Multiple readers, multiple texts, multiple Keats. (John Keats)

I. THE IDEA OF INCONGRUITY

My topic is the multiple meanings of Keats's poems, the multiple Keats who created the multiple meanings, and what I think is the real reason for the yearlong tribute of admiration and affection that marked the bicentennial of his birth in 1995.(1) The argument involves a notion of comic misfittingness, and I shall begin with three epitomizing examples in the form of a joke, a poem about Byron, Shelley, and Keats as the Three Stooges, and a typically zany passage from one of Keats's letters.

Here is the joke:

Two fishermen are out in the middle of a reservoir in a rented boat,

catching fish hand over fist, pulling them in as fast as they can get their

lines back in the water.

First fisherman: "This is a great place to fish. Don't you think we should

mark the exact spot?"

Second fisherman: "Sure, I'll put an X right here on the side of the

boat." (Marks an X on the side of the boar.)

First fisherman: "That's a stupid thing to do, that's dumb. [Pause.] What

if we don't get the same boat?"

This will sound like something from a standup comedian on TV. In fact I have appropriated it from a piece by my colleague Mike Madonick that appeared a few years ago in Cimarron Review.(2) In Madonick's telling, the fishermen are literary theorists named Jacques and Harold. As the dialogue continues, the two of them decide that the fish they have caught are not real fish at all but are merely linguistic constructs.

I use the joke to introduce the basic idea of incongruity. Everything funny has a central element of incongruity: something does not fit with something else. In Madonick's joke, the first incongruity is the stupid idea of marking the spot with an X on the side of the boat. Then there is a second incongruity when the other fisherman thinks putting an X on the boat is stupid for the wrong reason: they might not get the same boat next time. When we add the implied identities of the fishermen--two of the most famous literary theorists of our time--the result is a still more complicated set of incongruities. Why would these two be out fishing together? Why would they say such dumb things?

The poem about Byron, Shelley, and Keats as the Three Stooges is by Charles Webb, who teaches writing at California State University at Long Beach. This was the final poem read at the concluding session of a Keats conference held at the Clark Library in Los Angeles in April 1995. It begins as follows:(3)

Decide to temper Romantic Sturm und Drang with comedy.

Keats shaves his head;

Shelley frizzes out his hair;

Byron submits to a bowl-cut.

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

Keats sighs, his head stuck in a cannon.

Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!

Brightest in dungeons, Liberty!

Byron shouts, and lights the fuse.

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Shelley booms, and drops a cannonball on Byron's toe.

The poem continues with further slapstick intermingled with famous lines from the three poets, until--Webb says--

Until they die, too young, careening

Into immortality covered with flour, squealing,

Drainpipes on their heads--which explains why

For many years, the greatest poems

In English have all ended Nyuk, nyuk, nyuk,

And why, reading She walks in beauty like the night;

We are as clouds that veil the midnight moon;

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

You may feel ghostly pliers tweak your nose,

And ghostly fingers poke the tear ducts in your eyes.

When Webb first wrote this poem, he showed it to Beth Lau, his colleague at Long Beach, and Lau responded by referring him to a similarly ludicrous passage about "Tee-wang-dillo-dee" from the last of Keats's journal letters to his brother and sister-in-law in America. Here is the passage, written on 17 January 1820.(4) Keats is talking about his social life and the people he has seen lately:

I know three people of no wit at all, each distinct in his excellence--A, B,

and C. A is the foolishest, B the sulkiest, C is a negative. A makes you

yawn, B makes you hate; as for C, you never see him though he is six feet

high. I bear the first, I forbear the second, I am not certain that the third

is. The first is gruel, the second ditch water, the third is spilt--he ought

to be wiped up....Tee-wang-dillo-dee. This you must know is the Amen to

nonsense. I know many places where Amen should be scratched out . . . and in

its place "Tee-wang-dillo-dee" written. This is the word I shall henceforth

be tempted to write at the end of most modern poems. Every American book

ought to have it. It would be a good distinction in society. My Lords

Wellington, Castlereagh, and Canning and many more would do well to wear

Tee-wang-dillo-dee written on their backs instead of wearing ribands in their

buttonholes. How many people would go sideways along walls and quickset

hedges to keep their Tee-wang-dillo-dee out of sight, or wear large pigtails

to hide it.... Thieves and murderers would gain rank in the world--for would

any one of them have the poorness of spirit to condescend to be a Tee-wang

-dillo-dee? "I have robbed in many a dwelling house, I have killed many a

fowl, many a goose, and many a man" (would such a gentleman say) "but thank

heaven I was never yet a Tee-wang-dillo-dee." Some philosophers in the moon

who spy at our globe as we do at theirs say that Tee-wang-dillo-dee is

written in large letters on our globe of Earth. They say the beginning

of the T is just on the spot where London stands. London being built

within the flourish, wan reach[es] downward and slant[s] as far as Timbuktu

in Africa, the tail of the C; goes slap across the Atlantic into the Rio de

la Plata, the remainder of the letters wrap round New Holland, and the last e

terminates on land we have not yet discovered. However I must be silent;

these are dangerous times to libel a man in, much more a world.

At the conference in Los Angeles, Webb read this passage from Keats's letter first, then recited his poem about the Three Stooges, and added "Tee-wang-dillo-dee" at the end:

You may feel ghostly pliers tweak your nose,

And ghostly fingers poke the tear ducts in your eyes.

Tee-wang-dillo-dee.

Thus the celebration of Keats in Los Angeles concluded with a tweaking of nose, tears in the eyes, and Tee-wang-dillo-dee. Everyone was delighted.

I wish to focus for a moment on why everyone was delighted. What is it about such fundamental incongruities as the young Romantics as the Three Stooges and Keats's ridiculous excursus on Tee-wang-dillo-dee that gives people so much pleasure? At the same Los Angeles conference the day before, I had delivered a paper on multiple interpretations of The Eve of St. Agnes. When I heard Webb's poem in connection with the passage from Keats's letter, I thought I understood better than I had before just why there are so many different and contradictory meanings in Keats's good poems, and why these differences and contradictions are received as attractive rather than disturbing or displeasing. The fact is that, just as with the joke about the fishermen, the poem about the Three Stooges, and Tee-wang-dillo-dee, we get a great deal of pleasure from situations where things do not fit together I think this kind of comic misfittingness can be connected with some of the incongruities in Keats's best poems. There are many general names for the phenomenon: difference, division, disjunction, disharmony, contrariness, and so on. Whatever name we give it, it is the extreme opposite of the concept of unity that used to be so central in our critical activity.

In literary art itself, both unity and disunity have major roles, of course; but in literary criticism, over the long haul--up until a couple of decades ago, say--the idea of unity has been much more emphasized. We have been constructing unity in works, in groups of works, in single authors, in groups of authors, in whole periods and whole centuries, and making much of these unities, as if we had found them instead of constructed them. Throughout much of its history, the critical enterprise has absolutely depended on several kinds of oneness: a single author for each work; a single text of each work; a (hypothetical) single reader for the work--usually each critic individually, positing himself or herself as an ideal reader; and then, what obviously follows from the concept …