our word is our bond

The Word as Bond: Money and Performative Language in Hill's Mercian HymnsAuthor(s): Michael NorthSource: ELH, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Summer, 1987), pp. 463-481Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2873032 .

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THE WORD AS BOND: MONEY AND PERFORMATIVE LANGUAGE IN HILL'S MERCIAN HYMNS

BY MICHAEL NORTH

Geoffrey Hill's recent essay "Our Word Is Our Bond" forms an important, if retrospective, introduction to his sequence of prose poems, Mercian Hymns. In the essay Hill struggles with J. L. Austin's definition of performative language as it affects the powers and responsibilities of the writer. Like many contemporary critics, Hill takes up as a challenge Austin's exemption of literary utterances from his definition.' Hill's critique of Austin in some ways parallels a line of attack opened up by Derrida, but instead of ar- guing that all language is parasitical or etiolated in the sense Austin applies only to literary language, Hill argues that literary language can be held to a stricter version of Austin's theory.2 Where Shoshana Felman and Paul de Man see performative utterances as enjoying an almost nihilistic moral freedom, Hill sees them as tightly bound, even more so in literary works than in the ordinary utterances described by Austin.3

Hill's critique works by taking up a single phrase from Austin and adjusting three different interpretations of it, playing these interpretations off against one another, and miming the conflict between Austin's theory and the performative ambitions of poets such as Ezra Pound. The title of Hill's essay comes from Austin's book How To Do Things With Words. There Austin distinguishes performatives, utterances such as promises or verdicts that are themselves acts, from constatives, those utterances that describe or report. In doing so, he insists that performatives are not reports of distinct mental events but are themselves effective acts. In this view, a promise does not describe an inward decision but is itself an accomplished fact. Thus, he says, "accuracy and morality alike are on the side of the plain saying that our word is our bond . Hill seizes on this phrase as evidence of a naive faith in the transpar- ency of words, of "the empiricist desideratum that words should excite only the 'proper sentiments,' that, in the 'ordinary affairs of life,' they should be received as no more and no less than accept-

463



able tokens of exchange, 'signs or counters,' 'fiduciary symbols.' "5 Words, Austin says, "are our tools, and, as a minimum, we should use clean tools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us."6 As the last metaphor attests, Austin was hardly unaware of the possible bonds of language, and yet the passage also shows his faith that patient investigation can "clean" language and spring the traps before they snare us. Despite Austin's concern that performatives not be seen as reports of mental events, he still sees language as a "tool" to be used, it seems, as the result of unambig- uous mental decisions. This view of language also leads to Austin's refusal to consider literature, not to mention insinuations, jokes, and other ordinary uses of language.7

Against this view, Hill balances a different sense of the phrase "our word is our bond." Austin's phrase itself contains a play on the motto of the Stock Exchange, though the theory has no way to account for such play. Like Shoshana Felman, Hill shows how Austin's incessant joking and punning smuggle into his prose a whole class of counterexamples. But there is another kind of play even less under Austin's control. Hill remarks on Austin's "plain saying": "If we stir the soil about the roots of . . . these locutions we unearth seventeenth-century shards" (LL, 139). Often Hill speaks of the "density" of language (LL, 15), of the "gravitational pull" of usage (LL, 87). In his view, language is, in a phrase adopted from Hopkins, "dark and disputed matter" (LL, 145), dark because its ownership is in dispute, material because it is tied to the soil through history. Thus bond comes to stand, not for the intentional fidelity of speaker to language, but for the shackle of historical usage that binds speakers against their will.8 As Hill says, "Where there is 'semantic content' it is most likely that there will be semantic 'refraction,' 'infection' of various kinds" (LL, 139).

Bond has a third meaning as well, however. In a dialectical return, Hill adjusts the word again until it stands for a covenant among speakers, and between speakers and their language: "there is something 'mysterious,' some 'dark and disputed matter' implicated in the nature of language itself. But the mystery is nothing more nor less than 'ordinary circumstances,' 'habitudes and insti- tutions,' 'cultivated opinion,' 'traditional pieties and naive beliefs,' what Locke termed 'the audible discourse of the company'. . 'Our word is our bond' (shackle, arbitrary constraint, closure of possibility) is correlative to 'our word is our bond' (reciprocity, cov-

464 Money and Performative Language in Mercian Hymns



enant, fiduciary symbol)" (LL, 151). In "The True Conduct of Human Judgment," Hill quotes Bacon to the effect that "it is not possible to divorce ourselves from these fallacies and false appear- ances, because they are inseparable from our nature and condition of life." Awareness of this necessary bond can, however, in Hill's words, convert "what might have been a merely passive acceptance into something active and therapeutic" (LL, 63), a "troth- plight," as he says in another connection, "between denotation and connotation" (LL, 144). In this third sense of the word bond "the proscriptive sense of 'arbitrary constraint' and the affirmative sense of 'covenant' are firmly and reciprocally adjusted" (LL, 148).

This sort of dialectical turn has an important moral place in Hill's work. He speaks in several essays of a " 'return upon the self which may be defined as the transformation of mere reflex into an 'act of attention,' a 'disinterested concentration of purpose' upon one's own preconceived notions, prejudices, self-contradic- tions and errors" (LL, 155). Instead of the kind of transparent ease that Hill finds implied in Austin, the use of language is at best "helplessness and horror struggling to transmute themselves into a voluntary sacrifice" (LL, 101). But only this kind of return upon the self can open up what would otherwise be the closed medium of language. Thus Hill speaks in "The Conscious Mind's Intelli- gible Structure" of "acute historical intelligence drawing its energy from the struggle with that obtuseness which is the dark side of its own selfhood."9

Hill's ultimate contention in "Our Word Is Our Bond" is that literary work that is highly conscious of the opacity and difficulty of language is more purely performative than language that assumes an artificial freedom from conflict.'0 In this sense the ultimate speech act would be the confession of complicity, the confession of one's own inextricable involvement in the context of the language used. The dialectical movement of the essay is complete when Hill returns to Austin for the definition of this sort of performative: "The word-monger, word-wielder, is brought to judgment 'by his being the person who does the uttering. . . . In written utterances (or "inscriptions"), by his appending his signature' " (LL, 158). Hill uses the final line of Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius as example: "And now Propertius of Cynthia, taking his stand among these" (LL, 156). Here Pound confesses that he is "elegiacally aware of the tragic farce of being bound" (LL, 156); he takes a stand in language other than his own, bound by it and yet con-

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fessing his awareness of the bond. To take a stand is to commit a speech act; to do so in literature is to confess the grounds upon which one stands, which are never wholly one's own. Throughout the essay, Pound has been Hill's type of the modern poet, as- serting his "vatic privilege," signing on with the darkest powers, and finally here confessing, if only in literary language, to his own bonds. This binding confession is the speech act Hill attempts to define in his essay.

Though Mercian Hymns predates "Our Word Is Our Bond" by several years, any close reader of the sequence will notice the ap- plicability of such terms as "reciprocity, covenant, fiduciary symbol" to it. This sequence of thirty prose poems, focussed simultaneously on the ancient Mercian king Offa and a contemporary persona, can be seen as an extended play on the possible puns on the word bond. Seals and coins, among the most commonly mentioned artifacts in the poem, correspond to the financial definition of bond, while deeds, orders, contracts and finally cove- nants correspond to its social meaning." In all these cases, language becomes performative through the very financial metaphor suggested by Austin's proverb. More importantly, language becomes performative by the dialectical process defined in Hill's essay. Bonds are first shackles or impediments, alienating and con- stricting. Like language itself, which can both join and separate, these bonds stand between people, alternately obscuring and ad- vancing their community. Only when this inherent obliquity is investigated and opened can the means of alienation become a covenant, a bond in the positive sense.

The interplay of some of these terms can be seen in the first of the hymns, one devoted to a catalogue of Offa's attributes. As a builder, Offa presides over two quite different kinds of construc- tions. He is "overlord of the M5," a road, and builder of "the his- / toric rampart and ditch," a barrier. 12 He is architect of citadels and hermitages, but also guardian of two famous bridges. In other words, Offa presides over connections and separations, movement and blockade. This situation in space reflects his anachronistic po- sition in time. As "overlord of the M5" he is in the present; as builder of what is called "Offa's dyke" he is clearly in the past. The axes of space and time are crossed in the very first line of the sequence: "King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sand- / stone." The perennial or the continuous in time is contrasted to




the "riven" or separated in space. But Offa is the intersection of other transactions as well. He is "money-changer" and "salt- master," ruler over two different mediums of economic exchange. "Contractor to the desirable new estates" could mean that Offa builds these estates or merely supplies them, but contained within the word is the implied "contract," the bond of agreement that keeps commerce going. Certainly, "commissioner for oaths" places Offa at the point where all social and financial bonds are sealed. The oath is the linguistic version of the seal or coin and is precisely what Austin means by a speech act.

Offa is therefore the center of temporal, economic, and political exchange in the sequence. The second hymn defines him in terms of linguistic exchange:

A pet-name, a common name. Best-selling brand, curt graffito. A laugh; a cough. A syndicate. A specious gift. Scoffed-at horned phonograph.

The starting-cry of a race. A name to conjure with.

Offa's name is ancient, as "the starting-cry of a race," and also current, as a best-selling brand. The fact that the hymn turns so completely on puns makes this historical doubleness part of the essential doubleness of language. The name itself never appears in this hymn, as if it were only an absent source, and yet it is the "starting-cry" or ancient language of the whole race, and also the word that sets the race going. It is a "specious gift," a spurious offer, apparently, and therefore something that slips the bonds of ordinary performative language, yet it is also "a name to conjure with." This intransitive usage of conjure may contain a trace of the transitive meaning, to bind together by oath, so that Offa's name is both unreliable and the bedrock of the community, a false promise and a true one.

In his ambiguous rule over all forms of exchange, Offa stands for the very principle by which language becomes act. Hymn 10, entitled "Offa's Laws," includes a particularly clear example of this transformation. At his anachronistically modern desk, Offa "at- tended to signatures and retributions." The equation between words and acts is represented by the zeugma, or by what would be a zeugma if Offa were an ordinary person, for signatures can be retributions for the person whose word is law. What makes language performative in this case is Offa's seal, "the seals of gold and

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base / metal into which he had sunk his name." This seal, like a signature, marks the enactment of a law or decree. Hill puts a good deal of emphasis on Offa's ability to convert words into acts by the use of his seal: "Dismissing reports and men, he put pres- sure on the / wax, blistered it to a crest" (14). In this aspect of Offa, Hill seems to present a personification of the principle of performative language, but he makes it clear in Hymn 10 that language also binds those who use it. "He wept, attempting to mas- / ter ancilla and servus." Schoolboy and ancient king seem to merge here in weakness before language. Offa can command servants, but even he cannot master the words for servants.

Hill thus alters what seemed to be a purely utilitarian definition of performative language, one founded on the ability of political power to make language transparent to its wishes. This utilitarian definition of performative language gives way to a historical one as Hill varies the metaphor from seals to coins. According to Marc Shell, the sovereign's seal was one of the earliest forms of coinage. Shell associates tyranny with minting, with the power to transform metal with a certain limited intrinsic value into a medium of exchange, which can then act as the master-trope of an entire civili- zation.13 In Mercian Hymns, however, Offa's domination of the avenues of exchange, temporal, economic, political, and finally linguistic, is neither absolute nor personal. Minting, unlike the sealing of royal orders, is a social process involving the whole people. In Hymn 11 the creation of a medium of exchange in- volves mining, minting, and circulation, and it binds together Offa and his subjects:

Coins handsome as Nero's; of good substance and weight. Offa Rex resonant in silver, and the names of his moneyers. They struck with accountable tact. They could alter the king's face.

Exactness of design was to deter imitation; mutilation if that failed. Exemplary metal, ripe for commerce. Value from a sparse people, scrapers of salt-pans and byres.

Two authors sign these coins. They are the gold seals of Offa Rex and of his moneyers. Both are bound by their signatures. The mul- tiple meanings of the second verset include mutilation of counter- feiters, mutilation of coins that fail to be exact and mutilation of




moneyers who fail to be exact; both coins and moneyers are accountable, the first because they can be counted, the second because they can be executed. But Offa himself is also accountable in this second sense since the image that represents him is at the mercy of the moneyers. In the last hymn devoted to Offa's coins (13) the king is said to be "cushioned on a legend." The physical situation in which the portrait rests on an inscription is both mor- alized and ironized. Legend questions the authenticity of the inscription, and the word cushioned dryly suggests that Offa rests for all time on words, be they authentic or not. In this sense, the power of the moneyers to alter the king's face becomes a power over Offa himself. All participants in this process of exchange become subject to the process. As Hill says in "Our Word Is Our Bond": "The word-monger, word-wielder, is brought to judgment

'In written utterances (or "inscriptions"), by his appending his signature' " (LL, 158). When the moneyers and Offa place their signatures on these coins they become bound to the fiduciary symbol and are ultimately accountable.

Accountable to what? The answer to this question depends on the definition of money. Hill's hymn raises this perennial question: does the value of money come from the exercise of sovereignty, from the king's seal, from social convention, or from some sub- stantial material value? As Shell's two books on economics and language show, these financial questions are closely related to linguistic ones.'4 Hill's criticism of the empiricist definition of language as "acceptable tokens of exchange, 'signs or counters,' 'fiduciary symbols' " (LL, 140), makes it clear that he sees the money of language as established by something more fundamental than sovereign fiat or social convention. In Hymn 11, the coins derive "Value from a sparse people." The word value indicates that the coins are more than counters, but this value can hardly be derived from some essential mine, since the people who give it are "sparse." It is not some commodity that underlies coinage but rather the work of the people, "scrapers of / salt-pans and byres." The choice of salt can hardly be accidental, since at one time this commodity also functioned as medium of exchange. As scrapers of salt-pans the people themselves become minters, converting effort into money, which can then convert goods into other goods. People in general form the basis of coinage, not solely because they arbitrarily agree to use it, but because their work stands behind it.15 Where seals and coins first seemed mere tokens subject

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to individual control, they now appear as social symbols, backed by the labor of a whole people.

Language, in this view, becomes a kind of hoard, wrested from and reinvested in the soil, accumulating as part of a historical process. But this treasure is not easily available for use. Since human beings are themselves part of the treasure, difference and change will always coexist with simple accrual. Any investigation of the hoard will thus discover both continuity and separation. Hymn 28 compares generation and the signing of deeds, the "urge to marry well" and "Cthe wit to invest." In Hymn 4 the poet himself is the result of such investment:

I was invested in mother-earth, the crypt of roots and endings. Child's play. I abode there, bided my time: where the mole

shouldered the clogged wheel, his gold solidus; where dry-dust badgers thronged the Roman flues, the long-unlooked-for mansions of our tribe.

Planted or buried in the same ground as the Roman solidus, he accumulates value, just as money invested in land does. As he says in Hymn 12, "I have accrued a golden / and stinking blaze." Hill's use of the financial metaphor in describing human growth suggests the double meaning in the Greek word tokos, the etymological root of token, which "'came to refer not only to the biological generation of likenesses but also to monetary generation or interest."''6 Actually, Hill aligns three processes: the growth of the child, the process of historical accumulation, and the accrual of interest on money. He implies that the child grows out of the historical accumulation, or capital, as interest grows out of principal. But there is one difference. As Shell points out, both Aristotle and Marx differ- entiate between the exact reduplication of money in the form of interest and the variable reproduction of living beings by natural means.17 The offspring of living beings are never qualitatively identical to their parents, but money is always money. Hill often represents history as a process of simple accumulation, especially in Hymn 7 where a prized model airplane spins "through a hole / in the classroom-floorboards, softly, into the / rat-droppings and coins." But language does not simply accumulate like deposited coins, nor does it reproduce itself exactly. Hill says of Hopkins that he "is drawn down to a double nature within the etymological stratum," where double meanings "lie like shards or bones of 'most




recondite and difficult' matter within the simple hereditary accruals of the vernacular" (LL, 151). Simple accrual coexists with difference and mystery. As an actual child, Hill did not grow as a mere token of his past, though he "dug and hoarded," but instead "fostered a strangeness" (6). To raise beside oneself as a kind of foster-child one's own strangeness from others is the childhood ex- perience related in this hymn. But the contemporary speaker's relationship to the whole of English history, and especially to Offa, its distant exemplar, is also described here. Much later in the sequence, in Hymn 29, that relationship receives its definition: "Not strangeness, but strange likeness."

Thus strangeness and familiarity appear side-by-side when the hoard is investigated.

Their spades grafted through the variably-resistant soil. They clove to the hoard. They ransacked epi- phanies, vertebrae of the chimera, armour of wild bee's larvae. They struck the fire-dragon's fac- eted skin.

(12)

The etymological puns in this verset and the two following align the treasure-hoard with the word-hoard and also express the con- tradictory relationship of human beings to language and the past. In Hymn 12 the diggers plunder the "accruals" of the hoard, but digging down becomes dividing, so that the source doubles as it is uncovered, reacquiring in ambiguity what it has surrendered to the excavation. Much of this ambiguity is contained in the word graft. Hill appears to be stretching back to an Old Norse word meaning "to dig," a word represented in English now by grave.'8 But he must also be referring back to the Greek graph for stylus or pen, so that the diggers become writers and vice versa, their mu- tual ground the ground of language. Even in its modern form in English, however, the graft that derives from the Greek remains double, in that it designates both the slip or scion that physically resembles a pen, and the cut made to receive it. To graft is to cut and join. The very practice of etymological punning grafts, in that it divides while establishing likeness. A pun really is a graft, in this sense, but Hill would go farther to say that "when we quote, we are necessarily engrafting, together with scrupulously accurate formulations, much loose, slang, or imprecise matter and many 'compacted doctrines' " (LL, 142). Instead of the steady accrual of

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the same, what we see here is the grafting of the different, so that the hoard is simultaneously our own and an alien presence.

Hymn 12 exploits an odd class of words to show the ambiguous relationship of speakers and writers to language. Hill echoes the doubleness of "grafted" with "They clove to the hoard." To cleave is also both to join and to divide, so that the line means simultaneously that the diggers cut their way to the treasure and that they were themselves bound to it. The pun suggests exactly what Hill himself is doing here: splitting the language apart so as to expose our bond to it. A similar doubling occurs at the end of the second verset of this hymn: "They are scattered / to your collations, moldywarp. '"Collations" can mean meals, mainly in a monastic context, so that Hill is consigning his diggers to the appetite of the mole. But collations are also collections, so that to be scattered to collations is to be dispersed in order to be recollected. Perhaps recol- lection is precisely what is proposed here, as the mole addressed by his Old English name symbolizes the retentive capacity of the soil, the hoard. It has been suggested that "moldywarp," without the m, is an anagram of "wordplay," but rearrangement is not necessary to import play into the word.'9 Moldywarp means "earth- thrower." The mole is, therefore, like the diggers themselves, a being who divides or breaks open so as to join, to collate.20 Hymn 12 returns to the general monetary metaphor in the last verset: "telluric / cultures enriched with shards, corms, nodules, the / sunk solids of gravity." Here shards become solid, become in fact the "solidus" of Hymn 4, as the earth becomes the sort of bank described in that hymn. The force of these hymns has been to expose the ambiguity of historical enrichment. Hill figures the wealth of the past as both solid coin and broken shards. In performative terms, the economic metaphor suggests that language can both empower and disable, estrange and bind.

In these hymns, Hill adjusts the definition of this bond as he adjusts it in his essay. What first seemed a purely utilitarian relationship now appears as an ambiguous historical tie. Using the same financial metaphor prominent elsewhere in the Hymns, Hill adjusts his definition again until the shackle becomes a covenant. Thus ordinary fiduciary symbols become charged with covenantal significance. When Offa dies, he leaves behind him "memorial vouch- / ers and signs" (27), "coins" and "traces" (30). As signs, coins have a particularly close relationship to vouchers, since both are essentially promises or pledges.2' Shell suggests that the insti-




tution of the down payment derives from the Greeks' insistence that no sale exists unless some money changes hands, thus leading to the expedient of a ceremonial coin signifying the sealing of a contract.22 The same kind of sign can seal the contract between God and man. Calvin calls the sacraments "guarantees [arrhis] and tokens [tesseris]."23 Arrha means "the money used to ratify a contract, earnest-money, a pledge," where such money is actually part of the purchase price, that is, a down payment. The tessera can be, among other things, a monetary token, but it can also be the sort of tally "which was divided between two friends, in order that, by means of it, they or their descendants might always recognize each other. "24 Coins might function as such divided tallies, as is shown by an emblem in Claudius Paradin's Heroicall Devises (1591), showing two hands each holding half of a broken coin.25 Whole, sound coins signify faith, constancy, the fulfillment of promises, so it is no caprice when the Puritan poet Edward Taylor represents the Christian covenant by a coin.26 In such usage, the coin is not merely a particular symbol, but a kind of sign which represents the link between word and deed. The "memorial vouchers and signs," the coins and traces, left after Offa's death are seals of a promise, seals on the "deeds of settlement" in Hymn 28, which allow later generations to "invest in the proper- / ties of healing-springs." Offa's signs, then, appear to be much like Calvin's, seals on a contract or deed, the profit on which is to be water from a healing spring, or, that is to say, everlasting life.27

Hill figures the birth of Christ in similar economic and contrac- tual terms in Hymn 16. In this hymn, Hill conflates the celebration of "Christ's mass" rather naturally with ceremonial gift-giving: "Ambassadors, pilgrims. What is carried over? The / Frankish gift, two-edged, regaled with slaughter." Two-edged in several ways, the Frankish gift combines within itself a kind of coinage, "metal effusing its own fragrance," the mystery of the crucifixion, "the crux a crafts- / man's triumph," and, in "crux," a sense of linguistic mystery. This verset ends with a mention of "other miracles, other / exchanges," a syntactical parallel that suggests that miracles are exchanges. The great Christian metaphor, the sacrificial exchange of god for man on the cross, here takes on an economic character as it is figured by the exchange of goods: "What is / borne amongst them? Too much or too little. In- / dulgences of bartered acclaim; an expenditure." What is born at Christmas compensates for man's poverty in the covenant of works. God's indulgence fills both sides

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of the covenant of grace, which is actually a form of barter with himself, but only because man has nothing of value to bring. Hill here effects an appropriate exchange, replacing Offa, who stood at the intersection of all exchanges earlier in the poem, with Christ, who becomes the master-trope, the medium of transformation. Linguistic exchange now depends not on the raw power of the tyrant but on the covenant between god and man. The bond of language thus has appeared in three different forms, as simple performative, as historical connective, ambiguous and doubtful, and as covenant.

The last sense of the word bond, as covenant or communion, receives its fullest articulation in the three hymns entitled "Opus Anglicanum." In the first of the "Opus Anglicanum" hymns (23), work, community, and a transcendent religion are tightly folded together:

In tapestries, in dreams, they gathered, as it was enacted, the return, the re-entry of transcendence into this sublunary world. Opus Anglicanum, their stringent mystery riddled by needles: the silver veining, the golf leaf, voluted grape-vine, master- works of treacherous thread.

There is a gathering here in both a temporal and a spatial sense. The workers are gathered together in space, and as a group, it seems, they gather together the earthly and the heavenly, the past of Christ's actual presence and the future of his return. The first sentence of this verset seems to cover as completely as possible all the meanings of "communion." The workers who trudge forth in the last verset of this hymn may or may not be the producers of the embroidery, but they too are gathered: their lamps grow "plump with oily re- / liable light." To rely, as a transitive verb, means to gather, from the Latin ligare, to bind. Hill divides the line so as to expose the word "liable" within "reliable," as if to underscore the almost legalistic basis of this community. For ligare, at least in the conjectural etymology given by Vico and others, is also the root of "religion," which binds together a group of individuals into a gathered church by the bond Christ gives in promising to return.28 This reliable light is clearly the word of God, fiat lux, the first word as well as the first performative.




Communion does not, however, rule out the equal and opposite force of division. The stitching of the embroidery divides and joins just as simultaneously, as etymologically, as did the digging of Hymn 12. The "mystery," perhaps the religious mystery, perhaps the mystery of their lives, is stringent. There is an easy pun here on string, the "treacherous thread" of the workmanship, which, in being treacherous, is also stringent, or difficult. Etymologically, though, stringent means "tightly enfolding," so this is yet another of the many words in this poem reducible to bond. And yet this stringency, this bond, is "riddled," or pierced by needles. Ob- viously, embroidery works by piercing, by opening so as to stitch together. This riddling is also clearly mental, since the word as a transitive verb can mean to interpret. To interpret is to pierce, or open, the closed, the mysterious. And yet what is described here is a continuous complementary opening and closing.

All these ambiguities come to press most substantially on the phrase "as it was enacted," which is suspended grammatically between two possibilities. Read in one way, the phrase describes the promise of Christ's return, a legalistic "enactment" like the contracts described elsewhere in the sequence. This enactment must be one of the most problematic of performatives, since its "felicity," to use Austin's term, hinges not on commonplace powers and contexts but on the reliability of God. Read in another way, however, the phrase can mean that the workers gather according to some enactment, or, more importantly, that their gathering is the enactment of the promised return. "For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matthew 18:20). Their art, and by extension the art of poetry, is an act in the sense that it participates in the fulfillment of a massive promise. But the grammatical and syntactical play of the sentence both promises and withholds such a consummation. "Gath- ered" looks intransitive on first glance and then seems transitive, if "the return" is not to be read as an appositive. Conflated, the two possibilities suggest that their gathering together is a garnering of the promised return, and thus a real act, but there is perhaps no reason to conflate them. In its difficulty, Hill's poetry seems to be insisting on another difficulty, on the difficult situation of the Christian, who is both part of and separate from an eternal church.

The next of the "Opus Anglicanum" hymns (24) concerns a single worker, a medieval stonemason:

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Itinerant through numerous domains, of his lord's retinue, to Compostela. Then home for a lifetime amid West Mercia this master-mason as I envisage him, intent to pester upon tympanum and chancel- arch his moody testament, confusing warrior with lion, dragon-coils, tendrils of the stony vine.

Like its predecessor, this hymn contains the language of dispersal and communion. The mason first wanders through many coun- tries) and then returns home to his own, first part of a retinue, then working alone. 'fOf his lord's retinue" rather ambiguously suggests "of his Lord's retinue," as the stonemason makes his pil- grimage to the holy spot of Compostela. Even alone, the stonemason is part of this retinue, and his lonely work remains part of the gathered church in its celebration of the promise: "Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum." It may be that the stonemason sepa- rates himself from the rest in order to enjoy this larger communion. Like the tapestry-makers, in any case, he opens in order to close. The verb "to pester" can mean to annoy, to cover with blows, or to crowd. By chipping away, the sculptor crowds figures onto his stone canvas, cutting the stone, but fusing warrior, lion, dragon and vine.

The most revealing etymological excursion, however, is to be taken by way of testament. The stonework is the mason's last will, in a way, and testimony of his faith, but it is also a sign of the covenant. Testamentum is Christian Latin for diathiki, the Greek word chosen to represent the Hebrew berith. The Hebrew signifies the sort of promise God makes to Abraham. The Greek is essentially a business or commercial term, applied to contracts and wills. In both doctrinal and linguistic terms, then, testament means covenant. The Geneva Bible includes a marginal note "sign of the new covenant" in certain situations, Luke 22:20, for example, where the King James Version uses the word testament. In a usage even closer to Hill's Wycliff often uses boond in similar situations.29 The point of the etymology is that a testament is a bond or covenant. The artworks of the stonemason are his statement that his word is his bond. They represent half of a contract, the other half of which is carried out by Christ "mumming child Adam out of Hell." But the stonework is also a bond with convention, with the "<retinue." It is in fact only through that convention that the contract or agreement acquires its force. In carving, the




stonemason makes a promise and that promise is effected by the religious conventions of society.30

The last of the "Opus Anglicanum" poems (25) arrives at an utterance even Austin would recognize:

Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg.

This is Hill's own "moody testament." It seems to be a perfectly good example of illocution, perhaps on the most rudimentary level possible, since every statement must contain an implicit "I speak this." And yet Hill's pledge is a good deal more ambiguous than most Austinian performatives. The status of the "I" who speaks has been rendered unclear by the whole of the sequence, which mixes speakers and protagonists with no respect for person or chro- nology. Hill's grandmother did in fact work at a nailmaker's, so the hymn can be turned into autobiography.3' But great pains have been taken in the sequence to make the "I" historically ambiguous, suspended between the ancient Offa and the contemporary poet. The poet bears a "strange likeness" not only to Offa but to his own past self. To return to the terms of Hill's essay, the ability of the poet to speak unambiguously in his own voice is question- able. Hill, however, pretends to do here no more than what Pound does in Homage to Sextus Propertius, "taking his stand among these." As Hill says, this stand confesses the poet's sense of being "elegiacally aware of the tragic farce of being bound." In speaking in this hymn, Hill invokes not his own identity, but that of his past, the social world from which his words come.

The middle two versets of the hymn make it clear that the act Hill has in mind cannot be a purely private one, nor is the bond unambiguously positive. As in all the other hymns considered here, there is a simultaneous rending and joining, an ambiguity contained originally in Ruskin's bizarre neo-Latin. Ruskin defines clavigera as meaning a club-bearer, a key-bearer, and a nail- bearer. Thus Ruskin's Fortune opens, as with a key, and closes, as with a nail.32 Hill is most concerned with the last of these, but even the nail is not a simple bond. Denotatively, the hymn is Hill's confession of his bond to the past, to the world of his grandmother. Without such a bond to the collective past, the sort of bond that is

Michael North 477



both defined and confessed throughout "Opus Anglicanum," Hill's version of illocution cannot work, nor can Hill's poetry have the impact he wants. But none of these hymns are simple celebrations of English toil:

It is one thing to celebrate the "quick forge," another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire.

(25)

If the nail is manufactured so as to join, and if it does so in a historic sense in Hill's meditation, it can also cut. If wage labor joins together a working class, it does so only by a general wounding. This scar, this join that signifies a cut, is perhaps the best, though the most oblique, of Hill's versions of the bond. The covenant is not in Hill's sense a simple communion. Instead it is a scar. Hymn 25 exhibits the scar, which is both the mark seared into the face of the nail-worker, and the mark seared into the poet by his past. To confess in this way that one is wounded, that one's life and language are both implicated elsewhere, is to convert a poem into an act.

It is appropriate, given the financial or monetary basis of many of the Hymns, that this final conversion should also be economic in character. For the solidarity Hill seems to be accepting in this hymn falls within the context of Ruskin's Fors; as in Hymn 11, linguistic and financial value both come from the work of people. As Marx puts it in the Grundrisse, money is, in a capitalist society, a "social bond": "The individual carries his social power, as well as his bond with society, in his pocket. > 3 Money in the form of collat- eral is capable of binding people in contracts because it is an ob- jectified and alienated version of their own social relations.34 Though this "<objective bond" is rigid and oppressive, by its very existence it presents the possibility of "real community and gener- ality," to be achieved by confronting the specious ties that are the only real bond in society at this stage.35 In "Our Word Is Our Bond" Hill proposes that the shackle of language can become, in a similar dialectic, a covenant. Mercian Hymns renders, obliquely and darkly, the creation of that covenant.

University of California, Los Angeles




NOTES I would like to thank my colleagues A. R. Braunmuller, Robert W Dent, and espe-

cially Calvin Bedient for help and advice without which this would have been a far less satisfactory essay.

1 The literature here is too vast to summarize. In addition to works cited below see, for example, Mary Louise Pratt, Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1977); Richard Ohmann, "Speech, Literature and the Space Between," New Literary History 4 (Autumn 1972): 47-63; Stanley Fish, "How to Do Things with Austin and Searle: Speech Act Theory and Literary Criti- cism," in Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980), 197-245; and Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), 52-66.

2 Jacques Derrida, "Signature Event Context," Glyph 1 (1977): 172-97, and "Lim- ited, Inc.," Glyph 2 (1977): 162-254. See also John Searle's reply, "Reiterating the Differences," Glyph 1 (1977): 198-208, and Jonathan Culler's commentary, "Conven- tion and Meaning: Derrida and Austin," New Literary History 13 (Autumn 1981): 15-30.

3 Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, tr. Cath- erine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1983), and Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven, Yale Univ. Press, 1979).

4 J. L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words, ed. J. 0. Urmson and Marina Sbisa (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1962), 10.

5 Geoffrey Hill, Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1984), 140. Further citations will be identified in the text as LL. Notable essays that take up the problem of language as discussed in Hill's prose include Eric Griffiths, "Hill's Criticism: a life of form," in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work, ed. Peter Robinson (Milton Keynes, England: Open Univ. Press, 1985), 172-84; Donald Davie, "Fallen Language," London Review of Books, June 21, 1984, 10; and Peter Robinson, "Difficult Situations," English 33 (Summer 1984): 167-76.

6 J. L. Austin, Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 181-82. 7 As Derrida puts it, "performative communication becomes once more the commu-

nication of an intentional meaning, even if that meaning has no referent in the form of a thing or a prior or exterior state of things." "Signature Event Context," 189. See also Culler, 23, and Austin, How To Do Things With Words, 122.

8 In this sense, Hill is simply exploiting speech act theory's own reliance on context and convention. As John Searle puts it, "speaking a language is everywhere permeated with the fact of commitments undertaken, obligations assumed, cogent arguments presented, and so on." Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1970), 197-98. But Hill insists, in contradistinction to Austin, that conventions are compli- cating and restricting as well as clarifying.

9 Geoffrey Hill, "The Conscious Mind's Intelligible Structure: A Debate," Agenda, 9.4/10.1 (Autumn/Winter 1971/1972): 21.

10 This definition of the literary speech act is much like the one offered by Wolfgang Iser in terms of fiction in"The Reality of Fiction: A Functionalist Approach to Litera- ture," New Literary History 7 (Autumn 1975): 13-14, and by Terry Eagleton, very briefly, in "Brecht and Rhetoric," New Literary History 16 (Spring 1985): 633. Such a definition, in which literary utterances become performative by opening up the con- flicts within the social context of language, seems to preserve a good deal more of Austin's original insight than the versions offered by Felman and de Man. These take advantage of the fact that Austin's performative lacks the truth-value of the constative, but without respecting the corollary, that the performative is more bound to context than the constative. See Austin, How To Do Things With Words, 145-46.

11 The prominence of coins in the sequence has often been noted, but they have

Michael North 479



been discussed primarily as archaeological artifacts, not as signs with an important relationship to language. See Martin Dodsworth, "Mercian Hymns: Offa, Charle- magne, and Geoffrey Hill," in Robinson, 50-53; Thomas H. Getz, "Geoffrey Hill's Mercian Hymns and Lachrimae: The Language of History and Faith," Modern Poetry Studies 10 (Spring 1980): 5-9; and A. Kingsley Weatherhead, The British Dissonance: Essays on Ten Contemporary Poets (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1983), 84-88. One essay that does explore some of the possibilities of the money-language relation is Peter Robinson's "Reading Geoffrey Hill," in Robinson, 204-9. See especially Rob- inson's conclusion: "it is context, both within writing and in the implied occasion of utterance, that can limit the meanings and values in exchange, help settle the condition of trust" (209).

12 Geoffrey Hill, Mercian Hymns (London: Deutsch, 1971). This edition is unpaged. Therefore, citations will be identified in the text by hymn number.

13 Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978), 35; 11-36.

14 As Shell points out, the money-language trope is as old as Zeno. See The Economy of Literature, 38, and Money, Language and Thought: Literary and Philo- sophical Economies from the Medieval to the Modern Era (Berkeley: Univ. of Cali- fornia Press, 1982), 1-4.

15 Hill's choice among the possible bases of currency agrees with that of Marx, who also derides the empiricist dogma that money is a conventional token. Marx says instead that money is "the form under which certain social relations manifest them- selvs." Capital, tr. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (New York: Random House, 1906), 1:103.

16 Shell, The Economy of Literature, 93. See also Money, Language, and Thought, 132. For one classical citation, see Plato The Republic 507. In his Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), Hill has changed "accrued" to "raked up."

17 Aristotle decries usury because it is not natural for money to beget money, as animals beget animals (Politics 1258b). As Shell shows, natural reproduction is economic, in Aristotle's terms, while monetary reproduction is chrematistic; in the latter the offspring are identical to the parent. Marx makes the same point about surplus value, which is both the "son" of original value and identical to its father (Capital, 1: 172). Marx cites the tokos pun on 183. In "The Conscious Mind's Intelligible Struc- ture," Hill quotes approvingly Jacques Maritain's denunciation of "two unnatural prin- ciples: the fecundity of money and the finality of the useful" (15). The context, Mari- tain's Art and Scholasticism, suggests a Christian version of Aristotle's prejudice against interest.

18 All etymological information in this essay is derived from the OED. 19 Michael Edwards, "Hill's imitations," in Robinson, 168. Edwards makes the point

about the etymology as well, and also discusses the ways in which etymological excur- sions dig as moles do.

20 Here Hill approaches Derrida's use of "graft" in "Signature Event Context," 182. The general discussion should make clear how Hill differs from Derrida in essential assumptions. See also Christopher Ricks's discussion of the hyphen in "At-one-ment," in The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984): "the variably-resistant hyphen at once joins and divides, at once grafts and grafts through" (326).

21 Marx calls money a "social pledge" (Capital, 1:147). 2 Shell, The Economy of Literature, 33-35. 23 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. Mitchell and tr.

Ford Lewis Battles (London: S. C. M. Press, 1941), 2:1361. 24 Charlton L. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1969). 25 The Heroicall Devises of M. Claudius Paradin (London: W Kearney, 1591; rpt.

Delmar, New York: Scholars' Facsimiles, 1984), 15. This emblem tradition is also the basis of D. H. Lawrence's poem "Troth with the Dead."




26 The sound coin as an emblem of faith, constancy or honesty is proverbial. See Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1960), 678 (T448) and 266 (G284), and Oxford Dictionary of English Proverbs, rev. F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Clar- endon Press, 1970), 834. The ultimate source of the equation of faith and good gold is perhaps I Peter 1:7. This proverb is illustrated by a coin in a number of emblem books, including Paradin, 213 (which appears in Pericles 2.2.36-38), and Otto van Veen (Vaenius), Amorum Emblemata (Antwerp, 1608; rpt., New York: Garland, 1979), 45. For examples in Edward Taylor, see Preparatory Meditations in The Poems of Edward Taylor, ed. Donald Stanford (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), 1.6, 2.105, and 2.106.

27 Calvin specifically equates the sacraments with "the seals which are attached to government documents and other public acts" (1280). In the eighth sonnet of "An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England," Hill associates a "signet-seal's unostentatious gem" with the "durable covenant." Tenebrae (London: Deutsch, 1978), 29.

28 See Isaiah Berlin, Vico and Herder (London: Hogarth, 1976), 74. 29 See the massive entry on testament in the OED. 30 Terry Eagleton has suggested that quibbles about felicity resemble debates over

"sacramental validity" (Literary Theory [Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1983], 118). In a similar spirit, Peter Robinson contends, quite acutely, that it is because of Hill's suspicion of the reader "that literary success is defined in metaphysical analogies: atonement, transfiguration, redemption" ("Difficult Situations," 176). Hill, however, says that the "menace" in "Poetry as 'Menace' and 'Atonement' " "is entirely devoid of sublimity: it is meanly experiential rather than grandly mythical" (LL, 15). Perhaps atonement as well can be considered in these earthly terms.

31 John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation (London: Faber, 1981), 76. 32 "Clavigera, Nail bearing; or, in the full idea, nail-and-hammer bearing; driving

the iron home with hammer-stroke, so that nothing shall be moved; and fastening each of us to the Cross we have chosen to carry." Fors Clavigera (London: George Allen, 1892), 2: letter 13:3. In letter 2, Ruskin illustrates clavigera as a "portress at a gate which she cannot open till you have waited long" (2: letter 2:3). Ruskin's reference seems to be St. Lucy in Canto 9 of Dante's Purgatory.

3 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, tr. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Vintage, 1973), 156-57.

3 Marx, Grundrisse, 160. 35 Marx, Grundrisse, 162, 161. It should be noted that Marx questions the lan-

guage-money equation in this passage.

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