Prof: All right.
 
Now last time we were giving
examples of what might happen if
one takes seriously that
extraordinary eleventh footnote
in Wimsatt's "The
Intentional Fallacy"
in which he says that the
history of words after a
poem was composed may well be
relevant to the overall
structure of the poem and should
not be avoided owing simply to a
scruple about intention.
 
Essentially,
that's what Wimsatt says in the
footnote.
 
So I went back to the great
creator raising his plastic arm
and suggested that,
well, maybe after all there
might be some good way of
complicating the meaning of
Akenside by suggesting that the
modern,
anachronistic meaning of
"plastic"
would be relevant to the sense
of the poem.
This by the way--just because
one can make this claim and,
I think, make it stick in
certain cases,
doesn't mean that the
proposition is any less
outrageous.
 
Just imagine
>
a philologist being
confronted with the idea that
the meaning of words at a
certain historical moment isn't
the only thing that matters in
understanding the meaning of a
poem.
 
So I just wanted to give
another example a little closer
to home in the poem of Yeats,
the 1935 poem "Lapis
Lazuli."
 
I began talking about it last
time.
It's a poem which begins,
"I have heard that
hysterical women say / they are
sick of the palette and
fiddle-bow,
/ of poets that are always
gay..."
 
The storm clouds of the
approaching war are beginning to
gather.
 
A lot of people are saying,
"Enough of this kind of
effete culture.
 
We need to think about
important things,
particularly about politics and
the social order"--
by the way, a very powerful
argument in 1935.
In any case,
Yeats was on the other side of
the controversy and insisted,
after all, that there is a
continuing role for art,
as indeed, on the other hand,
there may well be even in such
times.
So he's sick of everybody
saying they don't want to talk
about painting,
they don't want to talk about
music,
and they don't want to talk
about poets who are "always
gay."
All right.
 
So then the poem continues.
 
It involves a stone,
a piece of lapis lazuli that
has a kind of a flaw in it,
which is like a
"water-course,"
and where one can imagine a
pilgrim climbing toward
increased enlightenment.
As the poem goes on,
Yeats talks about the way in
which civilizations crumble--
that is to say,
all things fall apart,
but then it's possible to build
them back up.
 
He says, "All things fall
and are built again / and those
that build them again are
gay."
Now, as I said last time,
needless to say,
Yeats was not aware of the
anachronistic meaning that we
may be tempted to bring to bear
on the poem.
Yeats is thinking of Nietzsche,
he's thinking of a word,
froehlich,
which probably is best
translated "joyous,
energetically joyous."
He is just borrowing that word
from the translation of a book
by Nietzsche.
 
Well and good but,
if you were a queer theorist or
if you were interested in making
not a weak,
but a strong claim for the
importance of queerness in our
literary tradition,
you would be very tempted to
say, this enriches the poem--
not just, in other words,
that they are energetically
joyous as creators,
but also that in our
contemporary sense of the word
they're gay.
 
Now this again,
as in the case of Akenside,
may or may not raise the
hackles of the philologists,
but there's a certain sense in
which from a certain point of
view,
it's difficult to deny that it
doesn't lend a certain
coherence,
an additionally complex
coherence, to the nature of the
poem.
 
All right.
 
Then we have Tony the Tow
Truck.
You're probably beginning
to wish I would refer to it,
so why don't I?
 
In the second line of Tony
the Tow Truck,
we learn that "I live
in a little yellow garage."
Now of course,
the denotation of the
word "yellow,"
as Cleanth Brooks would say,
is that the garage is painted a
certain color.
The connotation,
which undoubtedly the author
had no notion of,
wasn't thinking of--this is a
book for toddlers--
the connotation is that somehow
or another there's the
imputation of cowardice,
possibly also the derogatory
imputation of being Asian.
Maybe Tony is Asian.
 
Well--okay.
 
This has nothing to do with the
text, we say,
and yet at the same time
suppose it did.
We could interrogate the author
psychoanalytically.
We could say,
"Hey, wait a minute.
Okay.
 
So you say it was painted
yellow.
Why don't you say it's painted
some other color?"
We could begin to put a certain
amount of pressure on the text
and possibly,
as I say, begin to do things
with it which are kind of a
five-finger exercise--
we'll be doing a lot more of
that sort of thing--
but which might work.
 
All right.
 
These are examples of the
extraordinary implications of
Wimsatt's eleventh footnote,
and also, I think,
perhaps in advance of today's
discussion,
clarify to some extent the
importance for critics of this
kind of notion of unity.
 
In some ways,
everything we have to say today
will concern the idea of unity.
 
In other words,
a connotation is valuable and
ought to be invoked even if it's
philologically incorrect if it
contributes to the unity,
the complex building up of the
unity,
of the literary text.
If, on the other hand,
it is what Gadamer would call a
"bad prejudice"--
that is to say,
some aspect of my subjectivity
that nothing could possibly be
done with in thinking about and
interpreting the text--
then you throw it out.
 
So the criterion is:
is it relevant to the unified
form that we as critics are
trying to realize in the text?
That criterion,
as I say--not just for the
sorts of semi-facetious readings
we can do with Wimsatt's
eleventh footnote but also for
readings that may at least have
some marginal plausibility--
this sense of unity is what
governs interpretive decisions
of this kind.
All right.
 
Now a word or two about the
antecedents of the New
Criticism: In the first place,
the thirties and forties in the
academic world bear witness to
the rise of a canon of taste
largely introduced by the great
Modernist writers,
particularly by T.S.***Eliot.
 
You may notice that Brooks,
for example,
has a kind of Donne obsession.
 
He gets that from Eliot's essay
"The Metaphysical
Poets," which is a review
essay of a volume of Donne's
poems edited by somebody named
Grierson which made Donne
overnight,
for a great many readers,
the central poet in the English
tradition.
Brooks is still,
as I say, very much under the
influence of this.
 
Well, Eliot,
in "The Metaphysical
Poets," says some rather
interesting things that had
far-reaching consequences for
the New Criticism.
He says, "Poetry in our
own time--such is the complexity
of the world we live in--must be
difficult."
He says that poetry has to
reconcile all sorts of disparate
experience--reading Spinoza,
the smell of cooking,
the sound of the typewriter.
 
All of this has to be yoked
together in the imagery of a
good poem,
particularly of a metaphysical
poem,
and this model of complexity is
what matters both for modern
literature and for literary
criticism.
 
Now by the same token,
other Modernists like James
Joyce are also contributing to
this idea of the independent
unity of the work of art.
 
In "Stephen Hero"
or "Portrait of the Artist
as a Young Man," you
remember Stephen in his
disquisition on form and Aquinas
and all the rest of it argues
that the work of art is
something that is cut off from
its creator because its creator
withdraws from it and simply
pares his fingernails,
in the famous expression.
It's very interesting.
 
You remember that in the
Wimsatt that you read last time,
Wimsatt argues--I think
probably thinking about that
passage in Joyce--
that the work of art is
"cut off"
from its author at birth.
This is an umbilical cord he's
talking about.
It has no more connection with
its author from birth on and
roams the world on its own.
 
Ideas like this,
as I say, are taken from the
aesthetic and practical thinking
about the nature of the work of
art that one finds in Modernism.
 
In the meantime,
let's consider the academic
setting.
 
In the 1930s,
when Ransom in particular is
writing his polemical
manifestos,
The New Criticism and
The World's Body,
and attacking most of what's
going on as it's being done by
his colleagues,
he has two things in particular
in mind: in the first place,
old-fashioned philology,
the kind of thinking about the
literary text that would insist
that "plastic"
means what it means in the
eighteenth century--
and a lot of that was being
done.
 
This was the golden age of the
consolidation of the literary
profession.
 
Standard editions are being
created.
The great learned journals are
in their early phase.
Knowledge is actually still
being accumulated having to do
with the basic facts of the
literary tradition.
We didn't know a great deal
about certain authors until this
period of the flourishing of
philology in the very late
nineteenth and early twentieth
century took hold and pretty
much created for us the archive
that we now use today in a
variety of ways.
 
So although the New Critics
were fed up with philological
criticism,
I don't mean to be
condescending toward it or to
suggest that it didn't play a
crucially important role in the
evolution of literary studies.
Now the other thing that was
going on,
and here--I don't know,
depending on one's viewpoint,
perhaps some measure of
condescension might be in order,
but these two were
spectacular figures--
the other thing that was going
on was that there was a vogue
for what might be called
"appreciative
teaching."
 
That is, the contemporary and
colleague of I.A. Richards at
Cambridge was the famous
"Q,"
Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch,
whose mesmerizing lectures had
virtually no content at all.
 
They were simply evocations,
appreciative evocations,
of great works of literature.
 
I have to say that at Yale,
exactly contemporary with
"Q"
we had a similar figure,
the person after whom Phelps
Gate is named:
the great William Lyon Phelps,
who would enter the classroom,
begin rapturously to quote
Tennyson,
would clasp his hands and say
that it was really good stuff,
and the students were so
appreciative that they gave
hundreds and thousands of
dollars to the university ever
after.
 
In other words,
this was valuable
teaching, >
 
but again
>
>
 
the New Critics were fed up
with it.
This was the atmosphere they
found themselves in,
and what they wanted--and this
anticipates the atmosphere that
you'll see the Russian
formalists found themselves in
when we turn to them next week--
what they wanted was something
like rigor or a scientific basis
or some sort of set of
principles that could actually
be invoked,
so that the business of
criticism could become more
careful and systematic,
less scattershot,
less effusive and so on.
 
So this is, in effect,
the backdrop in which in the
American academy--
influenced, as we'll now see,
by certain trends in the
British academy--
arose in the thirties and in
the forties.
All right.
 
Now the first figure I want to
talk a little bit about,
and the first figure whom you
read for today's assignment,
is I.A. Richards.
 
Richards, before he joined the
English department at Cambridge,
was actually a psychologist,
trained as a Pavlovian
psychologist,
so that when you read in his
essay about "stimuli"
and "needs,"
you see pretty much where you
stand.
His sense of the way in which
the mind reacts to the world,
to its experience,
and the way in which it's an
uncomplicated reaction,
a resisting reaction,
or an adjusting reaction,
all has very much to do with
Pavlovian principles.
 
These govern to some extent
Richards' understanding even of
his literary vocation during the
period when in 1924 he wrote
Principles of Literary
Criticism.
For Richards,
reading is all about
experience--that is to say,
the way in which the mind is
affected by what it reads.
 
And so even though his subject
matter is literature,
he's nevertheless constantly
talking about human psychology--
that is to say,
what need is answered by
literature,
how the psyche responds to
literature,
what's good and bad about
psychic responses,
and so on.
This is the intellectual focus,
in other words,
of Richards' work.
 
Now another aspect of his
having been and continuing to be
a scientist is that Richards
really did believe,
seriously believed,
in reference--
that is to say,
in the way in which language
really can hook on to the world.
 
Verifiable and falsifiable
statement is for Richards the
essence of scientific practice
and he cares very much about
that.
 
He does not,
in other words,
share with so many literary
critics--
perhaps even with Brooks,
who follows him in making the
fundamental distinction I'm
about to describe--
he does not share with the
majority of literary critics and
artists a kind of distaste for
science.
This, by the way,
is also true of his student,
Empson, who was a math major
before he became an English
major.
 
Both of them take very
seriously the notion that there
can be a scientific basis for
what one does in English or in
literary studies.
 
So another aspect of it for
Richards is--
because he takes science so
seriously--
is that he actually reverses
the idea that we talked about
last time in Sidney,
Kant, Coleridge,
Wilde, and Wimsatt.
 
He actually reverses the idea
that it's art that's autonomous.
If you look on page 766 in the
left-hand column,
you'll find him saying that
science is autonomous,
and what he means by that is
that scientific facts can be
described in statements without
the need for any kind of
psychological context or any
dependency on the varieties of
human need.
 
It is autonomous in the sense
that it is a pure,
uncluttered and uninfluenced
declaration of fact or
falsehood.
 
Then he says:
To declare Science autonomous
is very different from
subordinating all our activities
to it.
 
[Here's where poetry comes in.]
It is merely to assert that so
far as any body of references is
undistorted it belongs to
Science.
 
It is not in the least to
assert that no references may be
distorted if advantage can
thereby gained.
And just as there are
innumerable human activities
which require undistorted
references [scientific
activities]
if they are to be satisfied,
so there are innumerable other
human activities not less
important which equally require
distorted references or,
more plainly, fictions.
 
Here you see Richards' basic
distinction between what he
calls "scientific
statement"
and what he calls "emotive
statement,"
the distinction between that
which is truly referential--
that which is incontrovertibly
verifiable or falsifiable on the
one hand,
and that which is emotive on
the other.
 
Later on Richards changes his
vocabulary, and he no longer
talks about scientific and
emotive language.
Even more dangerously,
from the standpoint of anybody
who likes poetry,
>
he talks instead of
"statement,"
meaning science,
and
"pseudo-statement,"
meaning poetry.
You are really out on a
limb if you're going to defend
poetry--
as Richards kept doing--as
"pseudo-statement,"
but of course
"pseudo-statement"
is just another expression for
what he calls here
"fiction."
Once we sort of settle into
this vocabulary,
and once we get used to this
clearly unquestioningly
scientific perspective,
why on earth do we need
pseudo-statement or fiction at
all?
We know very well,
by the way, that there are
scientists who simply cannot
stand to read poetry because
it's false, right?
 
Just as Richards says,
there's always something kind
of archaic or atavistic about
poetic thinking.
It's not just that it's not
trying to tell the truth,
as Sidney said--"nothing
lieth because it never
affirmeth."
 
It is in fact,
Richards goes so far as to say,
following Plato,
lying.
Poetry is constantly getting
itself in trouble in all sorts
of ways--on page 768,
for example.
He says, sort of toward the top
of the right-hand column,
page 768:
It is evident that the bulk of
poetry consists of statements
which only the very foolish
would think of attempting to
verify.
They are not the kinds of
things which can be verified.
In other words,
they're a pack of lies.
It usually follows from this
that somebody like this points
out that whereas we all know
that a democratic society is the
best society to live in,
poetry prefers feudal society:
it makes better poetry.
 
Whereas we all know that the
universe is of a certain kind--
we can't even call it
Copernican anymore--
poetry has this odd preference
for Ptolemaic astronomy.
In other words,
everything about poetry is
atavistic.
 
It's a throwback to some
earlier way of thinking.
There is some kind of latent
primitivism in poetic thinking,
and Richards seems cheerfully
to embrace this idea.
That's what he means by
"fiction"
or
"pseudo-statement."
So why on earth do we want it?
 
We want it, according to
Richards, because it answers
needs in our psychological
makeup that science can't
answer.
 
In other words,
we are a chaos of desires.
Some of them involve the desire
for truth--
that is to say,
for what we can learn from
science--
but a great many of our desires
have nothing to do with any
notion of truth but,
rather, are needs that require
fanciful or imaginative
fulfillment,
fulfillment of other kinds.
The reason this fulfillment is
important and can be valued is,
according to Richards,
that these needs--
unless they are organized or
harmonized so that they work
together in what he sometimes
calls a "synthesis"--
can actually tear us apart.
 
Literature is what can
reconcile conflicting or
opposing needs,
and Richards cares so much
about this basic idea that in
another text,
not in the text you've just
read, he says,
shockingly, "Poetry is
capable of saving us."
In other words,
poetry is capable of doing now
what religion used to do.
 
Poetry, you remember--this is a
scientist--
is no more true than religion,
but it can perform the function
of religion and is therefore
capable of saving us.
And so even despite the seeming
derogation of the very thing
that he purports to be
celebrating in books like The
Principles of Literary
Criticism,
Richards does hold on to an
extraordinarily important
feeling for the mission of
poetry to harmonize conflicting
needs.
 
That's the role of poetry and
that's what it does,
simply by evoking our wishes,
our desires--
irrespective of truth--in their
complicated,
chaotic form and synthesizing
them organically into something
that amounts to psychological
peace.
It's a little bit like
Aristotle's idea of catharsis,
which can be understood in a
variety of ways,
but Milton at the end of
Samson Agonistes
understands it in one way
when he says,
Now we have as a result of this
tragedy "calm of mind,
all passion spent."
 
That could be the motto for
Richards' work.
The experience of art,
the experience of poetry,
and the reconciliation of
conflicting needs results in a
kind of catharsis,
a "calm of mind,
all passion spent".
 
All right.
 
Now Richards had a student,
an undergraduate student,
William Empson,
who had, as I say,
been a math major who decided
he'd switch to English.
He went to Richards and he said
he had an idea about ambiguity.
He said he felt there was quite
a bit that could be written
about it, and so he wondered if
Richards would mind if maybe he
worked on that.
 
Richards said, "Fine.
 
Fine.
 
Sounds terrific.
 
Go do it."
 
So a few months later Empson
brought him the manuscript of
one of the greatest books of
criticism in the twentieth
century ,and one of the most
amazingly surprising:
Seven Types of Ambiguity.
 
The brief excerpt you have
in your photocopy packet--
I trust that you have picked it
up by this time at Tyco [copy
center]--
from Empson is taken from
Seven Types of Ambiguity.
I think Empson is the funniest
person who has ever written
literary criticism.
I think that his deadpan way of
bringing things down to earth
when they get a little too
highfalutin' involves the skill
of a genuine stand-up comic.
 
His timing is perfect.
 
He has, in other words,
all of the attributes of a
great comic writer.
 
I've enjoyed reading him so
much that when I was asked to
write a book about him,
I agreed to do so.
I've always been like that.
 
Byron was the only person I
enjoyed reading during the
nail-biting and tense period of
studying for my orals.
So I wrote my dissertation on
Byron as a result of
that--nothing complicated,
no deep reason for doing these
things.
 
But Empson I hope you enjoy.
 
He's a page-turner,
and his extraordinary
brilliance as a critic is really
just part of the experience of
reading him.
 
I'm particularly interested in
the excerpt you have and what he
does with his notions--
because this is his way of
responding to
"enthusiastic"
or appreciative criticism.
 
One of the tricks of
"Q"
and Billy Phelps and all the
other sort of authors and
lecturers in this mode was to
say that they read for
"atmosphere,"
that there was something that
one just felt along one's
bloodstream or in the pulses
when one encountered great
literature,
and their purpose as lecturers
and as critics was to evoke the
atmosphere of things.
 
So Empson says,
Well, atmosphere,
certainly that exists and we
can talk about it in all sorts
of ways;
but after all,
what is the use of atmosphere?
 
What is the use of any aspect
of literature if,
as good scientists,
we can't analyze it or can't
somehow or another account for
it?
If there is atmosphere in the
passage I'm about to quote from
Macbeth,
it must be atmosphere of a
certain kind and there for a
certain reason.
What follows,
it seems to me,
is one of the most staggeringly
beautiful, wonderful,
amazing riffs on a passage of
literature that you can
encounter.
 
I'm sorry if I sound a little
bit like Billy Phelps,
but I do get excited.
 
He quotes the passage from
Macbeth.
As Empson says,
the murderers have just left
the room,
and Macbeth is sort of
twiddling his thumbs,
hoping it's getting dark
because it's got to get dark
before Banquo can be killed.
So naturally he looks out the
window to see
>
 
how the time is going,
and this is what he says:
â€¦ Come, seeling Night,
Skarfe up the tender Eye of
pitiful Day
And with thy bloodie and
invisible Hand
Cancel and teare to pieces that
great Bond
That keeps me pale!
Empson doesn't mention this
word, "pale,"
but in juxtaposition with the
crows and rooks it strikes me
that it itself is an interesting
moment in the passage.
Light thickens,
and the Crow
Makes Wing to th' Rookie
Wood.
Empson italicizes that because
while he has something to say
about every part of the
passage--which all good
criticism by the way should do.
 
If you quote something,
say something about all of it.
>
 
Okay--but Empson italicizes
these particular lines because
it's going to be the true focus
of what he'll say later.
Good things of Day begin to
droope, and drowse,
While Night's black Agents to
their Prey's do rowse.
Thou marvell'st at my words,
but hold thee still [Lady
Macbeth has come into the room];
 
Things bad begun,
make strong themselves by ill:
So prythee go with me.
 
All right.
 
So Empson is fascinated by this
passage, and then he gives you,
in the next few paragraphs,
the amazing variety of grounds
for his fascination.
 
He says, Look.
 
This is what people mean when
they talk about atmosphere.
It's not just something you
feel on your pulse.
It's something that can be
described, something that can be
analyzed.
 
And I just want to touch on the
last part of it.
He says, "Rooks
live in a crowd and are mainly
vegetarianâ€¦"--
Empson's the person who says
that the ancient mariner shot
the albatross because the crew
was hungry.
 
He points out that in the 1798
edition of The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner,
biscuit worms had gotten
into the hard-tack,
so naturally,
he says, "The particular
kind of albatross that the
mariner shot,
I am told, makes a very
tolerable broth."
 
>
 
>
 
This is the mode of William
Empson.
So he begins here:
Rooks live in a crowd
and are mainly vegetarian;
Crow may be either another
name for rook,
especially when seen alone,
or it may mean the solitary
Carrion crow.
This subdued pun [this
ambiguity--remember,
this is a book about ambiguity]
is made to imply here that
Macbeth,
looking out of the window,
is trying to see himself as a
murderer and can only see
himself in the position of the
crow: that his day of power now
is closing;
that he has to distinguish
himself from the other rooks by
a difference of name,
rook-crow,
like the kingly title,
only;
that he is anxious at bottom to
be one with the other rooks,
not to murder them;
that he can no longer,
or that he may yet,
be united with the rookery;
and that he is murdering Banquo
in a forlorn attempt to obtain
peace of mind.
I'm not at all sure there's
anything more to be said about
that passage,
which I think lays it to rest.
It does so by insisting on a
complex mode of ambiguity that
governs the passage--not
atmosphere.
Sure, call it
"atmosphere"
if you like,
as long as you're willing to
subject it to verbal analysis,
as long as you're willing to
show how and why the atmosphere
is exactly of the nature that it
is,
and that it arises,
in other words--
and here is the relationship
between Richards and Empson--
out of a complex state of mind;
that poetry,
the poetry of this speaker,
this speaker/murderer,
is attempting desperately to
reconcile and harmonize,
just as he is attempting
desperately to be reconciled and
harmonized with the society from
which he has alienated himself
and,
of course, is failing.
 
Macbeth is not Shakespeare.
 
Shakespeare is representing him
in poetry,
attempting to do something
which in the immediate
psychological circumstances
poetry can't do,
but in the process evoking an
extraordinary complexity of
effort on the part of the mind
to be reconciled through the
medium of language.
 
As I say, this is the sense in
which Empson follows Richards.
But at the same time,
there's something rather
different between the two.
 
First of all,
Empson doesn't really kind of
settle into a sense that it's
all about the reader--
that is to say,
that it's all about the
reader's experience of the
literary.
Richards is actually an avatar
of figures like Iser,
like Hans Robert Jauss and
Stanley Fish--
whom we'll be discussing later
in the syllabus--
who are interested in reader
response: that is to say,
in the way in which we can talk
about the structure of reader
experience.
 
Empson is sort of interested in
that, just as he's fascinated by
the texture of textual evidence
itself.
He is also very
interested--much more so than
Richards,
and certainly more so than the
New Critics from whom he sharply
diverges in advance in this
respect--
interested in authorial
intention;
that is to say,
for him, literary criticism is
always an appeal to authorial
intention.
 
Mind you, he ascribes to
authorial intention the most
amazingly outrageous things that
other critics threw up their
hands in despair about,
but nevertheless it is for him
always still an appeal to
authorial intention.
At bottom, Empson doesn't
really settle into the rigorous
consideration of the author,
the text, or the reader as if
they were separate functions.
 
For Empson, there's a kind of a
fluid and easy movement back and
forth between what for
hermeneutics are three very
different phenomena:
author, text,
reader.
 
For Empson, it's a kind of
synthetic mélange
that's ultimately an appeal
to the author,
but certainly involves both
working on the text itself and
also understanding its effects
on the reader.
So all of this distances Empson
from Richards to a certain
extent,
but the most important
difference, I think,
between Empson and the other
figures we're discussing--
a difference which makes it
even a little bit complex to say
that he's a precursor of the New
Criticism--
is that Empson very rarely
concerns himself with the
whole of a text.
He isn't really interested in
the unity of "the
poem."
 
He is simply interested in
saying as much as he can about
certain local effects,
certainly with the implication,
possibly,
that this has a bearing on our
understanding of,
let's say, the whole of
Macbeth;
but he doesn't set about doing
a systematic reading of the
whole of Macbeth.
He always zooms in on
something, thinks about it for a
while and then goes away and
thinks about something else,
leaving us to decide whether it
has a genuine bearing on the
entirety or on the literary
wholeness or unity of Macbeth.
Empson is interested in the
complexity of local effects.
Another thing to say about
Empson's perspective,
which makes him differ sharply,
I think,
from Richards and from the
later New Critics,
is that Empson is perfectly
willing to accommodate the idea
that maybe--
just as in the case of the
psychology of Macbeth the
character--
that maybe poetry
doesn't reconcile
conflicting needs.
 
Maybe, after all,
poetry is an expression of the
irreducible conflict of our
needs.
The last chapter of Seven
Types of Ambiguity,
his seventh ambiguity,
is actually,
as Empson said,
about "some fundamental
division in the writer's
mind."
There, you see,
he diverges from his teacher,
Richards.
 
He's fascinated by the way in
which literature doesn't unify
opposites or reconcile needs but
leaves things as it found them,
but exposed in all of their
complexity.
Paul de Man more than once
invoked Empson as a precursor of
deconstruction,
not of the New Criticism.
For this reason--for the reason
that he's not concerned with
unity and that he's not
concerned with the idea of the
reconciliation of opposites--
Empson, I think,
can rightly be understood as a
precursor of deconstruction,
if only because deconstruction
follows the New Criticism,
of course, in being a mode of
close reading;
and there has never been a
better close reader than Empson.
Before turning away from
Empson, whose influence was
widespread despite this
divergence,
it needs to be said that his
purposes for close reading are
actually very different from the
purposes of the New Critics--
the American New Critics,
particularly Brooks whose
preoccupation with unity is
something he freely confesses
and something that--
well, we've got ten minutes,
so I shouldn't rush ahead
prematurely--
but something that you can see
to be at the heart of what
Brooks is doing.
 
Here Brooks,
in The Well-Wrought Urn,
Modern Poetry and the
Tradition, and the
other books for which he's well
known,
uses a variety of different
words to describe the way in
which the complexity of
literature is placed in the
service of unification.
 
In the essay you're reading
here, he uses the word
"irony."
 
He admits that maybe he
stretches the word
"irony,"
but he tries to argue that the
variety of effects that he
focuses on in his essay have to
do with irony.
 
In another great essay,
the first chapter of The
Well-Wrought Urn,
he talks about paradox.
Obviously, these are related
ideas,
and elsewhere he takes up other
ways of evoking the way in which
complex feelings and thoughts
are brought together.
Empson's word,
"ambiguity,"
continues to play an important
role in the work of the New
Criticism.
 
It is--at least,
it puts itself out there as a
candidate to be an alternative
term that one might use if one
got tired of saying
"irony"
or "paradox."
 
>
 
There are a variety of words,
in other words.
Another word given by the poet
and critic Allen Tate,
one of the founding figures of
the New Criticism,
is "tension"--
that is to say,
the way in which the literary
text resolves oppositions as a
tension;
that is, a holding in
suspension a conflict
experienced as tension.
So there are these varieties of
ways for describing what's going
on in a text.
 
It's interesting I think that
if one thinks of Tony the Tow
Truck one can think of--
when you go home and study it,
you'll see what I mean--
there's a complex pattern of
imagery,
as it were, between pulling and
pushing.
 
There's a tremendous amount of
pulling and pushing that goes on
in Tony the Tow Truck.
We'll revert especially to the
notion of "pushing"
in other contexts later in the
course,
but for the moment you can see
the way in which there is a
tension between that which pulls
and that which pushes,
which is one of the motive
forces of the story.
 
That, I think,
is an example also:
if it is ironic that
Tony is now stuck and instead of
pulling needs to be pushed,
if it is in some Brooksian
sense ironic that that is the
case,
we can understand that as irony
or as tension or ambiguity.
Now there's one way in which
Tony is probably not a
good proof text for the New
Criticism.
You remember that in "My
Credo," the little
sort of excerpt that you get at
the beginning of the Brooks
section in your anthology,
Brooks says,
"Poetry should be about
moral things but it shouldn't
point a moral."
 
Obviously Tony the Tow Truck
points a moral and so would
be subject to a kind of
devaluation on those grounds by
the New Criticism--
even though there are ways of
reading Tony,
as I've been suggesting,
New Critic-ally.
 
All right.
 
Now the idea of unity for
Brooks, and for the New Critics
in general,
is that it be complex,
that it warp the statements of
science,
and that it bring to bear a
tension between the denotation
and the connotation of words.
 
The word "yellow"
in the second line of Tony
the Tow Truck--
its denotation is that it
is a certain color,
the color that Tony's garage is
painted.
 
The connotation,
I have suggested,
is of the variety of kinds that
one might gingerly approach in
thinking about complicating the
texture of the story.
In any case,
the tension between denotation
and connotation is part of the
way in which irony works.
So the question again is--and
the question it seems to me
raised in advance by Empson--
why should these sorts of
tension, these movements of
complex reconciliation,
result in unity?
 
It's very interesting.
 
Brooks's reading of "She
Dwelt Among Untrodden
Ways," the wonderful Lucy
poem by Wordsworth,
emphasizes the irony of the
poem.
Brooks feels that he's on very
thin ice talking about
Wordsworth and irony at all,
but at the same time does bring
it out rather beautifully,
talking about the irony of the
poem basically as the way in
which you can't really say that
Lucy can be a flower and a star
simultaneously.
She's a flower,
she's perishable,
she's half hidden,
and she's ultimately dead and
in the ground--
whereas a star would seem to be
something that she just can't be
mapped onto if she is this
half-hidden thing.
 
But at the same time,
Brooks says,
"Well,
after all she is a star to the
speaker,"
and he's just saying,
"She's a star to me;
she's a flower half hidden,
unnoticed to everyone
else."
The relationship between the
depth of the speaker's feeling
and the obscurity of Lucy in the
world is the irony that the
speaker wants to lay hold of and
that reconciles what seem like
disparate facts in the poem.
 
Well, now I just want to point
out that close reading can
always be pushed farther.
 
That's the difficulty about
close reading.
It's all very well to say,
"Look at me,
I'm reconciling harmonies,
I'm creating patterns,
I'm showing the purpose of
image clusters and all the rest
of it," but if you keep
doing it,
what you have yoked together
becomes unyoked again.
It falls apart,
or at least it threatens to do
so.
 
A contemporary of Brooks's
named F.W. Bateson wrote an
essay on this same poem,
"She Dwelt Among Untrodden
Ways," in which he points
out--
the poem's on page 802--that
the poem is full of oxymorons,
contradictions in terms:
"untrodden ways."
A "way"
is a path, but how can there be
a path if it's not trodden?
 
What is the meaning of an
untrodden way,
or of "there are none to
praise" her but "very
few to love"?
 
Why call attention not so much
to the difference between
"few love her"
and "none praise her"
as the notion that none praise
her?
This is palpably false because
here's the poet praising her,
right?
 
So what does he mean,
"none"?
Why is he calling attention,
in other words,
to this logical disparity?
 
"She lived unknown and few
could know"--how can she be
unknown if few know anything
about her?
In other words,
the poem is full of
complexities,
but who says they're being
reconciled?
 
They're just sitting there
oxymoronically,
not reconciling themselves at
all.
So Bateson's argument is that
Wordsworth is calling attention
to a conflict of emotion or
feeling that can't be
reconciled,
hence the pathos of the ending,
"[O]h,
/ the difference to me,"
and so on.
 
This, as I say,
is a different use of close
reading.
 
It's close reading which is not
in the service of unity or of
unification but recognizes that
the very arts whereby we see a
thing as a unified whole can
just as easily be put to the
purpose of blasting it apart
again,
and of calling our attention to
that which can't be reconciled
just as the speaker can't be
reconciled to the death of Lucy.
Now the New Critics can,
I think, be criticized for that
reason.
 
The aftermath of--the
historical close reading
aftermath of--
the New Criticism does
precisely that,
if one sees deconstruction as a
response to the New Criticism.
 
It's not just that,
as we'll see,
it's a great many other things
too.
The deconstructive response
consists essentially in saying,
"Look.
 
You can't just arbitrarily tie
a ribbon around something and
say, 'Ah ha.
 
It's a unity.'" Right?
 
The ribbon comes off.
 
>
 
"Things fly apart,"
as the poet says,
and it's not a unity after all.
 
There is another aspect of the
way in which the New Criticism
has been criticized for the last
forty or fifty years which needs
to be touched on.
 
The notion of autonomy,
the notion of the freedom of
the poem from any kind of
dependence in the world,
is something that is very easy
to undermine critically.
Think of Brooks's analysis of
Randall Jarrell's "Eighth
Air Force."
 
It concludes on the last page
of the essay by saying that this
is a poem about human nature,
about human nature under
stress, and whether or not human
nature is or is not good;
and arguments of this kind,
arguments of the kind set forth
by the poem, "can make
better citizens of us."
In other words,
the experience of reading
poetry is not just an aesthetic
experience.
It's not just a question of
private reconciliation of
conflicting needs.
 
It's a social
experience, in this view,
and the social experience is
intrinsically a conservative
one.
 
In other words,
it insists on the need to
balance opinions,
to balance viewpoints,
and to balance needs,
precisely in a way which is,
of course,
implicitly a kind of social and
political centrism.
 
In other words,
how can poetry in this
view--how can literature be
progressive?
For that matter,
how can it be reactionary?
How, in other words,
can it be put to political
purposes if there is this
underlying,
implicit centrism in this
notion of reconciliation,
harmonization, and balance?
 
That has been a frequent source
of the criticism of the New
Criticism in its afterlife over
the last forty or fifty years.
There's also the question of
religion.
There is a kind of implicit
Episcopalian perspective that
you see in Brooks's essay when
he's talking about the
Shakespeare poem,
in which, under the aspect of
eternity,
inevitably things here on earth
seem ironic.
 
>
 
There's always that play of
thought throughout the thinking
of the New Criticism as well.
 
Naturally, one will think of
things in ironic terms if one
sees them from the perspective
of the divine or of the eternal
moment.
 
