book engages in a double task: to illuminate the evolution of the ‘contract’ over censorship and interpretation in seventeenth-century England, and to challenge those twentieth-century academ- ics who have repressed a major function of literature by insisting on the impossibility of such a contract. Early victims of her argument are the editors of The Division of the Kingdoms (especially Gary Taylor), who are accused of still privileging the figure of the detached artist even as they argue the case for a profoundly contextual genesis of his work; this is shrewd stuff, besides being good fun. Even the Marxists are challenged; at a later stage there is a more cordial, but equally pointed, attack on Fredric Jameson, whose class-centred theory of conflict is briskly shown not to fit the class situation of the period under study. The arguments introduced in a study of Clément Marot’s defence of the liberty458 GERMAINE WARKENTIN of his studies on the occasion of the seizure of his books and papers at Blois by officers of Francis 1. Marot frankly pleads his case for intellectual liberty, not as an inalienable right of man, but on the ground that poets can be given a longer rein than other men. This instance is the first of a series which displays the painful processes (literally so, in the case of William Prynne’s ears) by which French and English writers of the later Renaissance negotiated not only the precise nature of the writer’s privileges but also what constituted ‘fair interpretation.’ The poet's preoccupation was with what kind of discourse might affront the king, but equally the king had to be alert to what he could profitably ‘wynk at,’ as the Mirror for Magistrates puts it. These concerns were not merely prudential, for Patterson argues that, in the period she is focusing on, ‘political censorship was so pervasive that it rose to the forefront, at least among intellectuals and to some extent all literate people, as the central problem of consciousness and communica- tion.’ What evolved, she contends, was a concept of ‘functional ambiguity,’ a code of communication exploiting the indeterminacy inveterate to language which was ‘intelligible to all parties at the time, as being a fully deliberate and conscious arrangement.’ Yetat the same time the authors who built such ambiguity into their work tended to lose control over later rereadings of them with the result that they were co-opted to serve other purposes. The book falls into five parts, each of which is less a chapter than a miniature monograph comprising a set of chapter-like smaller essays; this may reflect its genesis in the conference papers in which Patterson has been publicly testing her views for several years. But it means that the linkages between points are sometimes tenuous; and the exasperating critical formula ‘connects with’ is made to serve all too many purposes. Nevertheless, Patterson's procedure makes it possible to extend her argument rapidly at crucial points to issues in the twentieth-century academy, though it often means she is firing over her shoulder as she charges past her opponents. The key study is of Sidney's Arcadia, not because it provides a model of the age’s solution to the problem of censorship, but for the opposite reason: its illumination of the human and conceptual complexity of the issues as Sidney saw them. His inability to resolve those issues means that the Arcadia involves her straightway in one of the period’s most controverted instances of veiled speech. Her reading refuses the easy way out, that is to argue for one view of Sidney’s purposes over another; the fertility of the example (for the Arcadia appears repeatedly as a touchstone later in the book) comes from the complexity engendered in Sidney’s own self-doubt: he was ‘fully and tragically aware, as the Arcadia evolved, that he ran the danger finally of not being understood, because he had chosen the wrong medium.’ This paradox is pursued through the Civil War and Caroline pre-emption of Sidney’s meaning, even to the history of Sidney scholarship in our own century. An over-extended but ultimately persuasive essay called ‘Prynne’s Ears‘ establishes as a key term ‘the hermeneutics of censorship’ to describe the interpretative principles which evolved in the decade after Sidney’s death to enable readers and writers to resolve the kind of problem from which that poetCENSORSHIP AND INTERPRETATION 459 could not extricate himself. As Patterson generalizes them in part froma 1599 letter of John Chamberlain, they are these: 1 / the time at which a work appears affects its reception; 2/ editorial materials (letters, prefatory poems) supporting the textitself can be important; 3/attempted censorship may actually draw attention to controverted matter; 4/the text may resist the reader by withholding the conditions of proof applicable to what it asserts; 5 / disclaimers of topical intention are not to be trusted; 6 / historical texts can be exploited to ‘cover’ for the author; 7/ the system does not depend on any crude opposition between government and its critics, as a poet might well switch roles; 8 / the writer’s own awareness of his changing status may play a role in his strategy. A test case for her theory, she admits, is Milton’s Areopagitica, in the writing of which Milton did not, she argues, polarize contrary views but offered instead a polysemous ‘myth of dispersal’ imaged in the figure of the virgin Truth, hewn in a thousand pieces and scattered tothe four winds. Unhappily this ‘pluralism’ does not, as she contends, amount to a Miltonic statement about indeterminacy. The very passage on ‘moderat varieties and brotherly dissimilitudes’ she cites in evidence restates a familiar cosmological topos Milton would have found tediously elaborated in Louis Le Roy. The fact is, Milton wanted to run with the deer and hunt with the hounds, an advantage he carefully ensured by insisting that Truth ‘needs no policies, nor strategems, nor licensing to make her victorious.’ It might have been more interesting to see her views tested on the earlier example of the Utopia, where we encounter a preliminary consideration of the problem of speaking to the king combined with a possible example of just such speech, both set down by a writer contemplating public responsibilities the scope of which was finally determined by the sharp edge of the axe. Of the three remaining sections, ‘Lyric and Society’ reviews and expands, in terms of Jonson and Cowley, issues which Patterson first began to investigate in Marvell and the Civic Crown (1978). In the case of Jonson, she argues that Underwood gives us a poetic neither plainly public nor haughtily private, but rather ‘one for which there was no obvious precedent in classical lyric, one that allowed history to tell its own story in the silent connections between poems; a voice that whispered of careerism, of the limits of idealism, of necessity, of the impossibility of independence.’ With Cowley these ‘invisible connexions’ have become the “very means by which the poet demonstrates his eloquence and scholarship at the same time as he shows ‘what could safely be written and published in 1656.’ Section 4, ‘The Royal Romance,’ considers the political function of seemingly quite unpolitical materials: the reading of Heliodoran popular romances like the Arcadia and especially Barclay’s Argenis by their seventeenth-century audiences as allegorical (and thus prudentially veiled) guides to contemporary European history. In section 5, ‘The Self in Familiar Form,’ Patterson looks at the most unlikely context of all for censorship, the familiar letter, only to detect even there a set of generic assumptions, and a calculated strategy of self-revelation, which substantiates her view that the controlled ambiguity of even the most unexpected genres has a real social utility. A book so fruitfully diffuse, so wide-ranging and so460 GERMAINE WARKENTIN contentious, will show its strengths even in its weaknesses. Patterson’s reading of Jonson is masterly, as the passage quoted suggests, but there is, in fact, much classical precedent for his stance — if not, strictly speaking, in lyric, then in the closely allied genre of elegy, where recusatio, the refusal to write epic, creates a conflict Jonson understood to his fingertips. ‘The Royal Romance’ is a fresh view of unexpected and mostly still unread materials, but it demands more connection with her account of Sidney’s dilemma than Patterson has paused to give it. ‘The Self in Familiar Form’ has perhaps the most exciting central notion of all, butis the worst victim of the book’s anxious energy, being undecided in direction and none too exhaustively documented; I wish she had patiently given us a fuller sense of the rich European context of the epistolary genres in which her subjects were so well read, though we no longer are. ‘Functional ambiguity,’ however, is a brilliant concept, because unlike most of the other ways in which the hapless term ‘ambiguity’ has been employed, it can be controlled critically. The immense interest of Patterson’s thesis is in the way it attacks the problem of interpretation by isolating a specific documentable instance in which interpretation arose as a feature of discourse. Her greatest difficulty is in providing a method to match it; the thesis is powerful, but instead of being powerfully argued it is illuminated by a series of flashing insights developed with different levels of confidence; one tends to feel there are several books here, all being written at one and the same time. This may be a consequence of her reluctance to engage in a ‘positivistic’ study. Yet repeatedly it is documents and letters - the old historical tools - which are used to drive home her case. It is not hard to imagine why the example of Sidney should prove suggestive for the whole work, because the problem of discourse the author faces mirrors precisely the one she contends bedevilled him: how to embody a message for which the contract, the conditions of determinacy as it were, have not yet been worked out. As both the procedure and the anxieties of this book make clear, the problem of demonstration in modem critical discourse requires an engagement with issues we have hardly yet begun to discuss. Censorship and Interpretation shows how urgently Patterson has driven herself to consider them, however; it clearly forms a sister project with her earlier study of Marvell, and returning to that earlier book one discovers how inevitably issues treated in terms appropriate to the standard academic study of a single poet are here ruthlessly reworked to yield new and more difficult questions. Necessarily, therefore, this volume is the converse of the other; what in the earlier book was cogent, elegantly focused, and attentive to the genres of academic writing is here packed with yet-to-be-assimilated matter, often angry, and naked with concern. The results yield more problems that the book can resolve, but these are risks well worth taking as we try to negotiate the constraints of the spoken and unspoken in academic and public discourse today.Copyright of University of Toronto Quarterly is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.