It’s the old classroom question: “Did Shakespeare really mean to put all that stuff in ‘Macbeth’ about light and dark imagery, sir?” To which the teacher will reply, “For the purposes of this exam, yes. Now shut up.”

Sometimes, writers really don’t  know where it all comes from: when Malcolm Cowley presented William Faulkner with the proofs of ‘The Portable Faulkner’, a selective anthology of that writer’s work published in 1945, it enabled him to see for the first time how many of his novels and stories fitted together to form a consistent and coherent body of literature. “Dear Cowley,” he wrote, “The job is splendid. Damn you to hell anyway. But even if I had beat you to the idea, mine wouldn’t have been this good. By God, I didn’t know myself what I had tried to do, and how much I had succeeded.” And on this occasion he genuinely didn’t. (1) It’s in no small measure down to Cowley that we’re now able to navigate our way around Faulkner’s interleaved creation of Yoknapatawpha County, which eventually encompassed 14 novels and numerous short stories. In fact, Faulkner himself got so caught up in the idea he asked permission to write an Appendix to the ‘Portable’, so he could tie up a number of loose ends left dangling after he’d completed ‘The Sound and the Fury’ nearly 20 years before.  He clearly wanted to know what his own stories meant and how they finished.

It’s clear that Faulkner had an inkling, if not a complete realization, of what he was doing; in 1936, he’d drawn a map of Yoknapatawpha to accompany the publication of his novel ‘Absalom, Absalom!’, which included several real and fictional places where events in previous stories had occurred. But because the stories don’t form a chronological sequence, and he was inventing new characters and dynasties to populate his County with each subsequent publication, it’s only with hindsight that all the pieces could be assembled by someone with the necessary perspective. And it took a sympathetic critic to do it.

In fact, throughout this section, the work of the writer and critic in establishing meaning will proceed pretty much hand in hand. Because the critic (or the good one that is) can fill in the gaps in the writer’s knowledge of his own output. It follows that a fair bit of the theory we’ll encounter will be applicable to both endeavours.

And so from a Mississippi part real and part imagined, we return to Ancient Greece, and Plato, who would have considered Faulkner’s ignorance of what he was up to as a sign that he was a poor writer.

In the ‘Apology’, the character of Socrates is adamant that a writer needs to know what he’s doing at all times. Otherwise, how can he control his meaning and communicate what he wants to say to his audience? The very idea that writers send out their texts not knowing what people will make of them is beyond his comprehension:

I went to the poets; tragic, dithyrambic, and all sorts. . .  I took them some of the most elaborate passages in their own writings, and asked what was the meaning of them--thinking that they would teach me something. Will you believe me? I am almost ashamed to confess the truth, but I must say that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. Then I knew that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them. The poets appeared to me to be much in the same case; and I further observed that upon the strength of their poetry they believed themselves to be the wisest of men in other things in which they were not wise.

Oh dear. This notion of the irrationality of poets is further developed in the ‘Phaedrus’, where Socrates notes that any meaning that cannot be disputed rationally and consistently is no meaning at all: it needs to  be “put to the test by spoken arguments.” Literary studies were, of course, in their infancy at this point, but already critics were displaying worrying traits that he wanted to nip in the bud as quickly as possible. ‘Fanciful’ explanations of Homer abounded, which, Plato notes, are all very nice, but which cannot be tested by any criterion of truth, or used to establish any truth; so they add nothing to the sum of human knowledge. So he was having no truck with any texts that would encourage these people to indulge their flights of critical fancy. So the writer and the critic were both at fault.

It was a sad fact of life, however, that writers of this kind continued to flourish, and Plato renewed his attack on them in the ‘Ion’, perhaps the most complete statement of his aesthetic philosophy extant. (2)

Ion, the eponymous ‘rhapsode’ or reciter of epic poems, is delighted by the notion of being inspired, and acknowledges that he is beside himself when he is performing, his eyes rain tears and his hair stands on end. This is, of course, like red rag to a bull with Socrates, who remarks that a man must be mad who behaves in this way at a festival when he is surrounded by his friends and there is nothing to be sad about. We’re then treated to a wonderful passage of Socratic irony, which is worth a quote:

For all good poets, epic as well as lyric, compose their beautiful poems not by art, but because they are inspired and possessed. And as the Corybantian revellers when they dance are not in their right mind, so the lyric poets are not in their right mind when they are composing their beautiful strains: but when falling under the power of music and metre they are inspired and possessed; like Bacchic maidens who draw milk and honey from the rivers when they are under the influence of Dionysus but not when they are in their right mind. And the soul of the lyric poet does the same, as they themselves say; for they tell us that they bring songs from honeyed fountains, culling them out of the gardens and dells of the Muses; they, like the bees, winging their way from flower to flower. And this is true. For the poet is a light and winged and holy thing, and there is no invention in him until he has been inspired and is out of his senses . . .

So poets are all essentially mad, the playthings of the Muses. And this can’t be right.

So what’s the answer? Plato reckons it’s ‘organic unity’, which he considers basic to the whole idea of art, and would prove hugely influential both in classical thought and into the present day. And it can apply both to the writer and the critic.

It’s not a line of argument that’s particularly easy to follow, nor is it argued with complete consistency either within the ‘Phaedrus’ or in other works where it appears (the ‘Gorgias’ and ‘The Republic’). But these are the main points as I see them:

- Everything has a natural unity

- But that unity can be split into its constituent parts for the purposes of demonstration or explanation

- In doing so, the natural unity must not be violated (Socrates uses the analogy of someone who’s inexpert at carving meat - so we’ll use a chicken as our analogy)

- If this division is done successfully, it’s possible to see the ‘One and Many’ in nature, which Socrates applauds as the supreme achievement of ‘dialecticism’, seeing something as a whole, and in its constituent parts. Then as a whole again.  So once you’ve carved your chicken, you can see how the joints fit together to form the whole. If you’ve just hacked away at it, producing irregular pieces, you won’t be able to tell what part of the animal they’ve come from (this also happens when you buy “chicken steaks” from Sainsbury’s). So when someone asks you for thigh meat only, you’ll just have to guess and risk their disappointment. Or blame Sainsbury’s.

- The writer needs to be aware of the whole, the parts, and how they fit together in order to write truthfully about the chicken. Or else he will be describing some genetically-engineered freak of a chicken.

- You can only perceive the One and Many through a combination of ‘nature’, ‘art’ and ‘practice’.

- 'Nature’ allows you to appreciate the wholeness of something; ‘art’ it’s constituent parts, and ’practice’ will help you see these things correctly every time.

- (We’re going to abandon the chicken analogy at this point) ‘Nature’ is the thing itself; ‘Art’ is what it’s saying to you (what Socrates calls its ‘rhetoric’ or what I’m calling its ‘meaning’)

- So, if Nature is the form and Art is its meaning, it doesn’t do for either the writer or critic to violate their organic relationship.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the 9-step program of ‘Organic Meaning’. No, don’t thank me, it’s my job.

So - it’s the writer’s duty not to unbolt the essential unity of whatever he’s writing about, thereby distorting its meaning. And if, under the spell of the Muse he’s not thinking straight (which he isn’t because he’s temporarily mad), he’ll never be able to perceive that unity, let alone recreate it in his writing. Harmony and balance are all, and, if he guides himself by these lights, he’ll be able to know (and express) what his meaning actually is with little or no equivocation.

OK, Mr Writer, now try doing that.

Plato can be rather prescriptive (as are many of the recommendations we’ll encounter in this section), and his observations on literature most commonly fall under the heading of ‘speculative’ criticism, which deals mainly in theory and not so much with practice (that sort’s ‘practical’ criticism, not surprisingly). But his ideas of wholeness, however abstract they may have been, were destined to exert a powerful influence on subsequent classical literary thought, not least in the writings of Aristotle, who became Plato’s pupil in 367 BC (and subsequently tutor to the future Alexander the Great in 342).

In Chapter 8 of ‘The Poetics’, Aristotle remarks that “whatever is beautiful, whether it be a living creature or an object made up of various parts, must necessarily not only have its parts properly ordered, but also be of an appropriate size, for beauty is bound up with size and order.” He then continues using terminology such as “unified whole”, “consistent” and  “wholeness”; in Chapter 10, he insists that action should “develop out of the very structure of the plot” and not be parachuted in. (3) Episodic plots are bad; organic ones are good; he reckons narrative writing should have for its subject  “a single action, whole and complete, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It will thus resemble a living organism in all its unity, and produce the pleasure proper to it.” (4) Back to our chicken, then. And let’s play down the influence of those Muses, or you’ll be thought “possessed”. (5)

Moving on from Aristotle, we can track the idea’s lineage to the poet Horace, writing in Rome in the first century BC. “After all,” he says, failing to anticipate the Surrealist movement two thousand years later, “if you were a painter, you wouldn’t put a human head on a horse’s neck, or represent anything but a bird as having feathers, or give a woman fins instead of legs.” It just wouldn’t be natural. The very idea that you can mix’n’match in this way belongs “in a sick man’s dreams” (which have no place in art),and the net result would be that no-one could “make head or tail of what he is driving at.” The work should be “entirely consistent” within itself, and not assembled piecemeal. In fact, he uses the word ‘consistent’ rather a lot.

Although he believes writers should have a “strong, natural aptitude”, Horace takes considerable pains to point out the degree of craftsmanship that is necessary for great writing (more often than not, it’s “hammered out”), and he satirizes those poets who consider themselves divinely inspired. After all, an athlete, a flautist or even an auctioneer has first had to learn his trade under a strict master. But the poet, with no evidence to back him up, can claim a hotline to the Gods and say “I write marvellous god-given poems, so up yours! So what if I know nothing about what I never learned!” (6)

Although his verses are likely to be wretched, he’ll attract a following, grow vain, and start to believe his own publicity. He’ll haunt solitary places, won’t take the trouble to trim his nails and beard, and become a stranger to personal hygiene. Then he’ll go entirely mad, and believe he is so beloved of the Gods he can leap into a volcano with impunity. Which is what the poet and philosopher Empedocles of Etna did in the 5th century BC. So that’s Horace’s cautionary tale of the muse-driven poet - caveat scriptor. (7)

Footnotes:

1. Faulkner routinely feigned ignorance on where his meaning came from to shut critics up. He was quite happy to let them invent what they wanted. But on this occasion, he allowed his studied disingenuousness to slip. He really was excited by the scope of his achievement.

2. It’s easy to assume that Plato was always down on poetry, but he occasionally gave writers a break. In the ‘Protagoras’ the eponymous character notes that we can learn a lot from poets; and in the ‘Lysis’ they are described as “the fathers and authors of wisdom”. This generosity isn’t characteristic, though.

3. At the end of certain Greek tragedies, the ‘deus ex machina’ (literally ‘the god from the machine’) is winched onto the stage to solve in one fell swoop all the seemingly insoluble problems arising from the plot. In comedies, the appearance of the DEM parodies those plays whose authors are suspected of being too lazy to think of a more satisfactory ending. Of the many examples, Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ is probably the best known, when in Act 5 Scene 4 the god Hymen appears, marries four couples, and Duke Senior’s banishment from court is instantly revoked after his usurping brother has a chance encounter with “an old religious man”. All this occurs in the space of 57 lines.

4. You might be expecting me to introduce Aristotle’s famous theory of ‘The Three Unities’ of Time, Place and Action into the main text at this point,since it would fit perfectly. But I’m not going to, because he never posited such a theory. It was the neo-classical Renaissance critic Castelvetro who, in the 16th century codified Aristotle's discussion, claiming that all plays should follow these three precepts:

Place. The setting of the play should be one location: in comedy often a street, in Oedipus Rex the steps before the palace.

Time. The action of the play should represent the passage of no more than one day. Previous events leading up to the present situation were recounted on stage by the actors.

Action. No action or scene in the play was to be a digression; all were to contribute directly in some way to the plot.

Nothing wrong with these principles - it’s just they don’t all belong to Aristotle. They do, however have a bearing on our argument, and they’re so well-known I’ve included them here.

5. Sorry about all these footnotes. So far, Aristotle hasn’t strayed too far from the opinions of his mentor; but in the following chapter, his conclusion that poetry is superior to history does set him at odds with Plato. For Aristotle, Poetry deals in “universal truths”, history in “particular facts”, a theme which reappears frquently throughout what follows.

6. After this delightful satirical foray, Horace takes on the poetry groupies who encourage the writer in his folly. On hearing one of the master’s odes, he will “turn quite pale with emotion, and will even be so amiable as to squeeze out a tear or two; he will dance with excitement, or tap out his approval with his foot.”