Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Prof: Okay.
Moving then as quickly as possible into our subject matter
for today, we begin a series of lectures
on various aspects of twentieth-century formalism--
a big word.
At the end of our run through the varieties of
twentieth-century formalism, I hope it doesn't seem quite as
big and that its many meanings-- yet a finite number of
meanings--have been made clear to you.
That is to say, what we're taking up this week,
is as much really the history of criticism as literary theory.
You remember in the first lecture I said there's a
difference between the history of criticism and theory of
literature, one difference being that the
history of criticism has a great deal to do with literary
evaluation: that is to say, why do we care about literature
and how can we find means of saying that it's good or not
good?
This is an aspect of thought concerning literature that tends
to fall out of literary theory but not out of the materials
that we are reading this week.
You can see that when Wimsatt and Beardsley talk about the
"success" of the poem,
they understand the whole critical enterprise,
including its theoretical underpinnings--
the question of what is a poem, the question of how should we
best read it-- to be still geared toward
literary evaluation.
That makes the subject matter that we'll be discussing this
week, as I say, as much a part of the history
of criticism as it is of literary theory.
We're going to be reading it with a theoretical
spin.
That is to say, we're going to focus on the
question of what a poem is and the question,
"What criteria should we invoke in order to read it for
the best and correctly?"
But there are other ways of approaching this material.
In any case, then, Wimsatt.
Beardsley by the way was actually a philosopher who
taught at Temple University, a good friend of his.
In the book in which the essay "The Intentional
Fallacy" appeared, a book called The Verbal
Icon, Wimsatt collaborated with Monroe Beardsley on three
essays, and this is one of them.
So we try to remember to say "Wimsatt and
Beardsley" even though it is Wimsatt who
taught at Yale.
That in itself needn't be significant except that the New
Critics, the school of critics to which
he belonged, have always been identified
with Yale and indeed consolidated here a kind of
teaching method and attitude toward literature which
constituted the first wave-- the first of two waves--of
involvement in literary theory which amounts to the Yale
English and comparative literature departments' claims
to fame.
Many of those figures who belong to the New Critics did
much of their important work before they arrived at Yale.
Others never were at Yale, and yet at the same time it's a
movement closely associated with this institution.
When I arrived at Yale, Wimsatt was still teaching,
Cleanth Brooks was still teaching, and so I feel a kind
of personal continuity with these figures and understand,
as we all will more fully later on,
the way in which the style, and emphasis on the style,
of close reading that evolved within the New Criticism
meaningfully and importantly left its mark on much subsequent
criticism and theory that hasn't in fact always acknowledged the
New Criticism perhaps to the extent that it might have.
Much of this should be reserved for next time when I talk about
Cleanth Brooks and return to the whole subject of the New
Criticism and the way in which it's viewed historically--
so much of it can be reserved for next time.
But what I do want to say now is this.
If it weren't for the New Critics, none of you probably
would have been able to sit patiently through any of your
middle or high school English classes.
When Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren published a book
called Understanding Poetry, first published in 1939 and
then subsequently reissued again and again and again as it swept
the country, suddenly schoolteachers had a
way of keeping kids in the classroom for fifty minutes.
Close reading, the idea that you could take a
text and do things with it-- that the interpretation of a
text wasn't just a matter of saying,
"Oh, yes, it's about this and isn't it
beautiful?"-- reciting the text,
emoting over it, enthusing about it,
and then looking around for something else to say--
it was no longer a question of doing that.
It was a question of constructing an elaborate formal
edifice to which everybody could contribute.
Students got excited about it.
They saw certain patterns or certain ways of elaborating
patterns that the teachers were talking about and,
lo and behold, the fifty minutes was over and
everybody had had a pretty good time.
This had never happened in an English class before.
>
>
Seriously, you're English majors because of the New
Criticism--I admit, especially if you went to
private school.
This way of teaching did not perhaps quite so much for a
variety of reasons permeate public school literature
teaching, but it was simply,
as a result of Understanding Poetry,
the way to go.
It took time.
If you had more than fifty minutes,
you could actually make ample use of it.
T.S. Eliot, who was in many ways associated
with the New Criticism, one of its intellectual
forebears, nevertheless took a somewhat dim view of it and
called it "lemon squeezer criticism."
What this meant is it takes time.
You've got to squeeze absolutely everything out of it,
and so it was ideal from the standpoint of teaching and was,
it seems to me, also wonderfully galvanizing
intellectually because it really did make people think:
"look how intricate what I thought was simple turns out to
be."
The New Criticism, incontestably and without
rival, created an atmosphere in which
it was okay to notice that things were a little more
difficult than they'd been supposed to be.
This in itself was extraordinarily useful and
constructive, not just for subsequent
literary theory, I think, but for the way in
which English teaching actually can help people think better.
All of this the New Criticism had a great deal to do with--
and when I talk next time about the way in which it's been
vilified for the last >
forty or fifty years, naturally I will have this in
the back of my mind.
So in any case, where did this preoccupation
with form-- because we're beginning to
think about the way in which theory can preoccupy itself with
form-- where does it come from?
Well, needless to say, I'm about to say it goes back
to the beginning.
When Plato writes his Republic and devotes Book
Ten, as I'm sure most of you know,
to an argument in effect banishing the poets from the
ideal republic, part of the argument is that
poets are terrible imitators.
They imitate reality as badly as they possibly can.
They are three times removed from the ideal forms of objects
in reality.
They're a hopeless mess.
They get everything wrong.
They think that a stick refracted in the water is
therefore a crooked stick.
They are subject to every conceivable kind of illusion,
not to be trusted, and Socrates calls them liars.
Okay.
Now when Aristotle writes his Poetics he does so--
and this is true and rewards scrutiny if one thinks carefully
about the Poetics-- he does so very consciously
in refutation of Plato's arguments in the Republic,
and perhaps the keystone of this refutation is simply this:
Plato says poets imitate badly.
Aristotle says this is a category mistake because poets
don't imitate reality.
Poets don't imitate, says Aristotle,
things as they are.
They imitate things as they should be.
In other words, the business of poets is to
organize, to bring form to bear,
on the messiness of reality and,
in so doing, to construct not an alternate
reality in the sense that it has nothing to do with the real
world-- that is to say,
it doesn't mention anything in the real world,
or it somehow or other invents human beings made out of
chocolate or something like that--
instead, it idealizes the elements existing in the real
world such that its object is something other than reality as
such.
This is really the origin of formalism.
Aristotle is considered the ancestor of the varying sorts of
thought about form, and it's this move,
this move that he makes in the Poetics,
that engenders this possibility.
Now turning to your sheet, in the early,
early modern period the poet and courtier,
Sir Philip Sidney, wrote an elegant,
really wonderfully written defense of poetry,
in one edition called The Apology for Poesie.
In this edition he, while actually a fervent
admirer of Plato, nevertheless develops this idea
of Aristotle with remarkable rhetorical ingenuity and I think
very impressively lays out the case that Aristotle first makes,
here in the first passage on your sheet.
Sidney's talking about the various kinds of discourse:
divinity, hymnody, science,
philosophy, history-- in other words,
all the ways in which you can contribute to human betterment
and human welfare.
He says in the case of all but one of them, each discourse is a
"serving science."
That is to say, it is subservient to the
natural world; its importance is that it
refers to that world.
The first sentence of your passage: "There is no art
but one delivered to mankind that hath not the works of
nature for his principal object."
This by the way-- although what they serve is not exactly a work
of nature-- is why even that which is
incontestably better than secular poetry,
in other words hymnody, and also divine knowledge or
theology-- even these fields,
which are the supreme fields, are also serving sciences.
They are subservient to an idea that they have to express,
which is the idea of God, right, and God is real.
There's no sense that we're making God up in this kind of
discourse.
Sidney is a devoutly religious person and there's no semblance
of doubt in his attitude, and yet he is saying something
very special about the poet who is somewhere in between divinity
and the other sorts of discourse with which poetry is
traditionally in rivalry: science,
philosophy and history.
And he says this is what's unique about poetry.
Only the poet disdaining to be tied to any such subjection
[subjection, in other words,
to things as they are], lifted up with the vigor of his
own invention, doth grow in effect another
nature....
He nothing affirms and therefore never lieth.
In other words, Plato is wrong.
The poet is not a liar because he's not talking about anything
that's verifiable or falsifiable.
He is simply talking about the parameters of the world he has
brought into being.
Sidney thinks of it as a kind of magic.
He invokes, for example, the science of astrology.
The poet, he says, ranges freely within the zodiac
of his own wit.
He also invokes the pseudoscience of alchemy when he
says that the poet inhabits a brazen world,
and of this--"brazen" means brass--
of this brazen world, he makes a golden world.
In other words, poetry is transformational.
In representing not things as they are but things as they
should be, it transforms reality.
All right.
So this is an argument which in outline,
once again, justifies the idea of literature as form,
as that which brings form to bear on the chaos and messiness
of the real.
Now I don't mean to say things just stood still as Sidney said
they were until you get to Kant.
A great deal happens, but one aspect of Kant's famous
"Copernican revolution" in
the history of philosophy is his ideas about
aesthetics and the beautiful and about the special faculty that
he believes has to do with and mediates our aesthetic
understanding of things, a faculty which he calls
"the judgment"; so that in The Critique of
Judgment of 1790, he outlines a philosophy of the
beautiful and of the means whereby "the judgment"
makes judgments of the beautiful.
He does a great deal else in it, but I'm isolating this
strand, which is what's relevant to what we're talking about.
In many ways Kant, without knowing anything about
Sidney, nevertheless follows from Sidney particularly in
this, as you'll see.
I'm going to look sort of with some care at these passages so
all will become clear, but particularly in this:
Sidney--and I didn't exactly quote the passage in which
Sidney does this but I urged you to believe that he does--
Sidney actually ranks poetry somewhere between divinity and
the other sciences.
In other words, poetry is not the supreme thing
that a person can do.
Sidney believed this so much in fact that when he knew himself
to be dying, having been mortally wounded in
a battle, he ordered that all of his own
poems be burned.
From the standpoint of a devout person, he had no doubt that
poetry was inferior to divinity.
Now in a way that's what Kant's saying, too.
In the passages you'll read, you'll see that the point is
not that art and the judgment of the beautiful is the supreme
thing that humanity can be engaged with.
The point is only that it has a special characteristic that
nothing else has.
That's the point that this whole tradition is trying to
make.
This is the way Kant puts it, turning first to the second
passage: The pleasant and the good both
have a reference to the faculty of desire [The pleasant is the
way in which our appetency, our sensuous faculty--which
Kant calls "the understanding,"
by the way-- understands things.
Things are either pleasant or unpleasant.
The good, on the contrary, is the way in which our
cognitive and moral faculty-- which Kant calls "the
reason"-- understands things.
Things are either to be approved of or not to be
approved of, but in each case,
as Kant argues, they have a reference to the
faculty of desire-- I want, I don't want,
I approve, I disapprove], and they bring with them the
former [that is to say, the pleasant],
a satisfaction pathologically conditioned;
the latter a pure, practical, purposeful
satisfaction which is determined not merely by the representation
of the object [that is to say, by the fact that the
represented object exists for me,
right] but also by the represented
connection of the subject with the existence of the object [in
other words, by the way in which I want it
or don't want it, approve of it or don't approve
of it].
My subjective wishes, in other words,
determine my attitude toward it, whereas what Kant is saying
is that my attitude toward that which simply stands before us as
what is neither pleasant nor good,
but is rather something else, doesn't exist for me.
It exists in and for itself.
The next passage: "Taste is the faculty of
the judging of an object or a method of representing it by an
entirely disinterested satisfaction or
dissatisfaction." In other words,
yeah, I still like it or don't like it,
but my liking has nothing to do either with desire or with
approval-- moral, political,
or however the case may be.
I just like it or I just don't like it according to principles
that can be understood as arising from the faculty of
judgment and not from the faculty of the understanding,
which is appetitive, and the faculty of reason,
which is moral.
So with that said, perhaps just to add to that,
the fourth passage: "Beauty is the form of the
purposiveness of an object so far as it is perceived in it
without any representation of a purpose."
You say, "Whoa, what is this?"
>
>
Kant makes a distinction between the purposive and the
purposeful.
What is the distinction?
The purposeful is the purpose of the object in practical
terms.
What can it do?
What can it do for me?
How does it go to work in the world?
What is its function among other objects?
What bearing does it have on--in particular--my life?
But the purposiveness of the object is the way in which it is
sufficient unto itself.
It has its own purpose, which is not a purpose that has
any bearing necessarily on anything else.
It has, in other words, an internal coherence.
It has a dynamism of parts that is strictly with reference to
its own existence.
It is a form.
It is a form and that form, because we can see it has
structure and because we can see it has organization and
complexity, is purposive.
That is to say, it manifests its
self-sufficiency.
So that's Kant's famous distinction between the
purposive, which is the organization of an
aesthetic object, and the purposeful,
which is the organization of any object insofar as it goes to
work in the world or for us.
An aesthetic object can be purposeful;
that is to say we can view it as purposeful.
I see a naked body, which the art historians call a
nude.
Let's say I don't accept that it's merely a nude.
I want it or I disapprove of it and, lo and behold,
it's no longer aesthetic.
I'll come back to that in a moment, but I hope you can see
that that is a distinction between the purposive and the
purposeful.
Now just in order to reprise these important distinctions,
I want to turn to a passage in Samuel Coleridge who is,
at least on this occasion, a disciple of Kant and is,
I think, usefully paraphrasing the arguments of Kant that we
have just been engaged in.
This is the fifth passage on your sheet:
The beautiful [says Coleridge] is at once distinguished both
from the agreeable which is beneath it [and notice the sort
of stationing of the beautiful as Sidney stations it between
what's beneath it and what's above it]--
from the agreeable which is beneath it and from the good
which is above it, for both these necessarily have
an interest attached to them.
Both act on the will and excite a desire for the actual
existence of the image or idea contemplated,
while the sense of beauty rests gratified in the mere
contemplation or intuition regardless whether it be a
fictitious Apollo or a real Antinous.
In other words, the judgment of beauty does not
depend on the existence of the object for its satisfaction.
Now Oscar Wilde, ever the wag and a person who
generated more good literary theory in ways that didn't seem
like literary theory at all, perhaps, in the entire history
of thinking about the subject, says in the famous series of
aphorisms which constitute his "Preface"
to The Picture of Dorian Gray--
he concludes this series of aphorisms by winking at us and
saying, "All art is quite
useless."
I hope that after reading these passages and enduring the
explication of them that you've just heard you can immediately
see what Wilde means by saying all art is quite useless.
He's appropriating a term of opprobrium in the utilitarian
tradition-- oh, my goodness,
that something would be useless,
right?–he's appropriating a term of opprobrium and
pointing out that it is an extraordinarily unique thing
about art that it's useless; in other words,
that it appeals to no merely appetitive or other form of
subjective interest.
We don't have to have an "interest"
in it in the sense of owning part of a company.
We don't have to have an interest in it in order to
appreciate it.
In other words, we can be objective about it.
We can distance ourselves from our subjective wants and needs
and likes and dislikes, and we can coexist with it in a
happy and constructive way that is good for both of us,
because if we recognize that there are things in the world
which have intrinsic value and importance and what we call
beauty, and yet are not the things that
we covet or wish to banish, we recognize in ourselves the
capacity for disinterestedness.
We recognize in ourselves a virtue which is considered to be
the cornerstone of many systems of moral understanding.
To realize that we're not interested in everything and
merely because we're interested take a view of things,
but that there are things that we don't have to have that kind
of interest in and can nevertheless recognize as
self-sufficient and valuable, is important.
Wilde's suggestion, but I think also Kant's
suggestion before him, is important for our
recognition of our own value.
By the same token, all this harping on the
autonomy of art-- that is to say,
the self-sufficiency of art, the way in which it's not
dependent on anything, or as Sidney says,
the way in which it's not a serving science existing merely
to represent things other than itself,
right?--the way in which this is possible for art is,
as also our own capacity to be disinterested is,
a way of acknowledging that freedom exists:
that I am free, that things are free from my
instrumental interest in them, so that in general what's
implicit in this view of art and this view of human judgment,
and what makes it so important in the history of thought,
is that once again--and this is not the first time we've brought
this up in these lectures and won't be the last--
it's a way of recognizing that in addition to all the other
things that we are, some of them wonderful,
we are also free.
There is in us at least an element that is free,
independent, serving nothing,
autonomous.
This idea of our freedom, and by implication of the
freedom of other things, from our instrumental interests
is what sustains the formalist tradition,
and against various kinds of criticism and objection that
we'll be taking up in turn as the case arises,
sustains and keeps bringing back into the history of thought
on these subjects the notion that form simply for its own
sake-- as the notorious Aestheticism
movement at the end of the nineteenth century put it--
is valuable.
All right.
Now John Crowe Ransom, who was never at Yale but is
nevertheless one of the founders or first members of a
self-identified school of figures who called themselves
the New Critics, published a book called The
New Criticism, and that's >
where the term "the New Critics"
comes from.
You may have noticed in your Wimsatt essay that there is a
footnote to somebody named Joel Spingarn who wrote an essay
called "The New Criticism"
in 1924.
Not to worry.
That has nothing to do with the New Criticism.
That just means criticism which is recent,
>
a different matter altogether.
By the same token, there is the work of Roland
Barthes and some of his contemporaries--
Poulet, whom I mentioned, Jean Starobinski and others--
that was called in the French press La Nouvelle
Critique.
That, too then is an instance of the New Criticism being used
as a term, but that too has nothing to do with our subject.
The New Critics, the American New Critics as
they are sometimes identified, were a school--and I use that
term advisedly because they are self-identified as a group--
a school of people who evolved this idea of the independent
status-- Ransom calls it a
"discrete ontological object"--
of the work of art and the means whereby it can be
appreciated as independent in all of its complexity.
Our first foray into the thinking of this school will be
our reading of Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The
Intentional Fallacy,"
which I'll get to in a minute;
but, simply as a reprise, take a look at the two passages
from Ransom which complete what's on your sheet and which,
I think you can see, create a link between the sort
of thinking you've encountered in reading "The Intentional
Fallacy" and the tradition that I've been trying
to describe.
Passage seven ought to be completely transparent to you
now because it is simply a paraphrase of the passages I
have given you from Kant and Coleridge: "The experience
[says Ransom] called beauty is beyond the
powerful ethical will precisely as it is beyond the animal
passion.
Indeed, these last two are competitive and
coordinate."
In other words, what they have in common with
each other, ethical will and animal passion,
is that they're both grounded in interest.
Right?
That's the point of Sir Kenneth Clark's word,
"the nude."
For the naked human being, as viewed both by the appetites
and by moral reason, as a common term from the
standpoint both of what Kant calls "the
understanding" and from what Kant calls
"the reason," the expression "naked
body" is just fine; but if we do believe there is
another category, the aesthetic,
viewed by an independent faculty called "the
judgment," we need another word for what
we're looking at-- modern painters like Philip
Pearlstein and Lucian Freud would strongly disagree,
but in a way that's the point.
When we're looking at a painting of a naked body
we don't say, "Oh, that's a naked
body."
We say, "That's a nyewd," and that
distinction is what, as it were, bears out the
implicit way, the semiconscious way,
in which all of us acknowledge there to be a category that we
call the aesthetic judgment.
On the other hand, a lot of people think it's all
hokum, and in fact the predominant
view in the twentieth century has been that there's no such
thing as disinterestedness, that whatever we are looking at
we have an interest in and form views of,
and that this Kantian moment of dispassionate or disinterested
contemplation is what the early twentieth-century critic
I.A. Richards called a "phantom aesthetic
state."
The predominant view is of this kind of--but,
just to do it justice in passing, there is a certain
sense, is there not?
in which we suddenly find ourselves,
without meaning to and without being simply victims of any sort
of cultural tyranny, standing in front of something,
clasping our hands, tilting our head and feeling
somehow or another different from the way we feel when we
typically look at things.
And that, too, is an intuitive way of saying,
"Yeah, however rigorously we can define it or defend it,
something like this does seem to go on in our minds at certain
kinds of moments of experience."
We just feel differently looking at a certain work of art
or a certain landscape, let's say, than we feel looking
at other sorts of things.
Maybe we don't know why.
Maybe we doubt that the difference is absolute in the
way that Kant wants to insist it is.
Nevertheless, we have in tendency feelings of
this kind and we should acknowledge them because again,
at least in terms of a weak understanding of these
positions, it does tend to justify them.
At least it explains to us why people can have had such
thoughts.
Okay.
Wimsatt--I keep saying Wimsatt.
Again it's Wimsatt and Beardsley, but I already
explained how that is.
Wimsatt right off the bat attacks what he calls "the
Romantic understanding of literature."
Now what does he mean by Romantic?
It's the attitude which supposes that a
"poem," and that's Wimsatt's privileged
word which I'll try to explain, that a poem is an
expression-- that is to say,
is the expression of some passion or profound genius
working its way into a form, but that the important thing is
the expression.
This much, by the way, Wimsatt has in common with
Gadamer, because Gadamer doesn't talk
much about authors either, and Gadamer is interested in
what he calls meaning, the subject matter,
die Sache.
Right?
He's not interested in your sort of expression
of that meaning or my expression of that meaning.
He's interested in the way in which a reader can come to terms
with a meaning conveyed by a text,
and that much, as I say, despite the
profoundly different nature of their projects,
Wimsatt and Gadamer have in common.
So a poem is not an expression but an independent object with a
self-contained meaning, and if this meaning is not
self-evident to the attentive reader then we don't judge the
poem a success.
This is where evaluation comes in.
The success or failure of a poem depends on the realization
of meaning.
It doesn't depend on our going to the archive,
finding out what the author said in his letters about it,
finding out what he told his friends,
or what he told the newspapers.
It doesn't involve any of that.
If the meaning is not clear in the poem, we judge the poem a
failure.
We don't refer--we have no reason to refer,
if we respect the autonomy of the poem as such,
we don't refer--we don't appeal to an authorial intention.
Hence, on page 811, the left-hand column,
about a third of the way down: "…
[T]he design or intention of the author is neither available
nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of
literary art…" It follows from this that even
a short poem, even a short lyric poem--and
here you could see Wimsatt "following"
Foucault, though obviously not following
but anticipating Foucault, and again they have nothing to
do with each other, but there is this overlap--even
a short poem doesn't really have an author.
It has a "speaker," a figure speaking in the poem,
that needs to be understood dramatically,
that is to say as though the poem were one of Browning's or
T.S. Eliot's dramatic monologues--in other words,
so that the speaker of any poem on Wimsatt's view is a speaker
endowed with a certain character,
a certain viewpoint, a certain argument to be put
forward, and our concern about the
speaker has to be a concern within the poem about the way in
which this character is elaborated,
and not reinforced, somehow, by biographical
reference to that which is not the speaker but the author
standing back there somewhere behind the poem.
Now why focus on the "poem"?
Notice that we never hear about literature.
We never even hear about "poetry."
The object of attention for an analysis of this kind is the
poem.
Well, the poem is, as John Donne puts it,
a little world made cunningly.
It's a microcosm.
It is a distillation or quintessence.
It is a model in other words for the way in which literature
can be understood as world-making--
not a representation, again, of things as they are
but of things as they should be; whereby "things as they
should be" is not necessarily an ideal but
rather that which is formal, that which is organized,
and that which has a coherence and makes sense
self-sufficiently and within itself.
That's why the poem, the lyric poem,
is privileged among the forms of literary discourse in the New
Criticism.
All literature is by implication a "poem,"
>
but the poem is the privileged site of analysis whereby this
broader statement can be made to seem reasonable,
hence the emphasis on the poem.
The absence of the Romantic word "poetry"
is therefore not insignificant.
Poetry is that which just sort of spills out of me.
It's the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.
(Never mind that.)
The New Criticism isn't interested in spontaneous
overflows of powerful feelings.
Wimsatt has his little joke about drinking a pint of beer,
taking a walk.
So the New Criticism just isn't interested in those sorts of
spontaneous overflow.
Sorry.
>
I won't go there.
>
But in any case, he goes on.
He goes on to say, "All right.
If we're focused on the work of art in and of itself,
on the poem, we obviously in thinking about
what it means need to come to terms with three kinds of
evidence."
That is to say, some things have a bearing on
what it means and some things don't.
What does have a bearing is language--
that is to say, words in the public domain
which all of us share and which we can study in order to come to
terms with the exact meaning of the poem.
A certain word--this is, of course, what kept you in
your high school classes for so long--a certain word has five or
six different meanings.
The New Criticism delights in showing how all five or six of
those meanings do have some bearing on the meaning of the
poem.
That's all legitimate evidence.
That is what one uses to build up the structure of the
interpretation of the poem.
What is not relevant is what I've mentioned already:
what the author said about the poem in letters to friends,
to newspapers and so on.
That has no relevance.
Then Wimsatt acknowledges that there's a sort of messy third
category of evidence which has to do with language and is
therefore legitimate to a point, but also has to do with the
author's idiosyncrasies-- that is to say,
the way that author in particular used language,
certain coterie words, or simply a private
misunderstanding of certain words.
You've got to know when you're reading Whitman what he means by
"camerado."
It's not exactly >
what the rest of us typically mean when we--well,
we don't use that word exactly, but it's
>
>
what we typically mean when we speak of comrades or
comradeship.
In other words, the word is loaded in ways
that-- Wimsatt would probably
acknowledge-- need to be taken into account
if we're going to understand what Whitman is up to.
Now this is very tricky, and he spends the rest of his
essay talking about the murky boundaries between types of
evidence, type of evidence number two
which is out of play and type of evidence number three which may
be in play but has to be dealt with in a gingerly and careful
way.
But I'm more interested, actually,
in a footnote which arises from this argument about the
idiosyncratic nature of language as a particular author may use
it because the footnote says, you know what?
That's just one consideration we bring to bear on the function
of language in a poem.
This footnote, number eleven at the bottom of
page 814 over to 815, is just about as devastating
and counterintuitive a pronouncement as is made
anywhere in our entire syllabus, the most earth-shattering
pronouncement that anybody could ever possibly make in the New
Criticism.
Well, look at this footnote: And the history of words
after a poem is written may contribute meanings which if
relevant to the original pattern should not be ruled out by a
scruple about intention.
That is bold.
The great creator raised his plastic arm, right?
Everybody knows Akenside didn't mean polymers,
but now we're all into cyberborgs and we take all of
this very seriously.
In a way it's a tribute to the great creator and also an
acknowledgement of the fact that the great creator lives in the
Eternal Moment.
He's not subject to history.
The great creator knew in the eighteenth century that some day
plastic would mean polymer, right?
Obviously that's one of the divine attributes.
Therefore, if the great creator chooses to raise his prosthetic
limb, that is simply a way of
understanding what it is like to be everything,
omnipotent and omniscient in the Eternal Moment.
In other words, if you take Wimsatt's eleventh
footnote seriously, that is a perfectly legitimate
way not to ironically undermine Akenside's line but actually to
reinforce it and to give it a kind of formal richness which it
does not otherwise have.
I realize that I'm out of time, and so I'll begin the next
lecture by talking about a poem of Yeats called "Lapis
Lazuli" written in 1935, in which he talks about the way
in which people who build up things that have been destroyed
are always "gay."
And of course, if we invoke intention,
Yeats doesn't mean that they're always gay in our sense.
He is using the English translation of the German
word froehlich from Nietzsche's The Gay Science.
Yeats is an astute and careful reader of Nietzsche and
in some ways is elaborating on what Nietzsche says in that book
in his poem "Lapis Lazuli."
At the beginning of the next lecture we will do the same
thing with the word "gay"
that we've just done with the word "plastic"
and then we will go ahead and consider the essay of Cleanth
Brooks and other aspects of the New Criticism.