Censorship and Interpretation

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,I 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 50 much argued as it is stated and restated in the study of a series of episodes in early modern 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 eTa 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 fonnulated in ways that were intelligible (in law) and useful (in politics). ' Thus, for example, the Spanish marriage crisis of the 16205 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 of 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 contractual agreement between writer and reader, and in fact her study is concerned with the genesis of justsuch an agreement, in this case between power-holderand 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 dearly 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 modem academic criticism, which she insists has vitiated itself by separating UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER), SPRING 1987 CENSORSHIP AND INTERPRETATION 457 text from context in such a way as to isolate the values of human sodety 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 aut. 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. Furthennore, these consequences cannot be avoided in our own cultural and political lives. She charges the members of the academic profession with I 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...