GH further
Not that I agree, necessarily, with what I wrote here. Mallory-Raine is right that you have to give a lot of time to the Writings, and if you repeatedly find yourself with meagre rewards, and you don’t agree with me that the book is obviously of significant merit, your dismissal is justified enough. The idea that ‘The exegesis itself assumes, anticipates, expects the reverent industrious exegete’ is fairly accurate—the one blankly wrong part is ‘reverent’—but it does betray the critic’s own lack of industry in its failure to address or even to acknowledge Hill’s arguments for his demanding form. I concede that he sort of wants to be accused from all quarters even as I maintain that he is worth accusing, if attention must ensue from that. Mallory-Raine’s ‘peevish murmur’, not a point to be debated, makes immediate to me the gulf between us: I cannot see how it can come from anyone who has better than skimmed the book; ‘rhetorical bravado’ and ‘showmanship first’ are closer to the mark in their recognition of Hill’s disregard for Point-Evidence-Explain (eg his sense of Leviathan as elegy) and his way of putting contempt in the atmosphere without assuming a posture of attack, but their denial to Hill’s prose of substance in and beside its audacity is dumbfounding. It’s true, Mallory-Raine gives a serviceable description of the work, but since ‘Each is inclined to treat weakness as strength and strength as weakness’, I value what he describes and he does not. I’d advise him: If your critical dildo isn’t yet worn with probing, try to use the urge to dismiss Hill provokes in you as the point of access you desiderate. The work rewards work. It is, actually, profound. One final, cheap point against a critic who affects to like ‘linear thought’ so much, yet writes: ‘Where many critics attempt to engage their readers in a dialogue, Hill explores subjects unlikely to expose their author to a broad readership.’ (1) How egregious a nonsequitur is this! (2) How far is ‘“Perplexed Persistence”: The Exemplary Failure of T. H. Green’ actually about T. H. Green? There was my thesis statement.
