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SYDNEY SHEA
A Quick Conversation with
Christopher Ricks
Professor Christopher Ricks is the William M. and Sara B. Warren Professor of
the Humanities, and serves as co-director of the Editorial Institute.
On criticism: What makes a good literary critic?
What makes people good at absolutely anything at all. It’s a good
idea to be intelligent, to be compassionate, to be dispassionate, to be fairminded and strong-minded; there are almost always things that are difficult
to fit together. It’s easy to be strong-minded and easy to be fair-minded,
but difficult to be both, so I don’t think a literary critic needs any other
qualities than those that one finds desirable in anybody. It’s a good idea to
be responsible, to know the difference between evidence and some fantasy
of your own. The critic is somebody for whom it’s not so much a matter
of knowledge, as a matter of noticing. If very good at it, critics notice the
relationships between the things they notice. The scholar, on the other hand,
is somebody who knows some things that you probably don’t know—so
there’s a question of tact here too, because maybe you do know them.
On poetry: How do you think poetry speaks to us in ways prose does not?
I don’t. I think that Eliot is right in saying that whatever else they may
or may not be, poetry and prose are different systems of punctuation. There
is no superiority of poetry over prose any more than there is in the rhythm
of dancing as against the rhythm of walking. There are never any respects in
which poetry differs from prose other than the conventions of a particular
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writer or a particular period. Agreed, there are important differences
between poetry and prose just as there are important differences between
black-and-white photography and color photography. But if someone says
one is clearly superior to the other, it isn’t.
In poetry, is less more?
But I think that of prose, too. And there is wordy poetry. Wordsworth
is, for me, the greatest English poet, if you think of Shakespeare as the
greatest dramatist. And Wordsworth can be very wordy. What would be
odd to say about Wordsworth’s poetry in general is that what I love is its
being succinct, so compact. Generalizations about the resources of prose
and poetry don’t work. When D. H. Lawrence says, “Thank God, I’m not
free, any more than a rooted tree is free,” his prose needs rhyme just as much
as a poem may. Such prose doesn’t use the regularity of certain poems, but
nor does Walt Whitman’s poetry. Then again, storytelling in poetry isn’t
characterized by compactness, and you’re not sure you would want it to be
compact. In a story, whether prose or poetry, you like the leisurely pace, you
like the feeling that anything might turn up now. You’re not insistent that
every word be packed with meaning.
There are things you can do if you’re very brief, and there are things you
can do if you’re not. It wouldn’t have been a good idea for Tolstoy to try to
get War and Peace down to the scale of a haiku.
On Austen: Why is there no sexual intercourse in Pride and Prejudice?
Jane Austen believes something that has a great deal of truth—that
even imaginary people are entitled to privacies. There is a case for people
not having sexual intercourse in public, as society has agreed that it is in
the interest neither of the observed nor the observer. It violates privacies.
Voyeurism, though inescapable, is not necessarily to be encouraged.
Admittedly, all erotic art is accusable of being pornographic. When it’s
really good erotic art, it isn’t pornographic, though it’s a delicate thing to
try and show why that is so.
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Ricks about to recite Larkin at the 2012 Core poetry reading. Photograph by Zachary Bos.
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I’d grant that it’s imperative that these things, which are part of our
everyday lives, should not have a sterilization order on them. But on the
other hand, you may need something of a cordon sanitaire. It doesn’t seem to
be simply a gain that novels must not only show you people falling in love,
they must show you people copulating, too. As to sex in Jane Austen: she
knows that what people say is sexually powerful and terrifically suggestive—
though sometimes it’s only flirtation. The novel depends on decorum. Isn’t
the total abolition now of decorum as a concept very bad? You can’t any
longer make a point unobtrusively. And in any case, you can’t ever show
everything in a novel. If you put something in, you have to leave something
else out.
On technology: Do you think the ‘death of the word’ is upon us?
There are certain things that human beings can only do if they use
words. Of course, screens are not word-free—screens are talking heads. But
one of the reasons for needing music is that it can be wonderfully wordless.
(I love listening to classical music when it’s word-free. I enjoy it and think
about it in some wordless way.) Words in literature are up to different things
from words in instructions as to how to mend a punctured bicycle tire.