No [One] Way to Treat a Text: Donaldson and the Criticism of Engagement

Abstract

���� ��� Two large topics of necessary interest to all those concerned with the critical legacy of E. Talbot Donaldson are patristics and patriarchy. In what follows, my argument is that the link between these two topics is Donaldson’s dedication to (or embrace of) what I call a criticism of engagement. I will further suggest that an important part of Donaldson’s critical practice was what Robert Payne has defined as “the true Aristotelian appeal from ethos, the rhetor’s calculated representation of his own character as a part of his material for persuasion,” 1 that is, the way in which an orator includes within his (or, pace Payne and Aristotle, her) persuasive speeches a construction of self, a persona, designed to stimulate in the audience trust of the speaker. (As Aristotle puts it, “there is persuasion through character whenever the speech is spoken in such a way as to make the speaker worthy of credence. . . . And this should result from the speech, not from a previous opinion that the speaker is a certain kind of person.” 2 ) Donaldson’s realization of himself as rhetor, to paraphrase Payne’s characterization of Chaucer in the essay I have just cited, involved establishing for himself a mediating relationship between text and audience with a view to convincing the latter not just, or not even, that this or that interpretation of Chaucer (or Piers Plowman) was correct—though he, like his many admirers, obviously valued his critical perceptions. Rather, I believe, the ethos of Donaldson the critic is ultimately that of someone who, first, respects the autonomy and the complexity of a major poetic text; second, is willing to work hard at engaging it, that is, at elucidating not only what it means, but also how its language delivers, or obscures, that meaning; and third, recognizes both the inevitable subjectivity of all critical activity and the fact that it is no less important, indeed necessary, a response to great poetry for being doomed to victimization by (to quote the title of one of Donaldson’s own essays) that poetry’s habitual “elusion of clarity.” 3