I have juxtaposed a trio of canonical American poems with a cult film that perhaps a small fraction of my readers may have seen. Such a gesture ought to prompt a question: What kinds of works are relevant to doing criticism in the sense I have been developing here? My brief in this book will cover the literary arts, the dramatic arts, and the narrative screen arts. As it happens, these inclusions and exclusions also conform to the standard institutional arrangements of higher education, at least in the UK, North America, and the rest of Anglophone world. For in literature departments like the ones we call “English,” not only are drama and theater often taught alongside poetry and fiction but so are film and other screen arts. English departments, of course, have been a home for film studies in many institutions for many years, even at places that have a separate program or department for, say, cinema and media studies. It is fair to say that the study of screen narrative is increasingly incorporated under separate institutional auspices, and under various rubrics: Film Studies; Cinema Studies; Screen Arts; Theater, Film, and Drama; Film and Television; Media Studies; and so on. It is also fair to say, however, that over the course of a decades-long pursuit of disciplinary autonomy, a certain tendency has arisen among scholars in the CMS fields to push away from any strong connection with literary criticism. It has become almost a rite of passage for these disciplines.42
Conversely, literary criticism has had its own issues with film studies, not least because of the position taken by the most important voice in establishing the academic terms of that discipline in the post-cinema era, I. A. Richards. Richards’ founding of his program for practical criticism in academia on a deeply inimical conceptualization of poetry and cinema has had far-reaching consequences for how study of the humanities has developed in the modern university. It was so far-reaching at Cambridge, indeed, that even a force like Raymond Williams, the most important British Marxist critic of his era, long had difficulty in overcoming it there. Williams’ early, forgotten championing of cinema studies, like his later and more familiar championing of drama studies, were both carried out on behalf of a challenge to Cambridge English as Richards helped to establish it, a critique of that program as a “theorization of reading” rather than a “theorization of composition.” Film, like drama, offered objects to criticism and theory that demanded attention to issues of “composition,” which in turn, presumably, had implications for the study of poetry. Working on such objects, as he put it, posed a challenge for practical criticism as it had been increasingly naturalized at Cambridge (and elsewhere), because when working on drama—as with cinema—one is “inevitably brought up against problems of form in the most direct way.” That is, one is made to address “basic problems of stance and mode which were never really posed at all” within the more narrowly literary confines of the Richards program.43
One indication that things need not be so, that they might have been otherwise, that they still might be otherwise, can be found in a remarkable encounter in Paris during the same year in which Richards published Practical Criticism. This is the meeting between Sergei Eisenstein and James Joyce, seven years after Joyce published Ulysses (1922), and four years after Eisenstein made Battleship Potemkin (1925). Far from an occasion for mutual turf defense, the conversation that day, according to both artists, was mutually productive. Eisenstein had acquired Ulysses the year before, when he called it “the Bible of the new cinema”—a cultural role Eisenstein would later, in effect, reassign to Dickens.44 After the meeting with Joyce, he experimented with stream-of-consciousness writing and began to associate Joyce’s formal techniques with his own ambitious project to make a film of Marx’s Capital.45 Joyce, for his part, later wrote to a friend that Eisenstein was one of two directors to whom he could entrust a film version of Ulysses.
It is in the adventurous spirit of this encounter between Joyce and Eisenstein that I choose to discuss how to do criticism in a field with loose but I hope intelligible parameters: defined narrowly enough for intellectual purchase but not in so constrained a way as to exclude areas of intersection. The decision to go this middle route with Aristotle poses both challenges and opportunities: challenges, because studies of film and literature have been too isolated from each other; opportunities, because it offers a chance to make new links while respecting large distinctions. I do not intend to impose connections between the literary and screen arts where they do not exist. Running against the grain of Richards’ influential strictures against cinema, however, there is a counter-tradition dating from Richards’ own time for thinking about the poetics of cinema itself: I have already mentioned the example of Jean Epstein. Conversely, Eisenstein himself famously proposed that his understanding of montage extended not only to dramatists like Shakespeare but even to as relentlessly textual an author as John Milton, whose Puritan commitments would have led him to be wary of theatrical productions. Eisenstein went so far as to call Paradise Lost “a first-rate school in which to study montage and audio visual relationships,” and he illustrated the point with passages he made a point of citing in English on the grounds that the “direct delight in the beauties of composition” would be lost if he were to analyze, say, Pushkin in translation. As a maker of epics himself, Eisenstein is especially interested in the grand-scale effects in Paradise Lost, especially in the passages narrating the war in heaven. He later wrote that, had he read Milton before he made one of his own great epics, Alexander Nevsky (1938), it would have been a different and better motion picture.
T. S. Eliot complained that Milton’s poetry was insufficiently vivid in its visual description,46 but Eisenstein treats it not as describing something but rather as prescribing a set of montage procedures to be, in effect, reenacted by the spectator, who necessarily “experiences the dynamic process of the emergence and assembly of the image just as it was experienced by the author.”47 Eisenstein goes on to illustrate how this process works by staging an analysis of some passages from Milton’s war in heaven (just as he had previously done for a passage from Pushkin) as providing rhythmically sequenced images and (as it were) camera set-ups. Since I began with the theme of tasting forbidden fruit, it might be fitting to examine the famous opening passage of Paradise Lost, in order to see how it might lend itself to Eisenstein’s montage analysis.
The theme of forbidden fruit is not long in making its appearance in this invocation of the epic muse:
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater man
Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,
Sing heavenly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed,
In the beginning how the heavens and earth
Rose out of Chaos: or if Sion hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed
Fast by the oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.
And chiefly thou O Spirit, that dost prefer
Before all temples the upright heart and pure,
Instruct me, for thou knowst; thou from the first
Wast present, and with mighty wings outspread
