Geoffrey Hill and Pastiche: "An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England" and The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy

One of the charges most often laid against Geoffrey Hill, by those who dislike his work and suspect his politics, is that of using pastiche. Even Hill's admirers have often applied the term in a tone of unease. So Hugh Haughton, in a largely positive essay hedged with reservations, suggests that "[t]here is an element of historical pastiche in all Hill's poetry, even at its most original; of tortured pastiche." He interprets this pastiche, semi-approvingly, as a technique for promoting a form of intellectual self-awareness: "Historical pastiche of this palpable kind draws attention to the way in which the historical past is necessarily fictive, in whatever degree, and a source of, as well as subject to, rhetorical contrivance and the consolations of poetry." ¹ Tom Paulin, in a notorious attack on Hill, sought to give Haughton's account a wholly negative gloss, seeing Hill's poetry in terms of "kitsch feudalism," and in the debate which followed in the pages of the London Review of Books the question of pastiche received some attention, from John Lucas and Eric Griffiths in particular. ² I will examine their differences in more detail shortly, but, in broad terms, Lucas saw pastiche as deadening and defensive, a way of being trapped in an archaic language, while Griffiths saw it as a way of recognizing linguistic diversity. E. M. Knottenbelt, in a lengthy and admiring critical study of Hill's work, expresses reservations about his use of pastiche in The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy, which she sees as too much concerned with logical and rhetorical puzzles about truth, and insufficiently concerned with actually getting at the truth of Péguy's life: "it is a poetry of 'ideas', since even when it is 'simple, sensuous and passionate' it still feels like a pastiche, depending too much on our willingness to read into the language rather than through it to what lies beyond." ³

One conclusion that can be drawn from the critics' comments cited above is that the term "pastiche," despite Fredric Jameson's appropriation of it for a specifically postmodernist effect, remains available for many critics as an under-analyzed term of disapproval, implying lack of originality and authenticity (precisely those qualities, of course, which Jameson sees as impossible under postmodernism). The positive values attached to pastiche by Haughton and Griffiths attribute to the technique a critical edge precluded by Jameson's idea of pastiche as "blank parody,"

a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody's ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue that you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. ⁴

In general, nothing would seem more alien to Hill's poetic than a "neutral practice" in the deployment of language: his poetry is always ethically and philosophically loaded, pervaded by satire and occasional laughter, always full of ulterior motives even if the precise nature of those motives is often a subject of dispute amongst his readers and critics. On the other hand, Hill's poetry might accord with Jameson's description at least to the extent that it is profoundly skeptical about the existence of "some healthy linguistic normality." For Hill language is always fallen, compromised and complex, though set alongside his resulting sense of poetry as "menace" is always his longing for, and occasional assertion of, poetry as "atonement": "the authority of the right, true poem." ⁵ Jameson's attempt at a one-to-one deterministic mapping of genres onto cultural movements or epochs (modernist parody gives way to postmodernist pastiche) fails, as do all such attempts, simply because neither culture nor art are monoliths...