Bates, Catherine. On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy. Oxford UP, 2017. Xviii, 302 pp. ISBN 9780198793779. £65 cloth.
‘But “Ah”, Desire still cries, “Give me some food!”’. In On Not Defending Poetry, Catherine Bates provides an extended reading of Sidney’s Defence of Poetry that seeks to show the Defence shares the uneasy rebelliousness of Sidney’s fictions and poetry. The Defence of Poetry, Bates argues, speaks with two voices. One, which Bates designates the speaker of the text, provides an orthodox humanist defense of poetry as properly and profitably educational. The other voice, which Bates refers to as Sidney, and which emerges from closer reading of the Defence, provides a rebellious counterpoint to the first, by ‘slipping in, guerilla-wise, the potential for a radial alternative’ (50). In the radical counterpoint, Sidney eschews an instrumentalist view of poetry for one that is ‘free in every sense of that word’: from the demands of ideals and ideology and from reproducing either (171). This poetry, like the bad-boy voice of the sonnets, is ‘naught’ — both naughty and empty of metaphysical guarantees.
There is a substantial critical debate about whether what appear to be divergent positions in The Defence can be harmonised, and arguments that they cannot are not new, as Bates knows. What distinguishes Bates’ book and makes it valuable is the level at which she explores the Defence’s ambivalences. Rather than focusing on the macro divides in the Defence’s structure or theory, Bates’ close, deconstructive reading of the Defence shows how these larger divides are only the most visible. The strength of On Not Defending Poetry lies in its attention to the more nuanced elements of the text that disturb its orthodox surface: its hesitations, ironies and especially its examples that not only do not exemplify, but often work against the point they are supposed to support.
The book is organised into three sections, each of which attends to one of the accusations against poetry to which the Defence responds: that poetry is profitless, that it lies, and that it abuses, i.e. corrupts, its readers. In the first section, on the profitability of poetry, Bates argues that the orthodox speaker of the Defence insists on ability of the poet to create value — for example, to turn our brazen world into a golden one (37). Bates reads this desire not as a wish for a return to an Edenic first age, but rather as paying tribute to a fetishistic demand to turn a profit, in which putatively free poetry is instead subordinated to a profitable heroic ideal (40-41). Against the speaker’s golden poetry, Bates finds the more recalcitrant Sidney floating alternative golden worlds of Indians (along with other ‘barbaric’ cultures such as in Turkey, Ireland and Wales) whose poets are said happily to sing without fructifying knowledge (11-12). Likewise, Bates reads in Sidney’s digressive association of poet-haters with ‘playing wits’ who praise unpraiseworthy things (e.g., the discretion of an ass) the eruption in the text of a similar desire for the role of ‘holy fool — as innocent of profitable learning as “the simple Indians”’ (57). By the end of the Defence, Sidney identifies poets with fools. When Sidney asks his readers ‘no more to laugh at the name of poets, as though they were next inheritors to fools’, he never, Bates argues, ‘more sincerely meant what he said in the Defence, even if he could only get away with saying it as a joke’ (59-60).
For poetry to be free from knowledge in this way, it must be truly fictional, free from some didactic purpose. In the second section of the book Bates turns to Sidney’s replies to the charge that poets lie. The speaker’s answer to this charge, of course, is that while poetry’s fictions are not empirically true, they are ethically so, and this ethical truth is both more reliable and more profitable than empirical ones, as in the competition between the historian and the poet (87). But how reliably ethical are the lies of fiction, really? The key example Bates puts under scrutiny is the historical account of Zopyrus and the parallel fictional account of Abradatas (appropriately, the first is dubiously historical, and the second misnames its hero). In both accounts, the Persian king’s servant and supposed hero of the story self-mutilates in order to ingratiate himself with and then betray the rebel Babylonians to their Persian rulers. In two respects, Bates observes, this story celebrates the lie, first as the literary fiction that is as good as the historical truth, and second in the content of both stories, which celebrates a lie — the apparent defection of the king’s servant — that defeats the rebels. That these rulers are the Persians, and the king served a descendent of that Cyrus who is the subject of Sidney’s paradigmatic heroic fiction (‘a Cyrus … to make many Cyruses’) makes the story all the more loaded.
But, Bates asks, how can this story of the fruitful and ethical lie be universally true? How could it mean the same to the betrayed as to the betrayers? And how could Sidney, who balks at tyrants elsewhere in the Defence and in his own politics, have felt sympathy with the story, whatever praise his official speaker gives it (124-28)? Rather, Bates argues, Sidney again is looking for a poetry that is not only free of such truths — which amount to ideological commitments — but also that, by its very lack of truth, provides an alternative to such fictions in an ‘art that pays no debt, redeems no “ought”, but serves rather to show the valuelessness of such “value” and the tyrannies that are perpetrated — and tragedies suffered — in its name’ (153). In this respect, the ruling genius of Sidney’s guerrilla counter-defense turns out to be the horseman John Pietro Pugliano, whose airy praises provides a model of epideixis without idealist foundations. As Bates wittily remarks, ‘it is one thing for a star-lover to love his star … but quite another for a horse-lover to love his horse’ (157-67; quote 167). In this horse-lover, Philip finds his alter ego.
In the last section of the book, Bates turns her attention to the speaker’s claim that poetry is dangerous only when abused, by attending to those moments when the more recalcitrant Sidney not only recognises the likelihood of abuse, but also the wish for and inevitability of it. Not only, for example, may the poet or reader of poetry identify with Dido over Aeneas (222-23), but also the example points to the way in which a poetry that properly creates warrior Cyruses may be antithetical to the learning on which poetry is said to found itself — perhaps delightfully, if the target is Sidney’s schoolmasters and orthodox humanists more generally: ‘For great deeds that such poetry undoubtedly does inspire are exemplified above all in the ransacking and laying to waste of the knowledge and learning of other civilizations’ (225-29; quote 228). Moreover, as a thing of this world, it is hard to separate the use from the abuse, since ‘use’ not only means make productive, but also contains within it the fears associated with ‘abuse’—that is, being used up or exhausted, an ambiguity Bates nicely traces in early modern English translations of the Bible that translate the same verse with both ‘use’ and ‘abuse’ (239-42). When use and abuse can translate the same biblical passage, ‘the concept of right use is far from stable’ and ‘abuse is all but inevitable’ (242).
As this reading of the antithetical meanings of ‘use’ should make clear, the reigning critical paradigm of the book is deconstructive, and its theoretical commitments are to Derrida, Bataille, Barthes and the Freud who theorises a death drive beyond the pleasure principle. Perhaps most central to Bates’ argument, however, is the work of economic critics Marc Shell and Jean-Joseph Goux. In their accounts, money-thought rises with the development of money exchange, and, like idealism, fetishises abstract value over material particularities (115), with the result of centralizing power and subordinating other values to an abstracted idea (115; see also 121-24). This commitment to the analysis of ‘money-thought’ makes Bates’ deconstructive reading oddly, perhaps uncomfortably historicist. The ‘always already’ of deconstruction precludes imagining pure moments ‘before’ writing. In On Not Defending Poetry, however, Bates gestures toward moments before ‘money-thought.’ This gesture can read like a pastoral fantasy, as when Bates criticises the speaker of the Defence for quantifying the ‘golden’ value of the poet’s world, ‘something the simple Indians would presumably never have needed to do’ (39). To be sure, Bates sees this Indian pastoral as a thought experiment about escaping the imperatives of idealism and the poetry that profits by reflecting it, rather than an empirical truth about Indian culture (61). Still, a moment such as this in the book reflects, I think, the challenge of historicism on such a large time scale, since it becomes difficult to imagine a before or after.
Indeed, Bates seems to me less interested in defining that past or future as in identifying alternative ways of thinking in the present of Sidney’s resistant text. And I think the value of Bates’ excellent book lies in her identifications of that resistance. If one considers the Defence as historical background for the period’s theories of poetry, then Bates’ readings of it — her close attention to the details of the text that resist that doctrine — may seem tendentious. But if one considers the Defence as itself a complex literary text, deserving of the same critical attention as, say, the Faerie Queene, then Bates’s book gives the Defence its due. Bates ends On Not Defending Poetry by placing the surprises of the Defence into a larger frame of the literature of the English early modern period, which she describes as ‘making … unexpected, unorthodox, even counter-intuitive moves: by taking liberties’ (272-73). Readers of Spenser should welcome such a view.
Robert Matz, George Mason University
48.2.10
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