Criticising the Critic

Reading a Geoffrey Hill Essay can be an exhilarating experience, best enjoyed – to fall back on a critical response that Hill finds fecklessly unreliable – by suspending the need for immediate gratification and waiting in the dark of difficulty, out of which arrives the same 'sudden blaze of the sentence' (p. 488) he attributes to Coleridge's Aids to Reflection, a blaze often emitting from the polemical fire in his belly. But the darkness and the light are not always easily distinguishable from one another, and such mines of dazzling insight as are to be discovered here can often leave the lesser critic's brain somewhat sunburned. This reviewer, for the present purposes, found himself feverishly transcribing whole sentences and passages verbatim; no gloss or keyword (though there are plenty of those listed in the index, including, amusingly, 'reduce/reduction') would possibly do to capture the finely wrought textures, the infinitely subtle ebbs and flows, of Hill's prose. But in revisiting my notes I couldn't help feeling a little like Borges's Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote, the blaze of Hill's sentences majestically self-sufficient, but weirdly stultifying, precluding amplification, resisting intervention, for all his purported courting of 'the antiphonal voice of the heckler' (p. 94). Aptly so, perhaps, for Hill, as he says of Emerson, 'is a thinker along the thin line that divides fecundity from desolation' (p. 504).

'The function of criticism is to serve something that in the first instance cannot be broadly realized. Its duty is to point to the minute particulars, particulars in which the individual judgement of the critic is itself implicated' (p. 561). There may be good grounds for not always doing so, but let us take Hill at his word, hoisting a few of the phraseological petards with which this volume is strewn. From the earlyish essay on Swift: 'it is difficult not to be in sympathy with those critics who cite the "agony and indignation" of Rochester's major satires as a precedent for Swift's own work in the genre and hard not to suppose that the Dean had read them' (p. 75). Note the characteristically guarded, self-defensive, qualifications, which strive against the genuine temptation to succumb to the easy voice of consensus and opinion, the sentence itself mediating something of the agony and indignation it meditates. And later in the same paragraph, following a couple of poetry passages meant to illustrate the supposed affiliation, another caveat, this one a touch less self-defensive, exposing its own critical manoeuvring even as it pre-empts exposure: 'That the advantage of this comparison appears to be with Rochester is not wholly due to the exigencies of arbitrary selection.' 'Not wholly due', but, we must conclude, partly. Those hedge-betting 'nots' – which occasionally stoop to the level of the absurd, as in the contention, if it is so bold as that, that 'It is not altogether astonishing to find in Swift's poetic satire a certain amount of irritation at the spurious proscriptions of false delicacy and a clear distinction between squeamishness and decorum' (p. 77), where the 'not altogether' raises the prospect of an oxymoronic 'moderately astonishing' which collapses the Swiftian distinction – evince a kind of negative theology, serving something that cannot be broadly realised by playing the voice of critical authority against ways of dispossession. And it is this constant recourse to the not-said, the sense that Hill's style comprises, as he puts it, a '"choosing-not-to-say" [. . .] a "hinterland" of style, a "back-country" of what might, for better or worse, have been said' (pp. 29–30), that hinders his, and our, search for solid ground in many of these essays, as do the impediments of a particularism that lies athwart argumentation, snagging the thetic impulse, tying itself in knots. 'Perplexity' (which has thirty-one entries in the index), not a word one would normally associate with good criticism, is in Hill's both a virtue and a vice, 'for better or worse...