Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (review)

HOBook Reviews Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts. The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, no. 34. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1995. xiii + 239 pp. $38. by David Norbrook The presiding spirit of these polemical essays — up to a point, at any rate — is William Empson. Like Empson, Richard Strier is often provoked into comment by criticism that seems to him to be obfuscatory and inhumane. Countering Tillyardianism and New Historicism together, he finds in central Renaissance texts the voice of political criticism and resistance. One of his starting-points is the celebrated exchange between Empson and Rosemond Tuve over Herbert's "The Sacrifice." Empson, he argues, is a far better model for the historical critic than Tuve, for he approached texts with "as clean a palate" as possible, while Tuve flattened out their particularities in the name of a rigid schema. Strier's readings are consistently refreshing and to the point. He offers a marvelously full and subtle analysis of Donne's third satire to bring out the poem's openness to the period's most radical intellectual and political developments. He demolishes conventional interpretations of King Lear that focus on the self-evident sinfulness of dividing the realm, and backs up his radical reading of Shakespeare by a wholly new interpretation of Nahum Tate's version of the play as sharing Shakespeare's sympathetic treatment of rebellion. Some brisk methodological pieces take issue with Fish, Greenblatt, and other contemporary critics with some telling counter-arguments, though a critique of the state of Shakespeare criticism ten years ago has by now a rather weary look. It is central to Strier's case to resist monolithic readings of a period's culture, and he is concerned not to locate political resistance automatically in all texts. He finds that both the later Donne and the Herbert of "The Church-porch" are marked by the narrow pragmatism of François de Sales's "devout humanism." This latter argument results in a certain tension, for he also argues strongly against Michael Schoenfeldt's New Historicist analysis of Herbert's subservience to structures of his power, and he wants to salvage some form of transcendence for the later poetry. The debate is an important one and even if Strier has not satisfactorily resolved the issues, it is good to have them laid out so sharply. Book Reviews111 True, in a way, to its own methodology, Strier's book is less successful in its larger methodological claims than in its specific readings. The book's title brings together political resistance and the resistance of texts to schematic critical abstractions. These are, however, very different kinds of resistance. From the Romantic period through to postmodernism, critics of the Enlightenment have invoked the particularity of language and the concrete against what are held to be its repressive totalizations. This mode of thought has tended to encourage precisely the kind of obfuscatory elevation of language above social practice that Strier so effectively contests. It is particularly odd that Strier should invoke Empson in his campaign for particularity, for Empson was to the death a champion of the Enlightenment. Indeed Strier has to distinguish between two Empsons, the reader of Herbert and the author of Milton's God, which he condemns as "deeply tendentious"; its "sense of justice and hatred of cruelty" get in the way of Strier's ideal of critical detachment. Yet Empson did not place a reading of "The Sacrifice" at a climactic position in Seven Types ofAmbiguity because it had happened pleasingly on his palate. He engaged with it as part of his lifelong, enraged, and fascinated critique of Christian orthodoxy. In a letter to Tuve he backed up his arguments about "The Sacrifice" by his interpretation of Milton, to which he was so committed that "I must say so till I die." He scolded Tuve for being too evasive about her position, or for a bland overprofessionalized indifference, rather than because she had allowed partisanship to override professional detachment. Milton's God is indeed a flawed book but it is one instance of Elmpson's general commitment to a criticism that involved critique in the Enlightenment spirit, rather than a...