Hugh Kenner - Wide-ranging enough to encompass Buster Keaton, Charles Babbage, horses, and a man riding a bicycle while wearing a gas mask. Kenner seeks the causes and outcomes of man's ability to simulate himself (a computer that can calculate quicker than we can) and his world (a mechanical duck that acts the same as a living one)

 

Hugh Kenner, The Counterfeiters: An Historical

Comedy. Dalkey Archive Press, 2005

 

Wide-ranging enough to encompass Buster Keaton, Charles Babbage, horses, and a man riding a bicycle while wearing a gas mask, "The Counterfeiters" is one of Hugh Kenner's greatest achievements. In this fascinating work of literary and cultural criticism, Kenner seeks the causes and outcomes of man's ability to simulate himself (a computer that can calculate quicker than we can) and his world (a mechanical duck that acts the same as a living one).

This intertangling of art and science, of man and machine, of machine and art is at the heart of this book. He argues that the belief in art as a uniquely human expression is complicated and questioned by the prevalence of simulations--or "counterfeits"--in our culture. Kenner, with his characteristically accessible style and wit, brings together history, literature, science, and art to locate the personal in what is an increasingly counterfeit world.

For 20 years now Hugh Kenner has been publishing books. (14 of them — the latest reviewed on Page 7) and essays (hundreds) for an audience that hasn't yet been born. How else can we account for the insipid reviews, the slow sales, the indifference of his colleagues?

Two are historical comedies, as he calls them, original contributions to under standing our own minds and deliciously funny—“The Stoic Comedians” (1962) and “The Counterfeiters” (1968). The critics were not amused. I did not review “The Counterfeiters” (1968). The critics were not amused. I did not review. “The Counterfeiters” for the simple reason that I drew caricatures for it, designed the cover and jacket and therefore felt myself disqualified as an objective re viewer. Nor did The Times review it. I am making up for both omissions. “The Counterfeiters” is a lesson in how to see. Not how to see surfaces but the inside of things and the astounding affinities of things which heretofore seemed to have had nothing to do with each other. Vaucanson and Yeats, for instance (but who is Vattcanson?), metaphysical poetry and Babbage (but who is Babbage?), Bus ter Keaton and Alan Turing (but who is Alan Turing?). Whereas the people who appear so strangely unfamiliar in “The Stoic Comedians” have at least the names of people we have heard of in other contexts (Joyce, Beckett, Flaubert), the people in “The. Counterfeiters” are only half familiar. Swift appears along side the English mathematician Alan Turing, who in turn introduces us to the Victorian wizard Charles Babbage (in ventors, respectively, of HAL in Clarke and Kubrick's “2001: A Space Odyssey” and the Difference Engine, which became the electronic computer).

Mr. Kenner has brought all these curious things together—Andy Warhol, Lemuel Gulliver, the Royal Society, Vaucanson's automata, the Jacquard looms, bad Augustan poetry, mathematicians, comed ians—because they are points which when connected make an intelligible and unsuspected picture of reality. In fact, they belonged together as they occurred; history is a secret process. That is why Mr. Kenner, disclaiming his obvious and superb skill as a critic, once called him self an X‐ray technician. He knows how things work. Where other critics can do a masterful job of disassembling an organism and displaying its parts neatly labelled, Mr. Kenner points to the work ing parts in place. “The Counterfeiters” is a history. It begins in the 17th century, when man was being redefined. Descartes said he was a machine we still believe that. Swift said (tongue in cheek) that man was a rational animal; we still try to believe that. Language began to be plain and sensible (how else can you write science and philosophy?), and we still believe that language should be plain and sensible. But something hap pened because of which we can't really believe any of these propositions. That is Mr. Kenner's subject.

For the world long ago ceased to make sense. We do not expect to hear sense from politicians or the pulpit, from the university professor or the TV set. Our economic system seems to be from the brain of the Mad Hatter, our daily lives seem to be the work of inspired and over worked devils, and science is beyond us. The French philosophers tell us we are absurd; the mathematicians say that they can duplicate our brain with a computer.

Mr. Kenner traces some of the lines of force that removed us from the Augustan world of sense and order to our world of nonsense and disorder. Science itself is part of the story; Swift's was the first voice to note that the language of science when applied to man changed our con cept of humanity and that a man operat ing under the strict guidance of empiri cism can end up a naive inhuman prig— Lemuel Gulliver, who found the perfect man and discovered that he was talking to a rational horse. So much for the ra tional animal.

That talking horse of Gulliver's was a counterfeit man. Mr. Kenner constructs his book out of many attempts to counter feit man. Art does it all the time, and so Mr. Kenner gives us an account of how the arts took up forgery in the 18th century; Defoe forged two notable counterfeits that have become and re mained models for the novel; Swift counterfeited his “Modest Proposal” and “Gulliver”; Pope invented a new kind of satire that looked like serious poetry. That is, the man of sense found the mask more useful than the naked face, and history then did away with sense al together (as the satirists predicted) and put sensibility in its place.

Mr. Kenner's book is written at a time when we have not emerged from that age of sensibility. We haven't yet learned to discern things for ourselves again, and thus (as Romanticism taught us all too well) we depend on theory, opinion, preju dice and enthusiasm. That is, we need a counterfeit response, whether to the arts or to the conduct of life itself. Told how to respond, we respond. Art is in spiring and transcends reality, but what do we do with a Campbell's Tomato Soup can offered by Mr. Warhol as a piece of sculpture? Mr. Kenner goes back to the Greeks to explain that. And in the process he Must talk about Abraham Cowley, Wordsworth and Joyce, sensibly, always sensibly.

Sensibly, and vigorously. In Mr. Ken ner's prose, grace cooperates with ener gy; and the energy is so economically compressed that every sentence contains the matter of another man's paragraph. Two civilizations meet in this tense, swift prose: the classical deference of urbane intelligence (Cicero, Plutarch) and the un adorned plain English of the 18th century, the last age to polish the language (Pope, Swift). The tophat dignity of Victorian English (in which the TLS is still written) is nowhere in Mr. Kenner's prose, nor is the drone of professorial sincerity nor the lacquered official prose in which it is thought fitting to cast books about literature and art. If there is a better writer of discursive English alive, I don't know him.

The apparent public neglect of Mr. Ken ner's work is partially due to the demand he makes on his readers. He is always original, usually startling, and radically different from the received ideas already carefully pasted to a subject. That is, he is always inviting us onto unfamiliar terrain. And he assumes that his readers are intelligent. And that they are imagin ative. And that they are interested in literature, as well as its place in the world. (The truth is that the large part of Mr. Kenner's colleagues are interested in a little bit of literature in which they have invested the whole of their wits and are living off the interest.)

It is therefore perhaps too early to re view “The Counterfeiters.” It looks like science fiction to the half‐educated and like fiction to the conservative scholar. A generation (when? where?) that doesn't know that literary criticism is supposed to be dull and flat‐footed will embrace it as a magic book. - Guy Davenport

https://www.nytimes.com/1972/03/26/archives/hugh-kenner-xray-technician.html

The north American critic Hugh Kenner, who has died aged 80 following heart problems, produced some of the most perceptive accounts of literary modernism. Much of his knowledge was gained at first hand, by following Ezra Pound's injunction "to visit the great men of your time". Pound provided the letters of introduction, and his pupil embarked with unrelenting zest on his grand tour, later described in The Elsewhere Community (1998), which also contains Pound's definition of modernism as "simple words placed in natural order".

Thus Kenner befriended the titans of the movement: TS Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, Basil Bunting and Louis Zukofsky. The only one he could not get to was Ernest Hemingway, because it would have meant a separate trip to Cuba.

Despite his wanderings, Kenner retained an unswerving fidelity to Pound, whom he promoted as the central presence in modernist writing. At a time when Eliot was enthroned as the monarch of contemporary letters, Kenner argued that the era had, in fact, belonged to Pound.

Though he made his case effectively, it was inevitably regarded as unconventional and tendentious, since the dedicatee of Eliot's The Waste Land was being held as a prisoner in St Elizabeth's hospital for the criminally insane, just outside Washington, DC. He was detained there, from 1946 to 1958, on a treason charge, for making radio broadcasts in support of Mussolini from wartime Italy.

In 1948, Kenner, who had been born in Peterborough, Ontario, visited Pound in St Elizabeth's with another Catholic Canadian, Marshall McLuhan. McLuhan, later best known as a communications scholar, had mentored the precocious undergraduate to a bachelor's degree (1945) and a master's (1946) at the University of Toronto, and had written the introduction to his first book, Paradox In Chesterton (1947).

At McLuhan's prompting, Kenner left Toronto for Yale, where he took a doctorate in 1950 under the supervision of Cleanth Brooks, the leading light of American new criticism, with its emphasis on text rather than biographical and historical background.

At a time when what Kenner called "thickets of misunderstanding" kept Pound at a distance from most critics and professors of poetry, he took it upon himself to brush them aside. During one summer holiday, he returned to Ontario and spent six hours a day for six weeks writing The Poetry Of Ezra Pound (1951).

His labour of love was published by New Directions Press, a small firm founded by Pound's old pupil and friend, James Laughlin. It established Kenner's reputation as a major scholar, and did much to rehabilitate Pound's literary reputation. As Laughlin put it, Kenner got Pound "listed on the academic stock exchange".

A job at Santa Barbara College (now the University of California, Santa Barbara) followed, as did another couple of dozen books - on Joyce, Eliot, Lewis, Beckett and others, many of them still the strongest in their fields. Dublin's Joyce (1956) and Joyce's Voices (1978) were succeeded by Ulysses (1980), still in print and seeking to make Joyce's complex masterpiece understandable.

Kenner adapted his critical style to suit the particular author under scrutiny, following Dr Johnson's observation that literary criticism must be regarded as part of literature or be abandoned altogether. His work avoids academic jargon, and draws on a massive range of influences, seeing connections and parallels in unlikely places.

In a Los Angeles Times review, Richard Eder said of Kenner's proactive approach that "he jumps in, armed and thrashing. He crashes [literature], like a partygoer... You could not say whether his talking or listening is done with greater intensity."

Kenner's magnum opus is unquestionably The Pound Era (1971), the result of two decades of research. This encyclopaedic critical biography explicated the notoriously difficult poetry of Pound and his contemporaries with lively authority.

It begins, for instance, with an evocative account of a 1914 encounter between Pound and Henry James in London: "Toward the evening of a gone world, the light of its last summer pouring forth into a Chelsea street found and suf fused the red waistcoat of Henry James, lord of decorum, en promenade, exposing his Boston niece to the tone of things." Kenner's book dealt with Pound's literary genius knowledgeably and carefully, and sympathetically revealed how such a mind could be duped by the vile ideology of fascism. Kenner himself deplored such politics.

In 1973, he left California for Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, where he remained until 1990. A post at the University of Georgia brought him once again to a more temperate climate, and he remained there until his retirement in 1999. He did not receive US citizenship, and found it amusing to be a perennial "resident alien".

As a student, Kenner had been faced with a choice between writing and mathematics; his grandfather was a skilled mathematician, and his parents were classics teachers - the local school in Peterborough is named after his father. A childhood illness had left him partially deaf, and he took to reading copiously, reckoning to have covered most of the University of Toronto syllabus by the time he matriculated.

However, science and technology remained important, and he wrote A Guided Tour Of Buckminster Fuller (1973), an engaging account of the American techno-transcendentalist thinker; Geodesic Math And How To Use It (1976), on the theory behind Fuller's celebrated dome structures; and Chuck Jones: A Flurry Of Drawings (1994), on the creator of Bugs Bunny and the Road Runner, arguing that Jones had invented an art that was as precise and technical as any other. In 1984, he even wrote a user's guide to the Heath computer, one of which he built himself.

When I met Hugh Kenner last summer, he was dressed in a stripey, light-blue suit, with a bow tie and glasses slightly askew. Even then though, the quickness and sensitivity of his mind were evident. He recited long passages from memory, and told anecdotes of Tom, Sam and Ezra. When I mentioned that I had come from London, his face registered the vivid recollection of a gone world.

The Pound Era had been dedicated to the memory of his first wife, Mary Josephine Waite, with whom he had three daughters and two sons. A year after her death in 1964, he married Mary Anne Bittner, with whom he had a son and daughter; she and the seven children survive him. - Jon Elek

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2003/nov/28/guardianobituaries.books

Hugh Kenner (1923-2003) was perhaps the greatest Anglophone literary critic of the 20th century: no other figure has been so instrumental in our understanding of modernism and its key figures, or so crucial to the development of new ways to think about new literature. He was that rare thing, a critic whose writing is so deft and mind so vivid that his criticism attains the condition of poetry; in that sense, he must be ranked beside Benjamin, Coleridge, and Goethe. He also wrote a book-length study of Chuck Jones cartoons, an introduction to geodesic math, and one of the first user's manuals for personal computing. Kenner taught at UC Santa Barbara, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Georgia.