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Reading Class through Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton . Christopher Warley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. viii+211.

2016; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 114; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/686974

1545-6951

Chris Fitter,

Religious Education and Schools

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewReading Class through Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. Christopher Warley. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Pp. viii+211.Chris FitterChris FitterRutgers University at Camden Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreChristopher Warley regrets that some academics harbor settled views about class and literature: for example, “that class continues to be treated as if it were, or could be, an identity” (24). To ensure fresh thinking in his own book, he decided to focus texts “more or less,” he says, “chosen at random” (24). In the next paragraph, however, he concedes, “I teach them nearly every year” (25). This is a strange definition of randomness; and it is difficult, further, to see how a person can claim freedom from definite opinions on texts that they have taught ad infinitum. These elementary self-contradictions are symptomatic. Neither consistency nor common sense are to be looked for in this book; and given Warley’s delighted embrace of postmodernism, this may well be a matter of pride for him.Warley explains, in a major understatement, that his book will not “be filled with examples or facts in an effort to spell out what is historical about class” (24), and lucid historical statements are indeed nowhere admitted. What does fill the book are unexplained pronouncements. “Why do literary criticism at all?” he demands, clarifying that it is wrong to perceive in “such attention an effort to grasp the first place as the phenomenonological hum of Being.” No: “The reason to make literature per se the object of study is that it helps you to imagine a future” (23). “Your exquisite reason, dear sir?” one is inclined to ask (following Toby Belch in Twelfth Night 2.3.127),1 but anticipating rationale is apparently vulgar.Busily fashionable, Warley dismisses Marxism, disdaining “the easy security that class analysis offered so many years of Marxist criticism, as if once you determined class position you knew, unequivocally, the truth of the matter, the base of all superstructures, the ground of all meaning” (55–56). Not only is the jeer breathtakingly ignorant that the category of class has generated fundamental and continuing controversy within Marxism, as with E. P. Thompson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Geoffrey de Sainte Croix, Andy Wood, and others. The sneer unfolds, further, historical gobbledygook: “the base of all superstructures, the ground of all meaning”? He earlier calls class “the condition of conditions, the actual, the ontology that secures meaning, the production of production” (15). Yet for Marxism, class relations are not the foundational reality but are logically subordinate aspects of more inclusive frameworks of the materially real, such as modes of production, and the existence of an innate human species-nature: not to mention long-term economic processes that, unlike the visible conditions of class, go on behind the backs of its actors. An undergraduate in a history course, or in philosophy, would see a red pen run through Warley’s disastrously sloppy set of conflations. Only in the sphere of postmodern literary criticism can such sentences, stylishly ironic but composed of historiographic hyperbole and conceptual blur, be regarded as accomplished.Poststructuralism famously ejected the Enlightenment principle of la clarté from valid cultural meditation. In epistemic recalcitrance to common sense proceedings there billows instead, one might say, la brume: a prose wherein meaning is dispersed into haze, proffering either the fine gleaming droplet of the art sentence or misty panoramas passed off as historical review. Warley’s book dutifully operates in a regime of vapor and gesture, hankering after preciosity, its chapters spurning sequenced argument for a climate of misted pronouncements. It is one of the paradoxes of such self-regarding discourse that strenuously sophisticated language may be given both to foolish exaggeration by blanket statement and to disclosing as the endpoint of its strains a shameless banality. Warley exhibits both tendencies.Profiling Horatio in Hamlet, for example, Warley argues his indeterminate class position: Marcellus thinks him a courtly insider, yet Hamlet suggests him plebeian (“Why should the poor be flattered?” [Hamlet 3.2.52]). Rather than reconcile this pseudocontradiction (he can hardly be a pauper if he has been studying at Wittenberg), Warley links this to well-nigh incomprehensible sentences from Pierre Bourdieu (favored as the chapter epigraph on page 47) that with cultivated historiographic nebulousness suggest, when decoded, that capitalism’s trajectory generated a conception of the arts as disinterested and a public sphere unconcerned for a speaker’s class location. This development, asserts Warley, is the reason Horatio is rendered indeterminate: for Horatio’s interpretation of the play’s action is “ours” (a remarkably déclassé formulation), and his understanding is uncompromised by a class location. Thus the play represents “a movement from a social system authorized by known positions to a social system authorized by unknowable, disinterested positions—a new Denmark or new England in which ‘the singularity of a place of speech’ is never secured” (71). So Horatio embodies the Enlightenment public sphere? Surely the process intimated by Bourdieu was nowhere near completion in 1600? And was drama in Hamlet’s time seen as “disinterested,” given that it was censored? But the mists have settled.As to banality, ruminating on John Donne’s “The Flea,” Warley declares, “When you read the poem, when you read its haunting, vibrating, sucking form, you are reading history, and in particular, the history of the divisible divisions of labor: that is, you are reading class” (86). And in what way, exactly, is “class” present in this poem? As “honor”: “the contradictions inherent in ‘The Flea”s representation of honor are seventeenth-century conceptions about honor” (90). That’s it? But is this aristocratic honor? Christian? Aristotelian? Is the female’s idea of honor “seventeenth century” or mere reiteration of the centuries-old double standard on sexual activity? Warley doesn’t care. It is as if, once you have made it through the labyrinth of his prose, with its ellipses and Sibylline announcements, you find a small card placed on the ground at the exit, bearing the smirking visage of the Joker.Yet the book’s blurb assures readers that it contains “accessible interpretations” of literary texts and “a detailed historical argument about what class means in the seventeenth century.” Since nothing of the kind is to be found here, I wondered uneasily whether this was some latest kind of Sokal ruse, such that Cambridge University Press will be triumphantly unmasked as solemnly publishing falderol, bearing no relation to its stated concerns. Alas, I concluded eventually that Warley probably endorses such ascertainable positions as can be decoded, and that Cambridge has permitted flagrant dishonesty on the book jacket. A more accurate title for this doting patchwork of opaque quotations disdaining historical construal of class would be “Miscellaneous Reflections on Critical Theory and Some Renaissance Literary Texts.”Notes1. All quotations of Shakespeare’s plays are from The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Suzanne Gossett, Jean E. Howard, Katharine Eisamann Maus, and Gordon McMullan, 3rd ed. (New York: Norton, 2016). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 114, Number 2November 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/686974HistoryPublished online September 12, 2016 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.