Return Of Reader

Elizabeth Freund

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136496486
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First Published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. 'New Accents' is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change. To stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.

Part I

Precursors

1

Richards revisited

sure a poet is a sage;
A humanist, Physician to all men.

(Keats, The Fall of Hyperion)

It is often said that modern Anglo-American criticism begins with the early work of I. A. Richards. This enabling fiction of a ‘beginning’ is conveniently located in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), the book which is at once the seminal theorization of reader-oriented criticism and a brief for the literary critical culture of the following decades. Yet Principles of Literary Criticism is also in many respects the belated culmination of Victorian earnestness, a redefinition of the Arnoldian valorization of culture as the bulwark against encroaching anarchy. Its message, informed by an urgent vision of the value of art as a preparation for life, is unequivocal. Poems are the unacknowledged legislators of order, and poetry is a means of overcoming chaos; it will ‘save us’ if we fulfil our responsibility of raising the standard of response.

‘The raising of the standard of response is as immediate a problem as any, and the arts are the chief instruments by which it may be raised or lowered’ (1924, p. 234). Richards’s own emphasis on the threat of deteriorating response is expressive of his acute sense not only of the ill-effects of poor art and sub-culture, but also of the serious dangers accruing from a decline in the quality and usefulness of our instruments of communication, without which mutual understanding between people(s) cannot take place. In the Ricardian defence of poetry, the role of the arts is very directly and intimately linked to the future welfare of humanity, for an understanding of the arts implies an understanding of the human mind. Such intelligence would enable the perfectibility of communication, response and, ultimately, of human action. On this point Richards is emphatic: what happens in the imaginative experience may modify all the rest of life:

if we would understand the place of the arts in civilization we must consider them closely. An improvement of response is the only benefit which any one can receive, and the degradation, the lowering of a response, is the calamity.

(p. 237)

Although the experience of art, for Richards, is definitely, even defiantly, continuous with the rest of our experience, it nevertheless remains a privileged category in his account. Art’s peculiar virtue as an experience lies in the authorization of free mental play, empowering the untrammelled release of response which eventually resolves itself in a highly organized disposition of elements. The response to art achieves a completion rarely obtainable elsewhere. Experiences of art and play are, for better or worse,

the most formative of experiences, because in them the development and systematisation of our impulses goes to the furthest lengths. In ordinary life a thousand considerations prohibit for most of us any complete working out of our response.… We have to jump to some rough and ready solution. But in the ‘imaginative experience’ these obstacles are removed. Thus what happens here, what precise stresses and preponderances, conflicts, resolutions and interinanimations, what remote relationships between different systems of impulses arise, what before unapprehended and in-executable connections are established, is a matter which, we see clearly, may modify all the rest of life

(pp. 237–8)

Ideally, the reading of poems is a privileged participation in the freedom of the imaginative experience. It leads to the practice of a fullness of response in other areas of experience. We should read life, Richards is suggesting, as responsively, as fully and as freely as we read poems. And with response begins responsibility.

In retrospect, the centrality in Richards’s writings of an abiding concern with language and the value of affect reveals an astonishing juncture of germinal (but also aborted) lines of inquiry which post-Ricardian theories of reading have engaged. Richards was a noble theoretician for all seasons, the extent of whose manifold interests cannot (and indeed, need not) be exhaustively represented here. I have therefore necessarily isolated for consideration only a few of those aspects which are instrumental in shaping this narrative, and which return as its leitmotiv.

Principles of literary criticism

The critic’s foremost responsibility, as Richards perceived it in the early 1920s, was to clean up the verbal and philosophic situation in order to redefine the aesthetic realm and the aims of literary criticism.¹ His first projects, therefore, Foundations of Aesthetics (1921) and The Meaning of Meaning (1923), written in collaboration with C.K. Ogden, set out to map the territory where philosophy, linguistics, psychology and aesthetics meet. Then, impelled by the post-war sense of social and cultural crisis, he sought in Principles of Literary Criticism to foster a general revival of art, and to place aesthetics on a new footing adequate to the blunted sensibilities and epistemological uncertainties of a troubled twentieth century.

For a start, the issue of response was to be neither falsely aestheticized nor idealized. The Meaning of Meaning had argued that language is a system of signs and that an activity of interpretation underlies all thinking and communication. When interpretation is understood as ‘a psychological reaction to a sign’ then clearly the question of the reader’s role must be engaged in other than the traditional categories which reify a ‘phantom aesthetic state’. What Richards believed to be necessary was the rethinking of a theory of value and a theory of communication purged of all transcendental and metaphysical presuppositions.

Principles starts off with the task of demystifying the ‘bogus entities’ and ‘hypostatized words’ (p. 40) that had bedevilled antecedent projects of aesthetics in order to show that the value of art requires neither ethical nor metaphysical ideas for its justification. The ‘aesthetic experience’ sui generis, Richards argues, is a non-existent ‘phantom’. Since all art is a mode of experience, no different in kind from any other mode of experience, the object of inquiry must be the work of the mind, as instrument of response and communication, rather than the work of art as sacrosanct, autonomous object.

We are accustomed to say that a picture is beautiful, instead of saying that it causes an experience in us which is valuable in certain ways … we continually talk as though things possess certain qualities, when what we ought to say is that they cause effects in us of one kind or another [and] the fallacy of ‘projecting’ the effect and making it a quality of its cause tends to recur.

(pp. 20–1, my emphasis).

To rid ourselves of this fallacy, the new theory of criticism must distinguish between what Richards calls technical remarks, which refer to the object, and critical remarks, which are about the value of the experience (p. 23). This position, far from being an appeal to subjectivity, is essentially anti-subjectivist; its purpose is to introduce and make possible a chastened and objective – one might even call it a pseudo-scientific – mode of critical discourse whose precision will be free of the impressionistic and subjectivist excesses of late-nineteenth-century writing.

But Richards evades the difficulties of the metalanguage to which he aspires by failing to determine its relationship to the object of study. The distinction between technical and critical remarks, for example, authorizes a separation between literary object and reading subject, a separation which the theory wishes to deny. It concedes the independent existence of a literary artefact about which technical remarks may be made, but also puts this independence in question by the appeal to critical remarks which are required to bring into being (‘project’) the literary artefact. This submerged ambiguity puts in doubt the ‘objectivity’ of the critical metalanguage and its concepts. The problem comes out into the open in Richards’s later work, which abandoned the hypothesis of neurophysiological causality to embrace a Coleridgean theory of mind, seeking to locate the epistemological moment in a coincidence or coalescence of an Object with a Subject. The act of knowing, in this view, is a kind of creation which ‘makes no discoveries except in the sense of discovering what it has made’ (Coleridge On Imagination, 1934, p. 49). As we shall see, it is frequently the inaugural gesture of contemporary reader-response criticisms to posit some version of this coalescence, but the nagging dualism of literary object and reading subject remains vexed. It continued to haunt Richards’s relatively rare examples of close readings, and looms large in Practical Criticism (1929), the companion volume to Principles.

Indeed, Richards’s early theory of communication cannot do without the duality. ‘The two pillars upon which a theory of criticism must rest are an account of value and an account of communication’ (1924, p. 23), he declared, for ‘the arts are the supreme form of the communicative activity’ (p. 26) as well as ‘our storehouse of recorded values’ (p. 32). In setting forth these twinned accounts, Richards negotiated an extremely precarious rhetorical balance between scepticism and idealism, between the determinate character of the literary object and the freedom of the reading subject, between the life of culture and the life of nature.

To begin with, his account of value is grounded in a reductive and dogmatized utilitarianism. ‘What is good or valuable is the exercise of impulses and the satisfaction of their appetencies’ (p. 58); anything that satisfies an appetency without frustrating some equal or more important appetency is valuable. Underlying this supposedly universal economy of balanced satisfaction and composure is Richards’s unshakable conviction that ‘our impulses must have some order, some organization or we do not live ten minutes without disaster’ (1970, p. 40). Art is a supreme example of such ‘order’, and the value of art lies in its practical and theoretically quantifiable effects in organizing our minds; and even though ‘we do not know enough yet about … that unimaginable organization, the mind, to say what order in any case actually exists, or between what the order holds’, we do, nevertheless, ‘know that a growing order is the principle of the mind’ (1924, p. 50).

This principle, Richards claims, is most fully realized in works of art which organize the confusion that is experience. Experience itself is nothing other than an exposure to the pressures of a chaotic multitude of disorderly stimuli which find their most intricate and satisfying reconciliation in the mind of the artist who ‘is the point at which the growth of the mind shows itself.… His work is the ordering of what in most minds is disordered’ (p. 61). Richards believed that, provided we share a fund of common experience, the artist’s product (poem, picture, piece of music) is undoubtedly, though perhaps never completely, communicable; not, of course, as strict transference or a participation in an identical experience, but as a transmissible paradigm of exemplary order. The recipient’s experience of art in turn becomes a therapeutic reflection of/upon the metamorphosis from relative chaos to relative order, from confusion to a state of composed equilibrium.

Poetry is meliorative because it is a purveyor not of Truth or Beauty, but of mental health. A poem is not a meaning but a means of achieving an ordered balance and composure of impulses. Unlike the verbal structures of science, which point to things systematically and neutrally, the value of poems is neural: maximum cathexis combined with minimum frustration. Richards’s notorious declaration that poems consist of ‘pseudo-statements’ was to outrage the New Critics by its denial of cognitive value to poetry, although they were not averse to the distinction between emotive and referential language from which it derives. In contrast to scientific statements, the statements of poetry are neither true nor false; they do not mediate knowledge, and their value is not measured by standards of verifiability or conformity to empirical facts, but by their psychological, therapeutic and civilizing effects. By extension, a poetic utterance is, for Richards, non-existent ‘in itself. Nor is literality or pure referentiality ever a feature of poetic discourse. Poems are always in a context, in a scene of ‘interinanimation’ – a word that Richards was particularly fond of repeating.

Geoffrey Hartman has aptly described Richards as a ‘classicist of the nervous system’ with decidedly romantic leanings towards a ‘dream of communication’ (1975, p. 30). Even in his early phase, Richards was a devout Coleridgean with respect to the doctrine of the Imagination as the faculty which reconstitutes the flux of our minds into an orderly cosmos. Paradoxically, this romantic faculty becomes the medium for the neoclassicist ‘rage for order’ that underwrites all Richards’s theoretical speculations. But whether the Imagination is a property of the mind of its maker or the mind of its reader is a question over which Richards constantly shifts ground in Principles. Evidently his rudimentary and oversimplified theory of communication is not really distinguishable from his theory of value, and both theories converge in a mechanistic model of stimulus and response (see Principles, p. 116).

It is frequently claimed that Richards’s thinking underwent an epistemological shift in the mid-1930s, away from positivism towards hermeneutics. Be that as it may, the later Richards² remains an evangelist of arduous reading, committed to the dialectical ‘audit of meaning’ (1955, p. 168), to the consonance and reciprocity of hermeneutic theory and practice, and to a renewed scrutiny of the symbolic machinery we construct to enable the acts of mediation we call comprehension. ‘We must, if possible, gain some power of diagnosis, some understanding of the risks that interpretations run.… Sooner or later interpretation will have to be recognized as a key-subject.… We must make ourselves aware of how the language we so much depend upon works’ (1929, pp. 315, 317, 319). He urges us to welcome rather than fear the instability of meaning; the anxiety of misunderstanding gives way to fresh speculation about the way ‘words wander in many directions in [the] figurative space of meaning’ (1955, p. 77).³ That they do so ‘systematically’ is one of many casual Ricardian anticipations of later theory (the conduct of floating signifiers, for example) uttered well before post-Saussurean doctrines became a commonplace of our critical vocabularies.

The canonical precursor of New Critical doctrine is rarely remembered for his undoctrinaire essayistic reflections on the uncertainties of comprehension, and perhaps that is why today his parenthetical observations (‘–it is worth recalling that grammar takes its name from writing –’ (1936, p. 47)) spring into new prominence in a reading consciousness shaped by grammatology. His use of specialized quotation marks, for example, becomes in retrospect a precursive gesture of placing words if not quite under erasure then at least in a frame calculated to heighten consciousness of their problematic rhetorical functions. (For a concise summary of the types of quotation marks see Richards, 1970, pp. 100–4). Reading the mythologies of primitive peoples or of our own bourgeois culture like a language, constructing a post-Freudian psycho-aesthetics, reading the unconscious (also like a language), demystifying the figural or rhetorical structures of literary language are not projects that we trace directly to Richards. Refracted through New Critical borrowings, his name is indelibly associated with our most common working definition of metaphor as consisting of ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’; with the orthodoxy of ‘practical criticism’; with a distinction between emotive and referential language; and with many other household terms in the discourse of English Studies. This is partly due to Richards’s own zeal in translating his heterodox ideas into operative pedagogical instruments. Nevertheless, the forgotten terms of his discussion of metaphor – the verbal phenomenon which, for Richards, was never a deviant or added power of language but rather its omnipresent principle and constitutive form (1936, p. 90) – are still vital. Metaphor, he also says parenthetically, is another name for what the psychoanalysts call ‘transference’ so that a ‘command of metaphor’ will go deep into ‘the control of the world that we make for ourselves to live in’ (p. 135). The New Critical appropriation of Richards as a precursor, his successors’ adoption and adaptation of the more rigid technicalities offered as aids to practical criticism, effectively repressed this explicit equation of language with trope and its linkage with the life of the psyche, as it repressed or obscured other seminal but at the time unassimilable Ricardian ideas.

Practical criticism

What difference does theory make? Between the possession of ideas and their application, Richards noted shrewdly, there is a gulf. As in the act of interpretation, however much evidence we amass, we still have to jump to our conclusions.

Practical Criticism came into being as an attempt to explore and regulate the act of negotiating the gulf. Richards believed that ‘critical principles … need wary handling.… Everything turns on how the principles are applied. It is to be feared that critical formulas, even the best, are responsible for more bad judgement than good’ (pp. 10–11). The alarming prospect that the superiority of principles does not necessarily yield superior evaluations actually threatens to subvert the undertaking which this warning introduces. But Richards assumes that the threat can be controlled. ‘Everything turns on how the principles are applied.’ It is this ‘turn’ which largely generates the central ideas and strategies of Practical Criticism for bridging and unifying ‘principles’ and ‘practice’. It also opens, as I hope to show, a critical division within Richards’s project which subsequently enabled his New Critical followers to discard the principles whilst assimilating the practice of his theory of reading.

In point of historical fact, the New Critical investiture of method consigned Practical Criticism to the textbook shelf, thereby obscuring its legitimate place within the ranks of twentieth-century studies in what Richards called ‘the natural history of human opinions and feelings’ (p. 3).

In part then this book is the record of a piece of field work in comparative ideology. But I hope, not only to present an instructive collection of contemporary opinions, presuppositions, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• General editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: the order of reading
• Part I Precursors
• Part II Reader-response criticisms
• In conclusion: reading reading
• Notes
• References
• Further reading
• Index