Hopkins

As Valentine Cunningham emphasizes the need for both "Fact and Tact," in a January 2001 article of that title (EIC 51, no. 1: 119-138), he generally supports my contentions, in this column last year, that literary criticism needs continuous logical control, even in our "postmodernized" millennium. In eight pages that summarize much previous study concerning Hopkins' sonnet "Felix Randal," Cunningham shows how etymological and historical research has often provided valid "fact[ual]" contributions to our understanding of this particular Hopkins lyric. He simultaneously censures illogical critics, who often sloppily concoct "weird mistakings and strange constructions" of poems that they examine (p. 133). Such critical misadventurers, opines Cunningham, produce "failures with fact" that are also "clear failures of tact," "trampl[ing] all over the poem" (p. 134).

Cunningham is not ultimately a reactionary curmudgeon, for he does acknowledge value in diverse critical methodologies. Still, he warns that "[o]ur undismayed current access to the facts about Hopkins' fraught sexuality," like "our inevitably widening knowledge about how texts work and what they do," "makes critical sensitivity, the principledness of tactful handling of texts, all the more necessary than ever" (pp. 136-137).

Multiple recent "postmodern" discussions of Hopkins, featured in several consecutive issues of VP, might please or displease Cunningham. I myself find that the articles vary considerably in the amount of fact and tact they display. They do demonstrate the potential value in postmodernist criticism--but show some disconcertingly cavalier analysis as well.

The first publication, Jenny Holt's "The Negotiation of Power Relations in Gerard Manley Hopkins' 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' and Sonnets about Working-Class Men" (VP 38 [2000]: 299-318), seems to begin sensibly enough, with probing of the ambiguous lexicon in "Felix Randal." Noting that Hopkins wrote about how he as a priest "tendered" a "ransom" to the dying Felix, Holt claims that these words partly reveal Hopkins as a corporate manipulator: someone who cared less for suffering people than for the Roman Catholic Church's institutional agendas (p. 301). Perhaps as a limited counterargument to excessive hagiographies of Hopkins, Holt may have a point. Yet her version of Hopkins seems overly anxious to erase all memories of a genial "tender[ness]" long associated with him.

Granted, an all-gentle Hopkins must, at least to some degree, be a narrow stereotype. Yet Holt generally views Hopkins according to a different stereotype, one deeming all religion manipulative and silly. Holt appears (pp. 301, 307-308) to judge Hopkins daft for having felt certain familiar religious paradoxes to be experientially conceivable--for instance, the mixing of human free will in an inexplicable ideational surd with divine predestination, or the meshing of perceived divine grace with conceived divine law. She insists, instead, that it is a folly for Hopkins ever to have sensed what he expressed in the "Deutschland" ode: the notion that God's mysterious interventions in earthly life can feel both like a "proffer[ing]" and like a "pressure" (p. 308). Likewise, she apparently believes, Hopkins should not have met Felix Randal's temperamental outbursts, during the blacksmith's battle against multiple fatal illnesses, with both priestly "[r]eprieve" and priestly "reproof" (p. 301).

For the sake of constantly "trace"-ing new readings that deconstruct traditional ones, therefore, Holt too often does distort fact and tact. I do not deny potential partial insight in such of her observations as the declaration that Hopkins may "fetishize" working men characters in a "gaze" which precludes much true "interact[ion]" with them (p. 303). But it does seem farfetched to assert, as Holt does (p. 304), that, when Hopkins eliminates part of the content of 1 Peter 1.24 from his allusion to that Bible verse in "The Wreck of the Deutschland," he does so in order deliberately to protest against the idea of God's ultimate "dominance" over words. Holt seems regularly to conjure forth thin circumstantial evidence for viewing Hopkins' entire life as a prooftext for "unreliab[le] . . . textuality" (p. 313). She somberly, for example...