A Sinking Island

This may be Hugh Kenner's crankiest book.

Kenner, a product of still-colonial Canada qualified by later USAn influence, never particularly liked England. Of all his books prior to this, only his very first was on an English writer - Paradox in Chesterton; I have never read a copy[1], it has not been reprinted, and he never treats Chesterton at greater length than perhaps a sentence again. He did pay attention to the Augustans, principally Pope and Swift, and in many ways the story that Kenner tells about England in the Twentieth Century is a coda to Pope's story in the Dunciad, or to the underlying trend to which Pope was responding.

For his overall theme is the collapse of a single public for serious literature in England proper, combined with a general turning away of the English literary establishment from international modernism.

He's entirely willing to grant talent to a fair number of writers individually, although he's equally willing to indicate where he thinks some of them wasted their talent. But the ones he thinks best of tend to be on the outside. (Basil Bunting, for example. Try finding a copy of Briggflatts, or his Collected Poems.) But English letters in general are another question.

He begins in 1895, identifying three publics for reading. There is a public for Tit-Bits, a sort of level below Reader's Digest (that public has now, had for some time even in 1988, become a consumer of television rather than printed matter). There is a public represented by Dent's Everyman's Library, now the broad consumer of both bestsellers and most "literary fiction". Finally, there's a small public with an interest in texts as such, and an interest in precision of diction and structural complexity.

For Kenner, the distinction between genre and much of what many people in genre call "litfic" is more like a continuous field connecting the two: at one point he implicitly lumps Woolf and Sayers (not to Woolf's benefit). (The essence of much of Woolf being in the Bloomsbury snobbery which appealed to a set of readers in much the same way Lord Peter Wimsey did.) The more important division is between works with a certain level of complexity / ambition / thematic importance and those falling below it. The "classics" of Everyman's Library, even if they began as challenging, have been made comfortable by a tradition of acceptance and interpretation (and also, nevertheless, are often admired from a distance, much as the Kelmscott Chaucer, which Kenner takes as emblematic of this attitude, was[2]).

Following Kenner's narrative, although the English literary world learned from international modernism - Mrs. Dalloway is unimaginable without Ulysses - it turned away from it: the dominant poets run Auden, Thomas, Larkin, anti-modernists all. Not only that, but the serious public for literature splintered, and the world of authors splintered as well. There is little commonality between David Jones, Charles Tomlinson, and Geoffrey Hill, and although their publics overlap they are distinct.

In many ways this may be the closest Kenner, trained at the height of New Criticism, ever came to writing, implicitly, about the function of, the justification for, for criticism.

For Kenner, literature itself is self-justifying as something which is to be enjoyed; but enjoyment is tied to it being a challenge, or at least requiring a continued act of attention. I have no recollection at all of Kenner reading "light" reading: in his spare time he played with computers (and wrote a column for Byte magazine), played with Buckminster Fuller's math, followed silent movies (Chaplin and Keaton), followed classic animation. He found much popular fiction unreadable.

From this point of view, the point of criticism is to assist the reader in approaching and enjoying texts which require either or both of "background" or close reading for full enjoyment. This is certainly the function of Kenner's criticism, running from The Poetry of Ezra Pound and Dublin's Joyce through The Invisible Poet and The Pound Era at the height of his career, to the more minor works of his later years.

And, for all that it put various (primarily English) reviewers' backs up, I think that A Sinking Island has a point. England's retreat from empire has been a cultural turning in, away from ambition and into nostalgia, and a continuing failure to engage with anything coming from outside. It may not be too fanciful to see the decline which Kenner asserts as the beginning of a slide which led, eventually, to the Brexit vote and a political culture in which Boris Johnson can be taken to be a serious politician.

[1]I have very possibly seen a copy, as I have been in both his campus and home offices when he was at Hopkins, and a copy may have been in my field of vision.

[2] I've handled a replica of the Kelmscott Chaucer. It requires a full scale lectern to make it feasible to read, and the black face typesetting is designed to be attractive rather than legible. The Golden Cockerel edition is not much better.