Literary Theory: An Historical Introduction [1 ed.] 9788024630069, 9788024630144

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Literary theory An historical introduction Prof. PhDr. Martin Procházka, CSc.

Recenzovali: Prof. PhDr. Martin Hilský, CSc. PhDr. Kamila Vránková, Ph.D.

Vydala Univerzita Karlova v Praze Nakladatelství Karolinum jako učební text pro posluchače Filozofické fakulty UK Sazba DTP Nakladatelství Karolinum Čtvrté vydání, v Nakladatelství Karolinum druhé © Univerzita Karlova v Praze, 2015 © Martin Procházka, 2015

ISBN 978-80-246-3006-9 ISBN 978-80-246-3014-4 (online : pdf)

Univerzita Karlova v Praze Nakladatelství Karolinum 2015 www.karolinum.cz [email protected]

Contents

PART ONE: HISTORICAL OUTLINE OF LITERARY THEORIES Introduction - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 7 Approaches to Aesthetics and Literary Theory - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 7 M.H.Abrams’s Typology of Literary Theories - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 9 Antiquity: Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 11 Plato and Platonism - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 11 Aristotle’s Poetics - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 19 Ancient Rome: Horace and Longinus - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 23 Renaissance - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 27 Sir Philip Sidney: The Defense of Poesie or An Apologie for Poetrie - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 31 Classicism, Augustan Age, Neoclassicism - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 37 John Dryden (1631–1700) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 40 Alexander Pope (1688–1744) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 42 Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 42 Romanticism - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 44 The Victorians - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 52 Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 53 Matthew Arnold (1822–1888) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 55 John Ruskin (1819–1900) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 56 William Morris (1834–1896) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 59 Walter Pater (1839–1894) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 60 New Criticism - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 64 Structuralism and Semiotics - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 72 Roman Jakobson (1896–1982) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 75 René Wellek and Austin Warren: Theory of Literature - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 76 Northrop Frye and Archetypal Criticism - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 78 Roland Barthes: Mythologies - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 82 Deconstruction: an Introduction - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 87 Deconstruction in America - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 97 New Historicism - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 107 Feminist and Psychoanalytic Criticism - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 116

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Feminist Criticism - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 117 Psychoanalytic Criticism - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 122

PART TWO: CONCEPTS AND METHODS Metaphor - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Metonymy - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Synecdoche - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Allegory - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Symbol - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Metre - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Rhyme - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Free Verse - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Drama - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Narrative Poetry - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Narrative Structures - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

129 133 135 136 140 142 148 152 154 162 169

Bibliography - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 173

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Introduction

APPROACHES TO AESTHETICS AND LITERARY THEORY In the first half of the twentieth century aesthetics was often believed to be in a state of confusion. Many British and American scholars thought it a “pseudo-philosophy” neither logical nor scientific, nor quite whole-heartedly and empirically matter of fact…without application in practice to test it and without an orthodox terminology to make it into an honest superstition or the thoroughgoing and satisfying cult. It is neither useful to creative artists nor a help to amateurs in appreciation. (D.W. Prall, Philosophies of Beauty [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1931], p.ix) Now we can see the reason for this confusion. In the traditional classification of sciences each science is distinguished by its own subject-matter and field and by the use of specific methodologies. But this classification may be useful only in the most abstract philosophical terms. In sciences as well as in the humanities the situation of individual disciplines is much less clear since their subject-matters, fields and methods often overlap (stylistics, for example, is based on linguistics and literary theory). Therefore many disciplines in the humanities are of relational nature: they are not defined by their own field, subject matter and individual methods but rather by their relations to other disciplines. This also holds for aesthetics and its subdivision, literary theory. It is generally accepted that aesthetics deals with the origins and nature of our feelings toward beauty, and its manifestations in the works of art. Aesthetics also describes and explains the creative process and studies historical forms of the beautiful. But this is not yet a definition of aesthetics. Rather, it is an enumeration of its major themes. 7

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Aesthetics and literary theory can be defined in many different ways on the basis of their relations to other disciplines. Thus, we have a philosophical definition of aesthetics, stating for instance, as Immanuel Kant did, that its chief feature is a special kind of judgement: aesthetic judgement which differs substantially from all other philosophical judgements. It is not concerned with our understanding of reality but with the free play of our cognitive and imaginative powers. Another, and probably the oldest, definition of aesthetics sees its specificity in the determination of standards or norms of beauty. This normative approach was current in the earlier phases of the discipline’s development (from the antiquity to Classicism). It builds on the authority of tradition: the notion of the beautiful is derived from ancient models of beauty (old Greek and Roman works). Aesthetic qualities of the work of art are prescribed (by a set of rules) rather than described. In this way, aesthetics and theory of literature are subordinated to the traditional disciplines of poetics (dealing with the means art uses to imitate reality) and of rhetoric (dealing with the figures of speech and the way they can influence the emotional reactions of the audience). Another approach to aesthetics and literary theory is concerned with the values present in the work of art and, more specifically, with its use, usefulness or function. This value-oriented or axiological approach is traditionally concerned with the salutary effects of art on the public: the improvement of morals, emotional education and the cultivation of human senses. Other, more recent and sophisticated forms of this approach point out that art can help us rediscover the values of everyday life and return the sense and substance to the alienated objects and events. Clearly, this approach does not limit itself to the study of the beautiful: it is preoccupied with the mediatory role of art in modern society. The last group of aesthetic theories is characterized by a different point of departure. Instead of the search for specific features of the beautiful a more modern approach is employed: the theory of signs or semiotics. General semiotics founded by the American philosopher Charles Morris classifies all phenomena under two main types of signs: indexes (e.g. the smoke which is a sign of the fire but at the same time it does not depict, or represent it) and icons (the object is represented by its image). The latter kind of signs is frequent in art. In literary theory, however a special concept of the language sign typical of de Saussure’s linguistic theory is being used. De Saussure defines the sign not as an object or a representation, but as a relation

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establishing meaning. There are two components or poles of this relation: the signifier (a figure designating a certain meaning) and the signified (the meaning designated by the figure). The problem is that the meaning may or may not refer to an object, and the meanings of signs are often derived only from other signs. M.H. ABRAMS’S TYPOLOGY OF LITERARY THEORIES A different and perhaps less complicated approach to the classification of aesthetic theories has been delineated by the American scholar M.H. Abrams in the introduction to his book on Romantic aesthetics, entitled The Mirror and the Lamp (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1953). In opposition to the relational definitions of aesthetics, Abrams tries to find “a frame of reference [for literary theories] simple enough to be readily manageable.” (p. 5) He also wants to avoid the silent translation of “the basic terms of all theories into [anyone’s] favourite philosophical vocabulary” (Ibid.). His solution is an “analytic scheme which avoids imposing its own philosophy, by utilizing those key distinctions which are already common to the largest possible number of theories to be compared”. (p. 6) Abrams’ scheme determines four basic elements, or dimensions, of any “situation” of the work of art: work product of the creative process artist creator of the work universe everything which has become the subject of the work, and the relationship of the work to “reality” audience those to whom the work is addressed These elements can be grouped into a simple triangular diagram with the work in the centre. universe work audience

artist

This means that the work of art can be explained from its relation to different forms of the other. The approaches which suppose that the other is the artist are called expressive because they usually explain art as the artist’s selfexpression. If the other is the universe, the theory is named mimetic because

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it defines art as the imitation of reality. If the other is the audience, the theory is called pragmatic because it is concentrated on the art as an action which produces specific effects, chiefly moral changes of the audience. Finally, the theories explaining the work art just from itself, as an autonomous object are called objective. We should keep in mind, M.H. Abrams writes, that the principal elements discussed in individual theories are not constants but variables. Take for instance the universe: according to one mimetic theory the artist imitates the beautiful aspects of nature, another theory says that he represents the moral aspects of human nature, and still others claim that art depicts the world of ideas or that it should imitate the natural world of common sense. Thus, the understanding of the four basic elements of the situation of the work of art varies from one theoretical approach to another. The following chapters in Part One demonstrate several historical forms of these relationships and other important theories and concepts in English and American aesthetic and literary theory. A discussion of the most important developments in the antiquity is prefixed, since many theories of later ages refer to them. QUESTIONS 1. Why was aesthetics and literary theory called a pseudo-science? 2. Explain a relational nature of aesthetics and literary theory. Give examples of relational approaches. 3. Why did M.H. Abrams design his typology of literary theories? 4. Explain the terms M.H. Abrams uses for the four basic types of aesthetic theories. 5. Give examples of the variability of the four elements of the work of art. Use your knowledge of literary history.

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Antiquity: Plato, Aristotle, Horace, Longinus

Western theory of literature started to develop in ancient Greece and Rome. As we shall see, the idea of literature in these cultures was widely different from our contemporary views.1 Greek or Roman notions of literature indicated rather a verbal art than written texts and made less of a distinction between art and philosophy. For these reasons, ancient approaches to literature are inseparable from philosophical reflections or opinions on oratory. If we recall M.H. Abrams’s typology of literary approaches, we shall find the germs of all four types in the theories of the ancients. The problem is that no author discussed in this chapter represents a pure type of literary theory. Thus, Plato’s philosophy has both mimetic and expressive features and Aristotle’s Poetics, which is mainly a work of mimetic theory, shows also conspicuous marks of objective theories. Horace’s Ars poetica is basically pragmatic but deals also with expressive and mimetic aspects of the work of art. And in Longinus’s treatise On the Sublime (Peri hypsous [hipsu:s]) there are expressive, mimetic and pragmatic traits. Viewed from a relational perspective, some of the approaches are mostly philosophical (like Aristotle’s), others (like Plato’s) are axiological, and still others (like Horace’s) are normative. PLATO AND PLATONISM Our trip through the realm of ancient literary theory will start with a glance at the aesthetic thoughts of Plato (427–347 B.C.). They appear in Plato’s 1

But even now it is very difficult to define a distinctive quality of literature: we could agree on “the art whose material is language,” but drama is also a part of literature and it includes non-verbal elements such as theatre-space, bodily action, stage objects etc. There are also attempts to define literature on the basis of some general quality of literary language – figurative language, using poetic and rhetoric figures – or, in broader terms of literary discourse (an utterance in its specific extralingual context), as the mode of writing characterized by literariness. This literariness cannot be defined in positive terms but only negatively: for instance by the absence of spoken language or by the liminal position of literary texts (they are neither life nor the ideal, neither body nor the abstract thought).

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dialogues, and Plato attributes them to his great teacher Socrates. In the dialogues Ion and Phaedrus Plato discusses literary and philosophical inspiration. Literature, philosophy and also oratory are inspired by a “divine power”. In Ion this power is only vaguely defined: it is described metaphorically as magnetic power attracting divinely gifted people to the transcendental beauty and ideas and the less gifted to the beauty and ideas created or invented by these divinely gifted people. The exemplary situation Plato depicts is that of the famous Ephesian rhapsodist Ion who is an enthusiastic interpreter of Homer. Inasmuch as Homer is attracted by the divine beauty, Ion is influenced by the beauty in Homer’s poetry. The audience becomes the last link in this chain, they listen to Homer because they are moved by the rhapsodist’s art. I do observe it, Ion, and I am going to point out to you what I take it to mean. For, as I was saying just now, this is not an art in you, whereby you speak well on Homer, but a divine power which moves you like that in the stone which Euripides named a magnet,… For this stone not only attracts iron rings, but also imparts to them a power whereby they in turn are able to do the very same thing as the stone, and attract other rings; so that sometimes there is formed quite a long chain of bits of iron and rings, suspended one from another; and they all depend for this power on that one stone. In the same manner the Muse inspires men herself, and then by means of these inspired persons the inspiration spreads to others, and holds them in a connected chain. For all the good epic poets utter all those fine poems not from art, but as inspired and possessed, and the good lyric poets likewise…when they have started on the melody and the rhythm they begin to be frantic, and it is under possession – as the bacchants are possessed, and not in their senses, when they draw honey and milk from the rivers – that the soul of the lyric poets does the same thing, by their own report. … Seeing then that it is not by art that they compose and utter so many fine things about the deeds of men – as you do about Homer – but by a divine dispensation, each is able to compose that to which the Muse has stirred him, this man dithyrambs, another laudatory odes, another dance-songs, another epic or else iambic verse; but each is at fault in any other kind. For not by art do they utter these things, but by divine influence; since, if they had fully learned by art to speak on one kind of theme, they would know how to speak on all. And for this reason God takes away the mind of

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these men and uses them as his ministers, just as he uses soothsayers and godly seers, in order that we who hear them may know that it is not they who utter these words of great price, when they are out of their wits, but that it is God himself who speaks and addresses us through them. …the poets are merely the interpreters of the gods, according as each is possessed by one of the heavenly powers. … And are you aware that your spectator is the last of the rings which I spoke of as receiving from each other the power transmitted from the Heraclean lodestone? [i.e., from the magnet] You, the rhapsode and actor, are the middle ring; the poet himself is first; but it is the god who through the whole series draws the souls of men withersoever he pleases, making the power of one depend on the other. And, just as from the magnet, there is a mighty chain of choric performers and masters suspended by side connexions from the rings that hang down from the Muse. One poet is suspended from one Muse, another from another: the word we use for it is “possessed”, but it is much the same thing, for he is held. … And so you, Ion, when the subject of Homer is mentioned, have plenty to say, but nothing on any of the others. And when you ask me the reason why you can speak at large on Homer but not on the rest, I tell you it is because your skill in praising Homer comes not by art, but by divine dispensation. (Plato, Ion, 533 C–536 D) Therefore the interpretation which is founded only on sacred enthusiasm does not develop any virtues and skills in the person of the interpreter. Nor does it increase the amount of knowledge and virtue among the common people. Hence, what Socrates pleads for is a deeper understanding of the work of art which has to be based on the understanding of life itself, of human work, and on authentic spiritual values. For this reason Socrates says ironically to Ion at the end of the dialogue Choose therefore which of the two you prefer us to call you, dishonest or divine. … Then you may count on this nobler title in our minds, Ion, of being a divine and not an artistic praiser of Homer. (Plato, Ion, 542 A–B)

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Enthusiasm for and inspiration by divine beauty is also among the main themes of Plato’s dialogue Phaedrus. But this time the art discussed is not recitation of old poems. It is oratory and rhetoric. With this theme a new question emerges: What is the purpose of writing? What is the use of recording speeches? In the strictest sense, these topics may not belong to the theory of art. Nevertheless they are important because they are articulated together with Plato’s theory of inspiration, and with his thoughts about the analogy between divine art, love and philosophy, which are important for a number of later, NeoPlatonic and Renaissance Platonic theories. In his discussion of inspiration Plato starts by distinguishing several types of obsessions and simultaneously several kinds of enthusiasm (mania). The first kind is the art of divination, of telling the future. The second is telling the future from earthly objects (from the flying of the birds for instance) and not from one’s own prophetic vision. The third is the enthusiasm coming from the Muses, that kind of enthusiasm described in Ion. But the fourth is the most important: it is the spiritual vision of the soul when it can glance at the gods. This spiritual vision is common both to the lover and to the philosopher (“the lover of the wisdom”) or supreme artist. The soul has first to transcend the terrestrial spheres – this act is symbolized by the growth of wings and the impatience of the steeds pulling the carriage driven by the soul. Having managed to ascend to the celestial region the soul can partake in the circular progress of the host of the gods and can see all things in a new light of eternal truth and justice. Then it returns to be reborn in another body. But how does it happen that the soul can transcend the earthly world? Looking at the terrestrial beauty one may start to recall the “real being” (divine Ideas) seen in one of his previous lives. For this reason the inspired person may be so attracted to the higher reality that others may consider him mad. Now here we have Theseus’s dictum from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: “The lunatic, the lover and the poet/ Are of imagination all compact.” The background for this statement is the following passage of Phaedrus All my discourse so far has been about the fourth kind of madness, which causes him [i.e., the inspired person] to be regarded as mad, who, when he sees the beauty on earth, remembering the true beauty, feels his wings growing and longs to stretch them for an upward flight, but cannot do so, and, like a bird, gazes upward and neglects the things below. My discourse has shown that this is, of all inspirations, the best

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and of the highest origin to him who has it or who shares in it, and that he who loves the beautiful, partaking in this madness, is called a lover. For, as has been said, every soul of man has by the law of nature beheld the realities [i.e., the world of Ideas], otherwise it would not have entered into a human being, but it is not easy for all souls to gain from earthly things a recollection of those realities, either for those which had but a brief view of them at an earlier time, or for those which, after falling to earth, were so unfortunate as to be turned towards unrighteousness though some evil communications and to have forgotten the holy sights they once saw. Few then are left which retain an adequate recollection of them; but these when they see any likeness of the things of that other world, are stricken with amazement and can no longer control themselves; but they do not understand their condition, because they do not clearly perceive. Now in the earthly copies of justice and temperance [i.e., moderation] and the other ideas which are precious to souls there is no light, but only a few, approaching the images through the darkling organs of sense, behold in them the nature of that which they imitate, and these few do this with difficulty. But at that former time they saw beauty shining with brightness, when, with a blessed company – we following the train of Zeus, and others in that of some other god – they saw the blessed sight and vision and were initiated into that which is rightly called the most blessed of mysteries, which we celebrated in the state of perfection, when we were without experience of the evils which awaited us in the time to come, being permitted as initiates to the sight of the perfect and simple and calm and happy apparitions, which we saw in the pure light, being ourselves pure and not entombed in this which we carry about with us and call the body, in which we are imprisoned as an oyster in its shell. (Plato, Phaedrus, 249 D–250 C) Interesting here is the connection between madness, remembering the ideal visions, love and the art of rhetoric or eloquence. But later in the dialogue Plato makes some important distinctions between those modes with respect to the ways they are used in society. Whereas the true poetic inspiration is the process of recalling the visions of ideal world, writing down speeches, recording the art of an individual for public purpose, may in fact be just an attempt to get artlessness and inauthenticity publicly approved and endorsed as art. For that

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reason, Socrates points out, Athenian politicians, when they have their speeches written down, also enclose the statement of approval of several honoured citizens. In short, writing is just an art of public approval and convention, while a good speaker, a good orator, has to learn how to lead the soul according to its true nature. The fact is, Socrates says, that writing can be both the “medicine” for memory, can repair what was lost, but at the same time it can never replace authentic knowledge and poetic vision. It creates only a kind of “outer layer”, “a varnish” of cultivation and education, instead of the real wisdom which can originate only from the remembrance of the world of Ideas. In this way, writing can also be a “poison”. Both meanings are implied in the Greek word pharmakon. But we have still to speak of propriety and impropriety in writing, how it should be done and how it is improper, have we not? … [Here Socrates narrates an Egyptian fable about the inventor of writing, a lesser god Theuth, and the highest god Ammon. The following extract contains a substantial part of Ammon’s answer to Theuth.] “For this invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn to use it, because they will not practice their memory. Their trust in writing, produced by external characters which are no part of themselves, will discourage the use of their own memory within them. You have invented an elixir not of memory, but of reminding; and you offer your pupils an appearance of wisdom, not true wisdom, for they will read many things without instruction and will therefore seem to know many things when they are for the most part ignorant and hard to get along with, since they are not wise, but only appear wise.” … He who thinks, then, that he has left behind him any art in writing, and he who receives it in the belief that anything in writing will be clear and certain, would be an utterly simple person … if he thinks written words are of any use except to remind him who knows the matter about which they are written. … Writing, Phaedrus, has this strange quality, and is very like painting; for the creatures of painting stand like living beings, but if one asks them a question, they preserve a solemn silence. And so it is with written

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words; you might think they spoke as if they had intelligence, but if you question them, wishing to know about their sayings, they always say one and the same thing. And every word, when once is written, is bandied about, alike among those who understand and those who have no interest in it, and it knows not to whom to speak or not to speak;… … Now tell me; is there not another kind of speech, or word, which shows itself to be the legitimate brother of this bastard one, both in the manner of its begetting and in its better and more powerful nature? … You mean the living and breathing word of him who knows, of which the written word may justly be called an image? (Plato, Phaedrus, 274 B–276 A) In his essay “Plato’s Pharmacy” the French philosopher Jacques Derrida deals with this ambivalence of Platonic thought and shows that Plato attempted to solve it by a so-called logocentrism, an approach privileging the spoken word as the bearer of superior knowledge and the means of presencing ideal truth and divine authority. Other Plato’s views of verbal art are also mimetic but show less respect for the artist. A well-known passage in his Republic presents the artists as the least important citizens, for they do not imitate the Ideas but only their sensuous images. Legislators and politicians are much superior, since they can directly imitate the Ideas and change the society according to them. In such a society, poets and especially the authors of tragedies may become liars because they imitate human action which is a mere reflection of the world of Ideas. Why does Plato change his opinion? In Republic he is speaking about an ideal community (polis) where no divine inspiration or enthusiasm are necessary to remind the rulers of the highest values and archetypes of reality. For these reasons, artists should be excluded from the ideal community. Plato’s concept of imitation was discussed by some of his successors. Though his disciple Aristotle presented a different theory of imitation in his Poetics, the so-called Neoplatonic philosophers in the third and fourth centuries A.D. returned to Plato’s doctrine of the Ideas and their relation to art. Plotinus rethought Plato’s assumption that the highest inspiration was coming to us in our recollections of the world of Ideas but he no longer connected it – as Plato

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did – with the myth of the transmigration of souls. On the contrary, Plotinus held that art had a privileged position since it was not only able to imitate Nature but could also capture the Ideas beyond it. He even said that art was able to improve upon Nature. Still the arts are not to be slighted on the ground that they create by imitation of natural objects; for…we must recognize that they give no bare reproduction of the thing seen but go back to the Ideas from which nature itself derives, and, furthermore, that much of their work is all their own; they are holders of beauty and add where nature is lacking. Thus, Pheidias wrought the Zeus upon no model among things of sense but by apprehending what form Zeus must take if he chose to become manifest to sight. (Plotinus, Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna, London 1926, v.viii.i) But this is not yet all. For Plotinus, the Ideas were not only to be found in the transcendental world beyond the limits of empirical reality. They could also dwell in the minds of the people. The ideal representations of art cannot be created only by imitation of nature, the artist must use his thought and imagination which can mediate to him the world of Ideas. Nor did [Pheidias], when he formed Jupiter or Minerva, have before his eyes a model which he followed strictly, but in his own mind did he have an extraordinary idea of beauty, this he contemplated, on this he fixed his attention, and to rendering this he directed his art and his hand… These forms of things Plato calls ideas…and these, he maintains, do not arise occasionaly in our minds, but are permanently present in reason and in intelligence; other things are born, die, flow, disappear, and never remain long in the same condition. (Plotinus, op.cit.) In this way, Plotinus seems to be going back to Plato’s passages about the vision of Ideas, but there is a sigificant difference. While Plato says that in this world we can only recall the visions of Ideas from the former life, and thus makes the memory the major agent of the recreation, Plotinus says that the ideas can be grasped by thought and imagination. In this way he changes the valuation of art which for Plato was often something less than craft and makes

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it a most important intellectual and imaginative pursuit standing on the same level as philosophy. This attitude very much influenced Renaissance and later versions of Platonism. The most characteristic case of this influence is the romantic Platonism of P.B. Shelley who claims that only art is able to apprehend the ideal truth and beauty, and therefore the poets are “unacknowledged legislators of the world”. ARISTOTLE’S POETICS Let us now consider a completely different work created nevertheless by Plato’s most important disciple. Aristotle (384–322 B.C.) lived in a completely different world from that of Plato. Plato’s philosophy was produced in the period of the decline of Athenian democracy when it was necessary to remind the polis of the lost ideal values. Aristotle’s thought evolved in a time of dramatic changes of Greek society when the empire of Alexander of Macedon (Alexander the Great) was being established. Aristotle was a Macedonian who had been called to Alexander’s court before he turned to Athens where he founded a philosophical school called the Lyceum. In contrast to Plato who had intended to improve the polis by simply formulated, authentic thinking expressed in the form of a dialogue, Aristotle was the first to create a system of philosophy where physics was the science of nature, metaphysics dealt with the world beyond the limits of empirical nature, ethics discussed the laws of human behaviour, rhetoric the art of speaking and poetics dealt with literary and dramatic art. In such a system of disciplines it was first of all necessary to define the subject of poetics. Aristotle’s definition singles out two major genres, epic poetry and tragedy and these are also discussed in Poetics. They are distinguished according to their different means of representation and subjects. The most important distinction concerns the means of representation, rhythm, word and melody. These elements can be employed either separately or together. Therefore epic poetry and tragedy are also related to other arts like dancing and music. Epic poetry, then, and the poetry of tragic drama, and, moreover, comedy and dithyrambic poetry, and most flute-playing and harpplaying, these, speaking generally, may be said to be “representations of life”. But they differ one from another in three ways: either in using means generically different [i.e. typical of a specific genre] or in

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representing different objects or in representing objects not in the same way but in a different manner. (Aristotle, Poetics 1, 1447a) Because of this variety of the means of representation Aristotle finds it extremely difficult to define “the art using only speech or verse,” i.e. what we would now call literature. In his age, the main problem consisted in a small awareness of the distinction between the written and spoken form of discourses. Thus, the recitation of Homer had a similar value as the reading of his poems, and verse was considered an adequate means of expression both for poetry and treatises in medicine or physics. Therefore Aristotle defined literature as “an art representing people in their actions”. And he added another distinction that these people may be “good or bad”. But even this definition, naturally, was too general. This made him discuss the differences in representation unconditioned by its means or subjects. Aristotle’s approach accounts for the distinction between the narrative and dramatic principle in art, according to the technique of representation: the poet either narrates his story or shows the characters as if “they were active themselves”. Another very important notion defined by Aristotle is that of representation, traditionally called imitation or mimesis. Mimesis is usually explained in the following way: Life “presents” to the artist the phenomena of sense which the artist “re-presents”, creates again giving them coherence and order specific to his own medium. But mimesis is not only a feature of art. The mimetic ability is one of the basic characteristics of mankind distinguishing it from the animals. Not only are people the most perfect imitators surpassing the animals but they can also cultivate and accumulate their experience in this way. Of course, there are many differences in imitation: some imitate the good in people and deeds, some can reveal only bad and superficial aspects. From the difference between serious and comical imitation, connected with imitating good and bad aspects of human behaviour and deeds, Aristotle derives the difference between the tragic and the comic. While tragedy represents noble aspects of human nature, comedy should imitate – in an amusing and “ugly, distorted but not painful” way – bad or superficial traits of characters. In Poetics, comedy is not given adequate attention, and Aristotle promises to write a separate treatise on this genre. If we can believe to his disciple Theophrastus, this book really existed,

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but the fact is that there is no further reference to it in Aristotle’s works. Not even the anonymous Tractatus Coislianus seems to abridge the authentic text of Aristotle’s theory of comedy, although there are scholars (e.g., R. Janko, Aristotle on Comedy. Towards a Reconstruction of Poetics II [Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984]) who defend this theory with some persuasion. Having differentiated between the serious and comic aspects of literature, Aristotle makes a distinction between the two main genres – tragedy and epic. Epic is distinguished from tragedy by the way it represents deeds and events (narrative in epic and dramatic dialogue and acting in tragedy), but also that it describes the action at greater length. For tragedy must depict the events of twenty-four hours, while epic has no such limitation. Epic and tragedy are further distinguished by the components of their structure. Epic poetry agreed with tragedy only in so far as it was a metrical representation of heroic action. But inasmuch as it has a single metre and is narrative – in that respect they are different. And then as regards length, tragedy tends to fall within a single revolution of the sun or slightly to exceed that, whereas epic is unlimited in point of time; and that is another difference, although originally the practice was the same in tragedy as well as in epic poetry. The constituent parts are some of them the same and some peculiar to tragedy. Consequently any one who knows about tragedy, good and bad, knows about epics too, since tragedy has all the elements of epic poetry, though the elements of tragedy are not all present in the epic. (Poetics, 5, 1449b) Thus Aristotle makes the first move towards an objective theory of art studying the work of art as a structured object. Aristotle speaks about six components of tragedy: the action, which is the most important, characters, thoughts, speech, setting and music. Two of these components, speech and music, are the media, or means, of representation, one of them, setting, is the mode of representation and three of them, action, characters and thoughts, are the subjects of representation. What is important is the hierarchy of these components: the fundamental one is the action, the characters come next, then come the thoughts, speech and the remaining components.

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Only the action can grant the unity of the work. The first thing is to select the characteristic events or episodes that may have meaning for the unity of action and of the whole work. For in writing an Odyssey [Homer] did not put in all that ever happened to Odysseus, his being wounded on Parnassus, for instance, or his feigned madness…, but he constructed his Odyssey round a single action in our sense of the phrase. … As then in the other arts of representation a single representation means a representation of a single object, so too the plot being a representation of a piece of action must represent a single piece of action and the whole of it; and the component incidents must be so arranged that if one of them be transposed or removed, the unity of the whole is dislocated or destroyed. (Poetics, 8, 1451a) Because of this emphasis on the unity of action, epic and dramatic poetry are closer to philosophy and more remote from history. …a poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could and would happen either probably or inevitably. The difference between a historian and a poet is not that one writes in prose and the other in verse… The real difference is this that one tells what happened and the other what might happen. For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts. (Poetics, 9, 1451a–b) Later, Aristotle deals with three basic components of tragic action: peripety, anagnorisis and drastis (often called “pathos”). Peripety or peripeteia is an abrupt turn of events, which runs counter to the expectations of the characters and the audience. Anagnorisis is a change of ignorance into knowledge, especially in the characters. Drastis is a painful or pernicious event. What is the meaning of the unity of tragic action? It is achieved in order to evoke fear and compassion in the audience, to produce catharsis which is never fully described in Poetics.

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Fear and pity sometimes result from the spectacle and are sometimes aroused by the actual arrangement of the incidents, which is preferable and the mark of a better poet. The plot should be so constructed that even without seeing the play anyone hearing of the incidents happening thrills with fear and pity as a result of what occurs. So would anyone feel who heard the story of Oedipus. To produce this effect by means of an appeal to the eye is inartistic and needs adventitious aid, while those who by such means produce an effect which is not fearful but merely monstrous have nothing in common with tragedy. For one should not seek from tragedy all kinds of pleasure but that which is peculiar to tragedy… (Poetics, 14, 1453a) The only mention of catharsis is in Aristotle’s definition of tragedy: Tragedy is a representation of a serious and complete action, which has a certain range and limits. It uses speech embellished in every section by a special and most appropriate means, uses acting characters, not narration, and causes, through the agency of compassion and fear, the catharsis, the purification from such feelings. The epic or the narrative, according to Aristotle, can be simple or complex, based on characters or on the drastic action. For instance, while the Iliad can be called simple and drastic, the Odyssey is complex, full of anagnorises. The most appropriate metre for such a poetry is hexameter. Due to its dignity it is a good means of conveying metaphors and accommodating words from different dialects of Greek. Epic is distinguished from tragedy by the range of action and by the type of verse. ANCIENT ROME: HORACE AND LONGINUS The chief critical work of Horace or Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65–8 B.C.) is a verse epistle entitled Ars poetica or Ad Pisones. It can be read as an instance of pragmatic theory as well as an attempt to give practical advice to the members of a literary academy in Pisa. The major aim is to explain how to write a good poem affecting contemporary audience. Horace starts his letter with a statement that poems cannot be just beautiful (pulchra), but also sweet (dulcia), affecting the minds of the audience. This dictum is quoted both in the original and in the English paraphrase made by Byron in 1811 and entitled Hints from Horace.

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Non satis est pulchra esse poemata; dulcia sunto, Et quocumque volent, animum auditoris agunto. Ut ridentibus arrident, ita flentibus adsunt Humani vultus; si vis me flere dolendum est Primum ipsi tibi; ‘Tis not enough, ye bards, with all your art, To polish poems; they must touch the heart: Where’er the scene is laid, whate’er the song, Still let it bear the hearer’s soul along; Command your audience or to smile or weep, Whiche’er may please you – anything but sleep. The poet claims our tears; but, by his leave, Before I shed them, let me see him grieve. (Lord Byron, Poetical Works, ed. J. Jump [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973], p. 130). This does not mean that poems should please at any cost, they should have their own aesthetic value, defined in relation to the common themes and well-known stories. The difficult thing, says Horace, is to tell these well-known stories, to write about these well-known topics properly, that is with decorum. Difficile est proprie communia dicere… ‘Tis hard to venture where our betters fail, Or lend fresh intent to a twice-told tale; … Yet copy not too closely, but record, More justly, thought for thought than word for word, Nor trace your prototype through narrow ways, But only follow where he merits praise. (Byron, Poetical Works, p. 131) The decorum has two components: sermo (“speech”), that is writing about everyday matters and ordinary subjects, and techne (“technique”) balancing the art and skill. This balance seems to be very important for Horace and is the reason for his discussion of themes and means of expression which in some respect resembles Aristotle’s Poetics.

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The next aspect discussed by Horace is the function of the poet’s work. Apart from serious goals like the moral edification of humanity (these were discussed especially by Plato), poetry, according to Horace, must also entertain. And moreover: it can also teach in an entertaining way. Aut prodesse volunt, aut delectare, poetae… Two objects always should the poet move, Or one or both, – to please or to improve. Whate’er you teach, be brief if you design For our remembrance your didactic line; (Byron, Poetical Works, p. 137) Last but not least, Horace reminds us of the fact that there cannot be any privileged approach to poetry: poetry is like a picture: it is different when viewed from different perspectives and under different circumstances. Ut pictura, poesis: As pictures, so shall poems be; some stand The critic’s eye, and please him where near at hand; But others at distance strike the sight; This seeks the shade, but that demands the light, Nor dreads the connoisseur’s fastidious view, But, ten times scrutinised, is ten times new. (Byron, Poetical Works, p. 137) Horace’s epistle had a great importance for classicist theory of art. The treatise Peri hypsous (On the Sublime) ascribed to Longinus (Longinos), an orator and teacher of rhetoric in third century A.D., is probably of much earlier date: it comes from the first century A.D. The central theme, the category of the sublime, is defined in two ways: as “the power of forming great conceptions” and “vehement and inspired passion”. This means that the sublime reflects the “great soul”, the personality of the author and the desire of greatness on the side of the reader or listener. This greatness also depends on the composition and style that can convey “the lofty and strong passion” to the reader. Longinus puts an emphasis on the transport of mind that results from lightening revelation, shattering image or stunning burst of passion. For these features his theory became important among the sentimentalists and romantics.

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QUESTIONS 1. Explain old Greek and Roman notions of what we call “literature”. 2. What are the sources of poetic (and philosophical) inspiration according to Plato’s dialogues Ion and Phaedrus? Why does Plato use the word mania when he speaks of inspiration? 3. Comment on Plato’s understanding of the difference between speech and writing. Explain the terms PHARMAKON and LOGOCENTRISM. 4. Why does Plato want to expel the poets from the ideal community? 5. How did Plotinus transform Plato’s doctrine of Ideas? What significance did it have for mimetic theories of art? 6. Explain the main features of Aristotle’s systemic approach to literary theory. 7. What distinguishes epic and tragedy from other arts? What is the difference between these two main genres? 8. How does Aristotle define mimesis? What significance does his definition have for his explanation of the distinction between tragedy and comedy? 9. Name six components of tragedy according to Aristotle and explain their structural relationships. Why can Aristotle be called a predecessor of objective aesthetic theories? 10. Why is the unity of action so important in Aristotle’s approach? What does it mean for the relation of tragedy and epic to philosophy and history? 11. Name the main components of tragic action according to Aristotle. Which of them are especially important for the unity of tragic action and for the moral and aesthetic effects of tragedy? How would you explain catharsis? 12. Compare Horace’s approach to art with those of Plato and Aristotle. 13. Explain: sermo, techne, ut pictura poesis. 14. Explain briefly Longinus’s notion of the sublime.

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Renaissance

The Renaissance was an age of an intense development of writing on literature. Trying to describe its variegated and changeable scene we cannot succeed without a good deal of simplification. Therefore out only two basic features have been chosen which influenced later attempts at systematic aesthetics and theory of literature. 1. The Dependence of Poetics on Grammar and Rhetoric Most of the approaches to the theory of literature were still greatly dependent on the system of education: metre and figures of poetic language were traditionally discussed by grammarians. Apart from grammars, there were specialized treatises on rhetoric whose purpose, however, was mostly pragmatic: to give the user of language good control over his audience. Aristotle’s Rhetoric which stands at the origin of this tradition systematizes the knowledge of ancient Greek rhetoricians. The end of rhetoric, according to Aristotle is the persuasion of the audience. There are three basic modes of persuasion: ethos, logos and pathos. Ethos means that the speaker manages to persuade the audience of his own righteous moral stance and integrity. It presupposes the relation of equality or friendship towards the audience and often also involves flattering the listeners that they should lend their ears to the speaker. Logos means persuasion by a logical argument, i.e., by induction or deduction. In the former, a generalization is derived from a number of individual instances. In the latter, inferences are made from statements, not from empirical phenomena. Here, syllogisms (called “enthymemes” in Aristotle’s treatise) are used as the major figures and logical constructions. Pathos means to persuade the public by arousing suitable emotions. Aristotle considered it inferior to logos, but there were other rhetorical schools, such as that represented by Gorgias or, later, the Longinians who thought pathos was the most important instrument of affecting the audience. 27

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Apart from these philosophical features most rhetorical treatises (starting with the classical work of Roman rhetoric, Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria from late first century AD) restrict themselves to the discussion of the orator’s personality and art, and to the description of rhetorical figures. The description of rhetorical figures is usually divided into two main sections according to the difference between the tropes (turns of speech) which make a link between a word and an idea or between two words (the main tropes are metaphor, metonymy and synecdoche) and schemes which are based on analogies or contrasts of morphological or syntactic nature (e.g., anaphora – the same beginning of a sentence, clause or a line, or homoioteleuton – the same ending of a word or a sentence). This is also true of Renaissance poetics, which resemble manuals of rhetoric adapted to meet the demands of contemporary writers and literary analysis. This tendency also characterizes an important work of Elizabethan literature, the Arte of English Poesie (1589) by George Puttenham (?1520–1601; sometimes, the book is ascribed to his brother Richard). Puttenham concentrates on three major aspects: the personality and art of the poet, proportions in poetry and prose (including not only sentence structure, punctuated by commas, columns and periods, but also the length of a poem’s line, its metre, rhythm and rhyme) and ornaments of poetic language. In the third part he discusses rhetorical figures, and attempts to anglicize their names. Puttenham is also well-known for his attempt to anglicize the Greek names of the rhetorical figures. However vivid some of his English terms are (hyperbole, the exaggeration, he calls the loud liar), his attempt has been in vain, partly because the English terms were often no more informative than the Greek. Anaphora, for instance, which means the repetition of words at the beginning of successive clauses, he calls the figure of report where, of course, report directly translates the Greek word, but only in the Latin sense (reportare “carry back”). By Puttenham’s time report had come to mean in everyday English the same as it means today, i.e. “account” or “reputation”, but since those meanings are irrelevant there, report is hardly more helpful than anaphora. (Gert Ronberg, A Way with Words. The Language of English Renaissance Literature [London: Routledge 1992], p. 143).

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Puttenham understands all these means as “the ornaments of speech”. Thus, all literature is likened to beautifying, painting, making up the common speech. These images then become soon devaluated as the metaphors of false speech, perverted writing and even bad acting which are frequent for instance in Shakespeare’s works (Sonnets, Hamlet). But Puttenham clearly does not anticipate the inflation of ornamental language The ornament we speake of is giuen to it [poesie] by figures and figurative speaches, which be the flowers as it were and coulours that a Poet setteth vpon his language by arte, as the embroderer doth his stone and perle, or passements [lace] of gold vpon the stuffe of a Princely garment, or as th’excellent painter bestoweth the rich Orient coulours vpon his table of pourtraite: so neuertheless as if the same coulours in our arte of Poesie…be not well tempered, or not well layd, or be vsed in excesse, or neuer so litle disordered or misplaced, they not onely giue it no manner or grace at all, but rather do disfigure the stuffe and spill the whole workmanship taking away all bewtie and good liking from it, no lesse then [than] if the crimson tainte, which should be laid vpon a Ladies lips, or right in the center of her cheeks should by some ouersight or mishap be applied to her forhead or chinne, it would make (ye would say) but a very ridiculous bewtie, wherfore the chief prayse and cunning [skill] of our Poet is in the discreet vsing of his figures, as the skilfull painters is in the good conueyance of his colours and shadowing traits of his pensill, with a delectable varietie, by all measure and iust proportion, and in places most aptly to be bestowed. (George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, quoted by Ronberg, op.cit., p. 142). 2. The Birth of Modern Literature In the antiquity and the Middle Ages, no fundamental difference was made between oral and written discourses. The disputes about the function of writing typical of antiquity (as we saw them in Plato’s Phaedrus) had paved the way for the metaphysical (logocentric) notion of writing: presenting the Voice, and the authority of the Speaker as the Word (logos), and the Law of the Universe. This notion of writing is well-known from the New Testament, from the beginning of the Gospel of St.John. Secular views of writing as a mere instrument which enables us to record spoken word were complementary to the

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myth of sacred script. But later, at the beginning of the Renaissance and with the emergence of the individual author, writing became interpreted as the extension of the author’s personality. Even so, the text was still the voice of the author made present and speaking to a patron or to a narrow circle of friends, acquaintances, persons of similar interests. This situation changed fundamentally with the appearance of the printingpress which especially after 1500 opened a new way of communication and started to mould a new audience. In this way, literature was given a chance to establish itself as a “modern entertainment business” which really happened towards the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Also, the transformation of the author and the trade itself had started: though many of the early prefaces of the printed books were beginning with the assertion by their authors that they had never intended to have their writings printed and that they under no circumstances would have it printed for money, these were often just pretended gestures of gentility. Though the prevailing tone of authorial utterances in the works of the Elizabethan age was still confidential, intimate or servile as in the circulated manuscripts, the texts began to reveal a great problem for writers in the era of the printing press, namely the anonymity of the readers and their change from a cluster of sympathetic or noble listeners to the users of the author’s works as his products and – indeed – commodities. To illustrate this I would like to quote from a preface by Austin Saker, a minor Elizabethan novelist. and he must write well that shall please all minds: but he that planteth trees in a Forest, knoweth not how many shall taste the Fruit, and he that soweth in his garden divers Seeds, knoweth not who shall eat of his Sallets. He that planteth a Vine, knoweth not who shall taste his Wine: and he that putteth any thing in Print, must think that all will peruse it: If then amongst many blossoms, some prove blasts, no marvel if amongst many Readers, some prove Riders. (Austen Saker, preface to Narbonus [1580], quoted in David Margolies, Novel and Society in Elizabethan England [London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1985], p. 24) Even Sir Philip Sidney, who had written many of his works for a narrow circle of aristocratic readers, had to change his mind. The later version of his pastoral novel Arcadia drops all addresses and apostrophes aimed at the imaginary audience of “Fayre Ladyes”.

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SIR PHILIP SIDNEY: THE DEFENSE OF POESIE OR AN APOLOGIE FOR POETRIE The commodification of literature and the development of a new, large and mostly anonymous audience are responsible for a new emphasis on the moral potential and value of writing. This emphasis is also typical of Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesie (1595) which defines literature in pragmatic, but at the same time axiological terms: as an activity whose aim is to produce images of virtues and vices which can have a beneficient influence on the morals and minds of the audience. Strangely enough, all this focus on the effect and moral values in the work of art brings the argument back to the poet as the “maker of images”. Thus we can even say that Sidney attempts to reconstruct the subjectivity of the poet in the incipient age of mechanical reproduction, media and entertainment industry. This gesture reveals the gulf between the private and public world which marks the beginning of the modern era. It also points out the importance of individual imagination, a theme which becomes dominant further in the development of literary theories, and especially in the age of Romanticism. The Defence starts with a veiled controversy against the privileged position of soldiers and their aristocratic elite – the “equestrial estate”. Though Sidney himself is a member of this class and is deemed by his contemporaries a paragon of the courtier, diplomat and gentleman, he cannot afford rejecting it openly. Therefore he says – quoting his Italian teacher Pugliano that the horse is “the only serviceable Courtier without flattery.” (Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie, in Complete Works, ed. by Albert Feuillerat [London: Oxford University Press, 1923], vol. III, p. 3) Obviously, Sidney is no Lemuel Gulliver and he is far from making the horse his only companion. Instead of pursuing his normal course of life, he puts an emphasis on his self-love, which is no selfishness but participation in the creation of beautiful things, and on his “unelected vocation” of the Poet. (Ibid.) So The Defence begins with an apology of the poet, rather than poetry. And it also develops a new notion of poetry as a private occupation (the way to self-perfection, or as the French philosopher, Michel Foucault would say: “a technology of the self”) with a momentous public effect. The public importance of poetry becomes the main issue of Sidney’s treatise. Poetry is first invoked as the primary and original power of mankind’s cultivation since the early antiquity. The most important role of poetry is to persuade the people to seek the way of cultivation. Or, as Sidney

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puts it in an allegorical metaphor, to move “stonie and beastly people” (p. 4), to influence them in the same way as the first poets, Amphion and Orpheus did with real stones and beasts. For this capacity, says Sidney, the poets are revered in all traditional societies, from the Indian tribes to Ottoman Empire. In the antiquity as well as in primitive societies, there is hardly any difference between the poets and soothsayers or prophets. In the ancient Rome, Sidney says, poets were called the Vates (that is, prophets or soothsayers). Another important trait of poetry according to Sidney is its universality. Poets are not tied to specific subjects like other people and especially scholars who practice individual sciences. Moreover, they do not even have to imitate nature as it is, i.e. with all its defects, but as they imagine it should be. This vague definition is specified when Sidney reminds us that the poets attain the greatest beauty of their images by imitating Ideas, the patterns (or fore conceits, as Sidney has it) of all things. It is important to represent these Ideas as vigorously as they have been imagined. Here we can recognize the features of expressive theories. But this can hardly be the whole scope of Sidney’s thought. In addition to pragmatic and expressive theories he includes a mimetic definition of poetry. “Poesie” he says “is an Art of Imitation: for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth to speake Metaphorically” (p. 9). While Aristotle emphasizes the different means of representation, Sidney puts more stress on its illusive and expressive and metaphorical nature (counterfeit, to figure forth), i.e., on the image itself and its independence from the thing represented. This tendency is even more evident in the second part of Sidney’s definition which no longer draws from Aristotle but from Horace’s Ars Poetica: Poetry is: “A speaking Picture with its end to teach and delight.” (Ibid.) In this formulation, literature becomes a prototype of any art in the age of mass reproduction whose production and circulation may be influenced in order to attain a socially desirable effect. Accordingly, instead of Aristotle’s discussion of the means of representation, Sidney starts to analyze the subject matter. He divides poetry into four classes: religious (including – apart from The Psalms and many other texts of the Old Testament – Homer, Orphic songs etc.), philosophical (moral and natural represented by Cato and Lucretius), and historical. Philosophical poetry is aesthetically inferior to religious poetry, since the demand on communicating knowledge restricts the poet’s imagination. The last and most important class of poetry is the production of those “who most properly

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imitate to teach and delight” and who “borrow nothing of what is, hath bin or shall be” (i.e. nothing from the fields of science, history and religion), “but range onely reined with learned discretion into the divine consideration of what may and what should be” (p. 10). Thus, poetry deals mainly with the potentialities of mankind, its ability to lead a better life and to get closer to the ideal models. In this way, Sidney’s notion of imitation is widely different from those of Aristotle and Plato: in contrast to the latter, it places the mankind and its potentialities to the centre of interest, and in contrast to the former it deals with the work of art as the product of imitation rather than the process of imitation or an autonomous structured whole. Thanks to its possibility to produce images able to attract and move people, poetry is thought to be a more efficient force of mankind’s cultivation than philosophy and history. Therefore while Sidney agrees with Aristotle that poetry is more philosophical than history he adds that it can also be more effective than philosophy itself because it works more intensely towards the common goal of human life, which, according to the Greek philosopher, is not gnosis but praxis. Here we have the purest expression of the pragmatic orientation of Sidney’s poetry. Poetry does not deal with concepts and categories but “giveth so sweete a prospect into the way” towards philosophical objectives, like a “journey through a faire vineyard” with a rich crop of sweet grapes (p. 19). In contrast to the philosopher who “beginneth … with obscure definitions” the poet “commeth to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for the well enchanting skill of Musicke, and with a tale forsooth he commeth unto you, with a tale, which holdeth children from play, and olde men from the Chimney corner” (pp. 19–20; notice the alliteration and Euphuist style of Sidney’s writing). Instead of Aristotle’s hierarchy of the six parts of tragedy, which emphasizes the autonomy of the structure of the work of art, we find in Sidney a hierarchy of basic literary genres which are ranked according to how efficiently they contribute to the ideal aim of literature. This aim is defined by Sidney in pragmatic terms: “The poet onely … doth not learn a conceit out of a matter, but maketh matter for a Conceit.” Conceit is a key Renaissance word: a metaphor or a simile which must be deciphered intellectually but is at the same time incomprehensible to those who do not have a cultivated aesthetic feeling and experience with figurative language. Conceits are no longer mere ornaments of poetry but they become important images in which signification takes place and by which the poem or a work of fiction can influence and

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inform the readers. As an example there is Sidney’s own conceit of heart torn apart by unhappy love from Sonnet 33 of his sequence Astrophil and Stella I might, unhappy word, (woe me) I might, And then would not, nor could not see my blisse: Tyll now, wrapt in a most infernall Night, I finde, how heavenly day (wretch) did I misse: Hart rent thy selfe, thou doost thy self but right. No lovely Paris made thy Helen his, No force, no fraude, robd thee of thy delight, No Fortune of thy fortune Author is; But to my selfe, my selfe did give the blow… (quoted from Ronberg, op.cit., pp. 169–170) Now let us return to Sidney’s list of genres. He mentions heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satyric, iambic (iamb was in ancient Greece used for invectives), elegiac and pastoral genres. His list is mixed and reveals, apart from the influence of Aristotle, the impact of later and especially normative poetics. All these genres are compared with philosophical discourse. The result is Sidney’s assertion that the central genre is that of heroic poetry. This Sidney illustrates with the character of Aeneas in Virgil’s epic: only this genre can make images which inflame the mind with the desire to be valiant and virtuous and can also instruct it how to achieve such a perfection. (Sidney, op.cit., p. 25). It is not surprising that Sidney when discussing verse and rhyme refuses to take them for the distinctive features of poetry. He says: “One may be a Poet without versing, and a versefier without Poetrie.” (p. 27) But Sidney acknowledges the pragmatic value of the verse as a higher degree of the organization of an utterance which enables us to memorize it and to perceive a poem as a whole where every word has its own place and cannot be left out. In the concluding section of his work Sidney repudiates all traditional and contemporary invectives against poetry and poets and then deals with contemporary literary scene. What may interest us is Sidney’s answer to an accusation that poetry is a “mother of lyes”, which together with the following one (that it produces “sinful fantasies”) betrays its origin: the growing influence of the Puritans. To these invectives Sidney suprisingly answers that while sciences have always to assert various things to be true and then they are found

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to be mistaken, “the Poet never affirmeth, the Poet never maketh any circles about your imagination, to conjure you to beleeve for true, what he writeth”. In short, Sidney says: “the Poet … nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth.” (p. 29) In this way Sidney not only distinguishes poetry from the other “Arts” (i.e., history, astronomy, medicine, mathematics, philosophy, grammar and logic), but also establishes a modern notion of meaning of the work of art which cannot be reduced to a single statement about reality. As to the banishment of poets from the society (in Plato’s Republic) Sidney says quoting Scaliger (another author of Renaissance poetics) that this can be done only by barbarous regimes and that Plato while he banished the poets, banished only the “abuse” of poetry, because he extolled them elsewhere as, for instance, in his Ion. It is not very surprising that Sidney, whose work is interwoven with numerous references to the authors of Greek and Roman antiquity does not pay much respect to the English literature of his time. Out of older poets he mentions only Chaucer and Gower (no wonder because others were not much known). Among the Renaissance literati only the Earl of Surrey and Edmund Spenser (the latter with some reservations) are worthy of his attention. But what really provokes Sidney is the development of Elizabethan drama, because it clashes with his basic concept of literature as the images that move people to greater virtue and perfection. The greatest objections are against the inability of the authors to observe dramatic unities (especially those of time and action), against the mixing of genres and styles (tragicomedy) and against the necessity of laughter in comedies (p. 40). Sidney can hardly recognize the principles of grotesque and carnival in Renaissance culture explored much later by a Russian scholar M.M. Bakhtin. While Bakhtin demonstrates the dialogical nature of these representations (their being in dispute with the official culture, or their subversive potential), Sidney in fact subscribes to the monological nature of literature as the most privileged, prophetic discourse of the new society. QUESTIONS 1. Why did Renaissance poetics depend on grammar and rhetoric? 2. Name the main features of ancient and Renaissance treatises on rhetoric. Explain Aristotle’s notions of ethos, pathos and logos, Quintilian’s difference between tropes and schemes, and Puttenham’s notion of the ornament of speech.

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3. Why can we say that the development of the printing press changed the author’s approach to the audience? Does this change have any connection with Sidney’s pragmatic theory of literature? 4. What is the “unelected vocation” of the poet according to Sidney? How is it related to his assertions of the public importance of poetry? 5. What aspects of Sidney’s aesthetics would you argue as ancient, modern, and particular to his own time? 6. Can you discuss Sidney’s aesthetics in terms of Abrams’ scheme? 7. What are the implications of Sidney’s ideas of the function of poetry and of the difference between poetry and philosophy in Apologie for Poetrie? 8. Why does Sidney criticize Renaissance drama? 9. Consider potential dangers of Sidney’s pragmatic theory of literature.

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Classicism, Augustan Age, Neoclassicism

What do these terms mean? Classicism is derived from the Latin words classis and classicus which does not only mean the navy, but also the first, military class of Roman society. Metaphorically, the term signifies the art addressed mainly to privileged and cultured members of society and having a hierarchy of styles roughly corresponding to the social strata. The meaning of the concept is also connected with the Latin word classicum which means the call of the trumpet in the battle. This may remind us of the most valued classicist genre: the heroic epic. In modern theory and history of art the term Classicism describes a style whose major categories and values are derived from, or at least referred to, the art and thought of the “classical” age of Western culture, i.e., the Greek and Roman antiquity. The term Augustan imposes certain restrictions on the span of time covered by the term Classicism. It refers to the “golden age” of Roman culture during the reign of the Emperor Augustus. In other languages, this term does not exist: in German terminology its remote equivalent would be Klassik, a period of flowering of great literature and philosophy towards the end of eighteenth and at the beginning of nineteenth century: the age of Goethe, Schiller and Hegel. In British and American cultural history, the attribute “Augustan” is used to describe the time of the greatest flourishing of Classicism in England (the reigns of Queen Anne, 1702–1714, and of King George I, 1714–1727), compared – sometimes ironically – with the “golden age” of Roman art. While German and Czech art historians have often used the term Neoclassicism to describe the attempts at a balanced, moderate expression in modern art accompanied by the renewal of “classical forms” (in the portraits of Picasso’s “blue period,” Paul Hindemith’s music) following the first hectic developments of the avant-garde, the English, as well as the French, use this notion to refer to the revival of Classicism in the second half of the 18th century, the return to simple and “pure” forms after the wave of the Rococo. In English literary theory, Neoclassicism means mainly the modification of 37

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Classicist principles in the work of Dr Samuel Johnson and others (e.g., the art theoretician and painter Joshua Reynolds) who started to stress the importance of universal, philosophical and aesthetic, categories (like human nature or regular beauty in art) against the original classicist emphasis on the observation of rules and on the imitation of the ancients. In contrast to the Renaissance whose aesthetic theories were focused on the pragmatic approach to art, classicist approaches may be said to anticipate the romantic emphasis on the author and expressive theories. This gradual shift takes place in two separate directions. First, by the direct penetration of the old, expressive theories of art. In 1674 Nicolas Boileau, the leading French classicist critic translated the chief work of the expressive theory of art in the antiquity – Longinus’s treatise On the Sublime. The influence of Longinus in England is registered quite early after this event. In 1701, Sir John Dennis published a treatise called The Advancement and Reformation of Poetry which, though it mostly repeated Horace’s maxims (poetry is to delight and reform the mind), also said that “Poetry is the imitation of Nature by a pathetic and numerous (rhythmical) Speech.” This prepares the ground for the romantic theory of poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of feeling” (Abrams, op. cit., p. 75). There were still other, more metaphorical ways of the development of expressive theories: for instance the seventeenth century theory of translation according to which author was being “revived” in the translated text as the dead body or the spirit of the original writer given voice and expression by the translator. Other opinions on the centrality of the author have much more pragmatic roots: the change of copyright laws. According to the old laws, the book was not a property of the author but of the publisher. But in the 1730s pamphlets appeared arguing for the author’s exclusive ownership of his works. They were using the philosophical discourse of private possession developed by John Locke. “Every man was entitled to the fruits of his labour, they argued, and therefore it was self-evident that authors had an absolute property in their own works.” (Mark Rose, “The Author as Proprietor: Donaldson v. Becket and the Genealogy of Modern Authorship”, Representations, 23 [summer 1988], p. 57). But what if the work ceased to be defined chiefly as a material object and a source of income and was re-interpreted as a set of ideas? Could Newton then claim the property of the laws of the universe? To solve this quandary the jurists had to extend the validity of the new law from the productions of mechanical nature to the organic creations of the author’s

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mind. These efforts influenced Edward Young in his Conjectures on Original Composition which made an equation between the products of mental and manual labour and described the process of creation as organic growth. As the owner of a field, the author was thought to have an exclusive right for the products of his brain. These considerations were then reflected in the commentaries of critics and verdicts of lawyers. One of them, Judge William Blackstone, echoed in his legislative formulation the verdict of a literary critic William Warburton: Style and sentiment are the essentials of a literary composition. These alone constitute its identity. The paper and print are mere accidents, which serve as vehicles to convey that style and sentiment to a distance. Every duplicate therefore of a work, whether ten or ten thousand, if it conveys the same style and sentiments, is the same identical work, which was produced by the author’s invention and labour. (Quoted by Rose, op. cit., p. 63) According to classicist literary theories, sentiment and language were important specific features of every literary work. Most of the normative criticism of the classicist period is concerned with various ways of controlling these two features. The major instrument of control was the traditional theory of imitation. “So long,” writes M.H. Abrams, “as the poet was regarded primarily as an agent who holds a mirror up to nature, or as the maker of the work of art according to universal standards of excellence, there was limited theoretical room for the intrusion of personal traits into his products.” (Abrams, op. cit., p. 226). What did the writers imitate according to the classicist theories? Not “real” nature, but its improved and heightened form, la belle nature. This was defined by an important French critic of the 18th century Charles Batteux (overstating Aristotle’s maxim that “poetry describes the thing…that might happen”) in a treatise entitled Beautiful Arts Reduced to the Sole Principle (1758): “the reality which does not actually exist but which ought to be; the reality represented as if it actually existed with all the perfections it can attain.” (Quoted by Abrams, op. cit., p. 35). But the ideal beauty was not the only target of classicist imitation. Another important aspect was that nature (the word of many meanings signifying the shaping force of the universe, our empirical

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world, the essential characteristic of an individual object or being, and last but not least, the human nature) had to be understood on moral grounds. Dr. Johnson argued that only some parts of nature were “proper” for imitation. In addition to these features, nature was to be uniform: the classicists argued that it is the same everywhere “from China to Peru”. Literature, therefore, was supposed to be concerned only with things generally relevant and interesting. Therefore also classicist criticism tends to praise characters representative of the general features of mankind. These features however must be of synthetic quality, an average of a great number of individual traits. This was aptly expressed by Dr. Johnson’s friend, Oliver Goldsmith: the sculptor … composed the various proportions in nature from a great number of different subjects, every individual of which he found imperfect or defective in some one particular, though beautiful in all the rest; and from these observations, corroborated by taste and judgement, he formed an ideal pattern, according to which his idea was modelled, and produced in execution. (Quoted in Abrams, op. cit., p. 37) The development of classicist criticism in England is marked by three great names of authors and critics: John Dryden, Alexander Pope and Dr Samuel Johnson. JOHN DRYDEN (1631–1700) Known as the author of An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) and other writings on tragedy, comedy and farce, heroic poetry and poetic licence, rhyme and blankverse, on translating poetry, etc., all of which were published during the Restoration. Dryden’s essay on opera, called “Musical Drama,” is one of the pioneering attempts in this area of criticism. So are his essays on translation in which he distinguishes three degrees of “faithfulness” of a translated text to its original: metaphrase, namely translating word by word, or, in our terminology, translation founded on lexical equivalence; paraphrase, defined as keeping the author in view and following his sense (in our terminology it would be translating with respect to the structural unity of the text, reproducing not words but figures of speech and their relations); the third way, according to Dryden is imitation which could be

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now called adaptation. Of these three modes Dryden values most the translation done according to general sense, or structural unity. This view of his confirms the tendency in English translation starting at the beginning of the 17th century with George Chapman’s traductions of Homer. In English culture, Dryden also introduced the notion of translation as the actualization of the text, concretization of its meaning in the present time. This Dryden did with Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. He re-established Chaucer as the father of English poetry, and highly valued the richness and authenticity of his characters. Therefore he decided to translate Chaucer into modern English. The basic themes of Dryden’s aesthetics were expressed in his Essay of Dramatic Poesy. It is written in a form of dialogue among four interlocutors Crites, Eugenius, Lisideius and Neander (hiding the names of Dryden’s contemporaries: the first of them, Sir Robert Howard, was Dryden’s brother in law). The Essay starts with a discussion of the accepted opinion of the age of Classicism (voiced by Crites) that we have to imitate the ancients because they were “faithful imitators and wise observers” of human nature distorted in contemporary literature. Then it argues whether the French authors are valuable because of their imitations of the ancients, though they may sometimes differ considerably from the drama of antiquity. (This is discussed by Eugenius who pleads for the supremacy of the modern French writers over the ancient playwrights who, for instance, neglected love as the theme of their works.) In this respect, the Essay was stimulated by the critical writings of Pierre Corneille, the founder of French Classicism. The next question, disputed by Lisideius and Neander, the latter being Dryden himself, is a real burning issue of the contemporary critical debate. Should the English authors accept the models of French classicist drama, because it better keeps the unities, is structurally more regular and uses rhyme instead of blankverse? Or should they adhere to the English drama, because of its “lively imitation of nature”. In this context Neander makes a strong case for the irregular English drama and maintains that the French drama “has lost more than it has gained by undue regard for decorum and obedience to the rules” (Dramatic Essays by John Dryden, Introduction by W.H. Hudson). This conclusion was rather bold in Dryden’s time and he did not attempt to defend it any further. In his later writings on drama he tried to make a sort of compromise. The basic rules of the ancient tragedy have to be adhered to, but at the same time, a special freedom, “larger compass” must be given to the English stage, because Shakespeare has to remain its chief authority.

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ALEXANDER POPE (1688–1744) His Essay on Criticism (1711) written in heroic couplet belongs to the best critical works of Augustan age. It is divided into three parts: the first deals with the subject and rules for the study of art criticism, the following two discuss the causes of the wrong judgement (among which the pride and lack of learning are prominent) and consider the moral qualities of a critic. In contrast to Horace who wrote about “the art of poetry”, Pope sees himself as the founder of “the art of poetical criticism”, which is sometimes more important that poetry itself, as the contemporary writing shows distinct marks of dullness and decadence. But Pope does not prefer criticism to poetry, he treats them both as complementary forms of literature (criticism is personified as a handmaid, helping to dress her beautiful lady Poetry). The first section of the Essay is the most significant because it outlines a system of coordinates of Classicist criticism. The central axis of the system is formed by a pair of categories: common sense and wit. Human nature is uniform and should avoid extremes. Therefore common sense is one of its main features. Wit is the best expression of common sense (“what oft was thought but ne’er so well express’d”) and at the same time the most appropriate ornament of human nature which is “to advantage dress’d”. Wit cannot exist without the ideas of our senses, but its existence may often be endangered by the action of the power which processes these data: the power of understanding and judgement. In this respect, Pope’s thought shows the influence of Locke’s epistemology. Judgement forms a kind of opposition to wit, the former is the feature of a critic, the latter of the artist, but this opposition is never exclusive: Pope compares these faculties with husband and wife. They can be balanced by nature only and their balance is a precondition of a successful exercise of artistic and critical abilities. DR. SAMUEL JOHNSON (1709–1784) His most important critical work is the Preface to Shakespeare. According to it Shakespeare was able not only to imitate nature well, but also knew how to please readers of all kinds. An important innovation was that Johnson ceased to censure Shakespeare for the disrespect of Aristotelian laws of dramatic composition and for mixing tragedy and comedy (which was the objection raised by Sidney and other Elizabethans as well as their classicist followers). Johnson had to admit that Shakespeare was no longer imitating the “beautiful nature” of the classicists, but “the real state of sublunary nature

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which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety”. The “mingled” drama is according to Johnson, much closer “to the appearance of life” and can move better than the regular drama observing the unities. The only instance in which Johnson resembles the writings of other classicists is the assertion that Shakespeare “seems to write without any moral purpose”. But this, as it appears, does not matter too much because Shakespeare was, in Johnson’s praise of his comic characters, elevated into a great British author using a “style which never becomes obsolete” and which “is to be sought in the common intercourse of life, among those who speak only to be understood, without ambition of elegance”. Here Johnson, according to M.H. Abrams, comes very close to the idea of language which is “true to nature”, expressed in Wordsworth’s preface to Lyrical Ballads. QUESTIONS 1. Explain the differences between CLASSICISM, AUGUSTAN AGE, and NEOCLASSICISM. 2. Which features of classicist theories of literature anticipate Romanticism? 3. How does the classicist approach to the author differ from the Renaissance idea of the poet? 4. Why is the theory of imitation so important in Classicism? What nature was the classicist author supposed to imitate? 5. What are the main normative features of Dryden’s aesthetics? What essay emphasizes creative approach to literary texts? 6. Explain Dryden’s attitude to French classicist theory of drama. 7. Why does Alexander Pope find literary criticism so important? 8. Explain the relationship beween the senses, wit, common sense, understanding, and judgement in Essay on Criticism. 9. How did Dr. Johnson modify classicist theory of imititation? What was the most important value of Shakespeare’s work according to Dr. Johnson?

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Romanticism

In romantic aesthetic theories, M.H. Abrams tells us, major emphasis lies on the poet and his capability to express what is in his heart and mind. “All good poetry,” William Wordsworth argues in his preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), “is a spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” and he adds that poems “to which any value can be attached, were never produced … but by a man who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility had also thought long and deeply”. („Appendix,” in William Wordsworth, S.T. Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1798, ed. W.J.B. Owen [London: Oxford University Press, 1968], p. 157). The inherent problem of definitions like this one is that they do not understand the poet as an individual but rather as a representative of human creative powers, or “human nature”. According to William Wordsworth, the “purpose” of Lyrical Ballads was “to illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in the state of excitement”. This is the language of empirical psychology invented by John Locke and developed by David Hartley in the second half of the eighteenth century. But Wordsworth is romantic enough to distrust the language of abstract reasoning. Therefore he rectifies his scientific statement about the association of ideas and says that poetry should “follow [that does not mean imitate or represent!, M.P.] the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature”. Although the poet is important in Wordsworth’s aesthetic scheme, poetry as the creative power, reproducing “the great and simple affections of our nature” is the crucial concept of the whole structure. Why does poetry have to reproduce the elementary emotions of all human beings? (Using the phrase “all human beings” we should note that in spite of Wordsworth’s belief in the abstract, uniform “human nature” of the Enlightenment his attention was focused on the simple country people and social, mental as well as racial others, that is, the Old Cumberland Beggar, The 44

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Mad Mother, The Idiot Boy or The Forsaken Indian.) This is because, as Wordsworth and other romantics say, civilization has already managed to corrupt the human mind to such an extent that it cannot produce a sound culture. Wordsworth again returns to his scientific theme, human mind in the state of excitement: For the human mind is capable of excitement without the application of gross and violent stimulants … For a multitude of causes unknown to former times are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and … to reduce it to the state of almost savage torpor. The most effective causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.” (Ibid., p. 159–160) According to Wordsworth, the chief aim of poetry can no longer be to lead humanity towards more virtuous life; nor to imitate the higher culture of the Antiquity. It is a revival, reproduction and sometimes even resuscitation of human creativity and emotionality in the age of technological civilization, division of labour, alienation, industrial pollution, rapid changes of demographic structure and the first signs of ecological crisis. In such a context, literature has a more important function than aesthetic. It becomes a new creation of the “divine body” of mankind (to use Blake’s words), an attempt to grasp “the shaping spirit of imagination” (Coleridge). Therefore, romantic aesthetic theory does not focus on the poet, but on the work itself which is not understood as an object with a certain structure, but as a creative act of imagination, renewing the lost powers of human species. In this way, imagination is sharply differentiated from fancy (as a mere mechanical combination of ideas and images) and identified with the sacred power of divine creation. In his Biographia Literaria (1817) Coleridge says that though the aesthetic imagination exists

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with the individual personality, that is, with “conscious will” it differs from the divine power (performing “the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” S.T. Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. A. Symons, London 1906, p.146) only “in degree and in the mode of operation”. Consequently, the work of art may be interpreted as a re-creation of the sacred. And so it is in the concluding lines of Coleridge’s poem “Kubla Khan”. The substitution of the works of art and their images in the mind by the figure of a prophet possessed by divine power does not merely stress the importance of the poet’s personality. The image of the poet is a representation of the second coming, of the arrival of the sacred, which was made possible by means of the operations of human imagination. Nevertheless the sacred is represented in the persona of an inspired artist. What are the operations of human imagination? The primary imagination, Coleridge says, is the agent of all human perception. This implies that perception was considered creative process. It was supposed to give the world a meaningful order, the order of the Self (in this Coleridge was influenced by the philosophical notions of Immanuel Kant and Johann Gottlieb Fichte). But we should not forget that the emphasis is no longer on the Self, but on the analogous structure of the work of art. The secondary, aesthetic, imagination “dissolves, diffuses, dissipates in order to re-create” that is, it transforms the habitual ways of perceiving the world and creates a meaningful and ideal whole out of objects which are “essentially dead”. Coleridge’s notions are quite abstract, but there are also more poetic and symbolic approaches to imagination. In one of William Blake’s prophetic poems – Vala, or the Four Zoas (1805) – the fall and resurrection of humanity are described. The Four Zoas – Reason (Urizen), Imagination (Los), Body (Tharmas), and Feeling (Luvah) – fight for the power over the main hero Albion (the British people). In the course of the cosmic contest Los strives to protect Albion against the deadening influence of Urizen which can only separate and objectify, but cannot reunite and recreate. Los is not conceived as a mere allegory of a mental capacity, he is connected with human work, with arts and crafts. The symbolic struggle does not take place in a vacuum, but in the universe composed of different fields of concentrated psychic energies: one of them is called Beulah and represents the unconscious, another is called Ulro and stands for vegetative powers, will and sexual instincts; there is also the sunny and spiritual Eden, representing the Eternity and the new creation, and the astronomic Cosmos deadened by the operation of the Reason. From

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Blake’s thought we can see quite distinctly that poetry as a creative force was inseparable from theoretical reflection which could take place due to the symbolic and allegorical structures of the individual poems. No wonder that for the romantics the world of poetry was circumscribed by the limits of individual consciousness and the communicative function of poetry was considerably restricted. Conclusions like this seem to be supported by the fact that the romantics did not have any idea of their audience, that they often wrote their texts for themselves or for an intimate friends (like Wordsworth who composed his greatest poem, The Prelude, originally just for Coleridge), that they composed plays that could be seldom produced, etc. But there is one important aspect that changes the whole situation: most of the romantics concentrated on the problem of the language of poetry. This gave their reflections a different frame no longer identical with the limits of human consciousness. The language was not merely a feature of poetic form: it was understood as the vital component of creativity. What are the features of romantic theories of poetic language? Wordsworth, in his preface to Lyrical Ballads repudiated traditional approaches to literary language as “poetic diction”. In spite of the repeated classicist and neoclassical critical opinions repeating Aristotle’s or Horace’s thought that poetry was the imitation of nature whose role was to please, move and edify, he argued for a different kind of poetry which can “make the incidents of common life interesting”. (Lyrical Ballads, p. 156) Therefore Wordsworth chose country people and their simple life as his subjects, but he also saw the necessity to add a new definition of poetic language, a language “arising out of repeated experience and regular feelings“. (Ibid, p. 157) This language, he contended, was “far more philosophical than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art” when “they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation”. (Ibid.) While Chaucer was acknowledged by Wordsworth as the poet whose language was “pure and universally intelligible” even to contemporary readers (Ibid.), the major fault of classicist poetry was “unnatural language”. To illustrate his idea Wordsworth quotes a sonnet by Thomas Gray and shows the difference between the language distorted by poetic diction and “natural language” which is the same both for poetry and prose.

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The birds in vain their amorous descants join, Or cheerful fields resume their green attire: These ears alas! for other notes repine; A different object do these eyes require; My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine; And in my breast the imperfect joys expire; It will easily be perceived that the only part of this Sonnet which is of any value is the lines printed in Italics: it is equally obvious that except in the rhyme, and … the language of these lines does in no respect differ from that of prose. (p. 162) Having demonstrated this, Wordsworth declares that there is “no essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition”. (p. 163) Prose which at that time was still thought the language of common sense and everyday life is thus explained as a sign of the “natural” character of poetry. This also implies that the aesthetic qualities of the basic modes of writing cannot be established by means of separate elements of form (like metre, rhyme etc.). Wordsworth comments on this issue and introduces the distinction known to us already from the work of Philip Sidney: the difference between poetry and science. Even though there may be a fundamental difference between these two modes of creativity, Wordsworth, like many other romantics, believes that they have fundamentally the same aims. While the poetic language has to produce immediate pleasure, science achieves the same goal by much more indirect and lengthy ways. Metre, rhyme and other poetic devices are only “superadded” (p. 165) and their function is not aesthetic but psychological: they have to regulate the excitement, to keep it within certain bounds. (p. 171–172). When Wordsworth speaks about “restraining the passion by an intertexture of ordinary feeling” he adds that the metre need not be too much artistic and that pathetic and drastic scenes in folk ballads are efficiently rendered in “artless” metre. Moreover, Wordsworth says, metre tempers the intense emotions produced by poetic images also by divesting “the language in a certain degree from its reality” and thus throwing “a sort of half consciousness of unsubstantial existence over the whole composition.” (p. 172) Here Wordsworth anticipates formalist and structuralist theories of “estrangement” (i.e., of causing the aesthetic effect by the “strangeness” of poetic language), but with one crucial difference. While for the formalists

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“estrangement” is the device breaking the habitual, automated ways of our expression and creating thus a new aesthetic experience, for Wordsworth it creates a psychological distance between the poem and its reader. Though these observations may be important, still, the most significant aspect of Wordsworth’s theory is not language but subject matter. And here Wordsworth distinguishes between the simple folk poetry based on sane feeling, and the bleak triviality of Dr. Johnson’s attempt to imitate casual conversation. Contrary to Wordsworth, Coleridge thought the metre essential. He spoke of it as the basic power of human creativity, “a spontaneous effort which strives to hold in check the workings of passion” (Biographia Literaria, p. 179) In this he followed Aristotle’s philosophical distinction between energeia and entelecheia, the dynamic and the structuring powers. This can also be demonstrated by the symbolic structure of “Kubla Khan” based on the opposition of the eruptive energy of the “mighty fountain” and of the measured beauty of the garden with the Dome of Pleasure in its centre. In the poem, both symbols are fused together: The shadow of the Dome of Pleasure Floated midway on the waves Where was heard the mingled measure From the fountain to the caves. The fountain symbolizes the origin of energy while the caves its dissipation and loss ending in the “lifeless ocean”. If we now return to Coleridge’s theory of metre we can see why he understands it as an essential feature of the creative nature of poetry. Metre, Coleridge says, can effect “an union; an interpenetration of passion and will, of spontaneous impulse and voluntary purpose”. To illustrate this thought he quotes Polixenes’ thoughts on art and nature from The Winter’s Tale. This is an art, Which does mend nature, change it rather; but The art itself is nature. In Coleridge’s reflections as well as in his poetry, metre is the only means of synthesis of the fragmenting symbolic structure into a meaningful, organic whole in which all the parts were irreplaceable.

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Because metre had a key function in his poetic system, Coleridge started to experiment with it. To allow for a different length of individual lines, which as he said varied with the intensity of passion, he introduced “accentual prosody” characterized by four stresses in one line. This prosody was nothing new, it existed already in the alliterating verse of the Anglo-Saxon poetry. Coleridge could never completely shake off the tradition of the metric stress, i.e. the stress which is imposed on the line in accordance with the conventions of the metre and sometimes does widely differ from the stress in ordinary language, see e.g. the first stanza of Christabel: ‘Tis the middle of night by the castle clock, And the owls have awakened the crowing cock; Tu–whit!–Tu–whoo! And hark, again! the crowing cock, How drowsily it crew. Coleridge’s experiments with metre contributed to the complete change of poetic diction in English romantic poetry. The main component of this change was the shift of emphasis from the grammar of poetic genres, forms and figures to the units of meaning, to images, represented by random configurations of words. But the words also had a substantial expressive potential. Therefore some romantic critics, as for instance William Hazlitt (1778–1830), thought that poetry consisted in the fully emotional approach to reality and that intense emotional expression (in stressing this aspect, Hazlitt followed Longinus’s theory of the sublime) could discover the existential uncertainty of human life and recover the sensuous beauty of the world of objects damaged by the forces of civilization. From this theory Hazlitt’s notion of aesthetic ideal develops. Ideals are, according to him, very individual: they may be inborn visions of our mind or they may become the means of achieving a more emotionally powerful individual expression. Also, the ideal is no longer a result of the “imitation of nature”, it is transferred to the practical sphere of poetry as the social programme, changing essentially the quality of human life. In this respect, Hazlitt already anticipated the programme of the Victorian Aesthetic Movement. In contrast to Hazlitt who saw the function of poetry in recovering the aesthetic aspects of life, Percy Bysshe Shelley figured poetry as the prophetic

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power of mankind which has the potentiality to influence its development, by turning its direction from “the Mammon of the World” to the Platonic ideals of harmonious existence which can only be “approximated” but never reached because they are transcendental. But Shelley also saw the function of poetry in its coincidence with randomness of literary language (the most important random element is rhyme, given that it changes the meaning in dependence on a pattern of repetitions which does not have anything common with the meaning). Poetry, he argued, anticipates “the sudden and unexpected change” which may bring human life to a higher and substantially different level. Thus, in Shelley’s aesthetic, poetry becomes a prototype of human creativity which is essentially different from the activities causing economic or technological progress. QUESTIONS 1. What is the main feature of the romantic idea of the poet? Is M.H. Abrams’ general approach to romantic poetic theories fully adequate? 2. What was the influence of the eighteenth-century theories on Wordsworth’s explanation of the “purpose” of Lyrical Ballads. 3. What are the romantic features of Wordsworth’s poetic theory? Can you differentiate them from similar neo-classicist notions? 4. Explain the fundamental feature of romantic notions of the work of art and imagination. 5. Why does Coleridge differentiate between a) fancy and imagination, b) primary and secondary imagination? 6. What characterizes Blake’s understanding of poetry? 7. Contrast Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s opinions on verse and metre. 8. Was Coleridge able to introduce purely accentual prosody in Christabel? 9. Contrast Hazlitt’s and Longinus’ concepts of the sublime. 10. What are the romantic features of Shelley’s Platonism?

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The Victorians

The thought of Victorian art critics develops gradually from romantic theories. One of the most important features of this development is the convergence of the aesthetics of objects, comprising both mimetic and objective theories, and the aesthetics of life, i.e. mainly the expressive theories dealing with art as the process of self-expression and making no real distinction between it and other activities. This convergence started in the aesthetic theory of William Hazlitt and especially in his notion of the “gusto”. For Hazlitt’s contemporary Thomas De Quincey (1785–1859) the sensuous pleasure of the gusto was not strong enough. He became famous for his Confessions of An English Opium Eater (1821) which described several visions under the influence of the drug. These visions were imaginatively reconstructed in the process of writing. The moral message of the book, the story of the disintegration of the poet’s self, was subordinated to the aesthetic message: the sublime nature and the architectonics of the visions resembling the labyrinthine buildings in the drawings of the Italian artist Piranesi or apocalyptic scenes painted by John Martin. De Quincey’s style shows distinct marks of Longinus’s notion of the sublime: it relies on the power of individual rhetoric figures to move the reader. Similar features are apparent in Hazlitt too, but it was only the Oxford scholar John Keble whose expressive theory interprets the sublime as the means of escape from the pressures of everyday life into a liberating world of literature. However, De Quincey was not only a rhetorician or a visionary. He had some knowledge of the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. In Kant’s Critiques he read about human understanding founded on judgements and about the specific nature of aesthetic judgement which is not concerned directly with truth but deals with art as the free play of imagination and cognitive powers of the mind. These motives made him distinguish between “the literature of knowledge” and “the literature of power”. Whereas the former, he said, spoke “to discursive understanding” the latter spoke “ultimately…to the higher understanding or 52

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reason but always through the affections of pleasure and sympathy”. But here De Quincey clearly forgot about Kant’s ideas of disinterested aesthetic pleasure (interessloses Wohlgefallen) as well as about his notion that our experience of the sublime becomes the source of moral law in us. Instead, he again returns to Longinus when he says that sympathy is the mediator of the aesthetic power of language. The most interesting fact is that De Quincey’s departure from Kantian objective theory anticipates another similar departure typical of the new critical distinction of the emotional and the referential language. But in comparison with the scientific approach of I.A. Richards and C.K. Ogden, De Quincey keeps the characteristic features of the ironic and humorous style of the English romantic essayists: What do you learn from Paradise Lost? Nothing at all. What do you learn from a cookery book? Something new… in every paragraph. But would you therefore put the wretched cookery book on a higher level of estimation than the divine poem? What do you owe to Milton is not any knowledge, of which a million separate items are still but a million of advancing steps on the same earthly level; what you owe is power, – that is, exercise and expansion to your own latent capacity of sympathy with the infinite, where every pulse and each separate flux is a step upwards, a step ascending, as upon a Jacob’s ladder from earth to the mysterious altitudes above the earth. (Quoted from David Daiches, A Critical History of English Literature, vol. IV [London: 1960], p. 941). THOMAS CARLYLE (1795–1881) Carlyle was an influential Victorian essayist, philosopher and historian. Though he studied German theories of aesthetic pleasure in the works of Jean Paul and Immanuel Kant, he became more interested in the question of power in society and literature. His theory of power developed the romantic cult of the creative personality, expressed for instance in Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry”, but his notion of hero was closer to the Hegelian concept of “world-historic” (weltgeschichtlich) personalities, i.e. those who are able to articulate and satisfy other people’s desires, and to shape the historical development. Carlyle’s opinions of heroes were expressed in the famous series of lectures On Heroes and Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1841). In literary theory, Carlyle was influenced by the romantic version of the Longinian notions of sublime.

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Discussing the nature of poetry, he identified it with music and thought it musical not only in form, but also in its contents: “musical thought…that has penetrated into the inmost heart of the thing”. Though he praised poetry as “a kind of inarticulate, unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that,” he never ceased to think about the social relevance and function of literature and other arts. He redirected De Quincey’s concept of “the literature of power” towards the social aims of human life. Carlyle was too much under the influence of German Romanticism and metaphysical philosophy to be able to identify either with the reform movement (hoping that the change of religious ways and institutions and the reform of parliamentary system would mean the transformation of society) or with Utilitarianism (trying to achieve the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people by means of the progress of scientific rationality). In his fictitious spiritual autobiography Sartor Resartus (1833–34) he stylized himself as Teufelsdröckh, a German “Professor of Things-in-General” (i.e., philosophy) and described the evolution of his “philosophy of clothes” (i.e., phenomenal reality). The major part of the hero’s trip leads from the Everlasting No, to the Everlasting Yea, i.e., from the negation of personality produced by the excess of individual freedom to the assertion of life as a love of God and the creative work for other people: …The Everlasting No had said: “Behold, thou are fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine (the Devil’s);” to which my whole ME now made answer: “I am not thine, but FREE, and forever hate thee!” It is from this hour that I incline to date my Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism; perhaps I directly thereupon began to be a Man. (Quoted from Daiches, op. cit., p. 953) In his description of the purpose of the individual’s life Carlyle directs his rhetoric from the pleasure and sympathy to the existential and social necessity of work and production. I too could now say to myself: Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce! Were it but the pitifullest infinitesimal fraction of a product, produce it, in God’s name! ‘Tis the utmost thou

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hast in thee: out with it, then. Up, up! Whatsoever thy hand findest to do, do it with thy whole might. Work, work while it is called Today, for the Night cometh, wherein no man can work. (Ibid., p. 954) Thus, the aesthetic organization of the individual’s world is given an ideological sense because “work and production” are no longer aesthetic categories. In this way, aesthetics comes to influence the ways of expressing other, non-aesthetic, dimensions of social reality. This becomes typical of many Victorian writers who deal with burning social questions as if they were predominantly aesthetic or cultural issues. MATTHEW ARNOLD (1822–1888) This poet and critic became famous for his Essays in Criticism (1865, 1868) in which he praised Homer, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton, extolled Wordsworth, Byron, Goethe and Heine as the leading modern writers, misunderstood Chaucer and started to discover Russian literature, especially the novels of Tolstoy. He also expressed his conviction that literature was to supersede religion as the most important cultural form. A comprehensive expression of Arnold’s opinions on culture and education can be found in the essay Culture and Anarchy (1869). Here, the aesthetic angle of view changes the whole perception of society and culture. The situation of Victorian England is viewed as the strife between two general cultural traditions: Hebraism and Hellenism. While the former is characterized by the stern law of God and is in its last stage of decay (the dissolution of Christianity), the latter, represented by the ideals of “sweetness and light” and the harmonious personality of Euphues was too premature in its arrival both in the Antiquity and in the Renaissance. Hellenism also needs further elaboration and perfection. The main problem, according to Arnold, was that the values of neither of these traditions had been cultivated by any of the existing classes. In Culture and Anarchy, these classes were called Barbarians (i.e. the aristocrats, because of their origin from the leaders of the tribes who had overthrown the Roman Empire), Philistines (middle classes: because of their hatred of art) and Populace (working class). The Philistines, Arnold contended, were only superficially identified with Hebraic (i.e. Puritanical) values, but in fact they were characterized by their materialism which did not allow either aesthetic cultivation (i.e. the progress to the ideas of Hellenism) or genuine (Hebraic) spirituality. The

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Barbarians no longer had any “light”, they had preserved a mere outward show of culture which could hardly be called “sweetness”. As for the Populace, Arnold thought that it was too early to think of any serious improvement of their cultural standards. Consequently, he did not envisage any solution of this cultural and social crisis which would result from the creative activity of any of existing classes. What was necessary, he argued, was a dominant personality which would connect “the excellence of sincerity and strength” and would be able to mediate between the British individualist concept of culture and the new notion of culture as the aesthetic education of the masses organized by the state. The last suggestion recalls Friedrich Schiller’s theory of aesthetic education as the way towards the “aesthetic state” (ästhetischer Staat) – a perfect form of society, where politics, government and beauty work together organizing the life of every citizen. But Arnold was developing in a different direction. As David Daiches says, from Culture and Anarchy leads a straight line to an analysis of literary public undertaken in 1933 in a book by a famous English new critic F.R. Leavis and Denys Thompson entitled Culture and Environment. Here the authors also consider the impact of education on the reading public and come up with the well-known categories of “low-brow”, “middle-brow” and “high-brow” audiences. Instead of using Arnold’s concept of education leading to the “aesthetic state of society”, they accept the distinction between “mass civilization” and “minority culture”. The aesthetic line of Victorian criticism reaches its peak in the work of its three representatives, John Ruskin, William Morris and Walter Pater. They differ from each other both politically and as art critics. While Ruskin emphasizes a direct connection between aesthetic and moral value and is firmly grounded in the liberal humanist tradition, Morris becomes a socialist seeing art as the agent for transforming the social order. In opposition to both of these critics, Pater deals with aesthetic pleasure as an individual contemplation of the aesthetic object and becomes the founder of the “art-for-art’s-sake” movement in Britain. JOHN RUSKIN (1819–1900) Of all three important Victorian critics, Ruskin had closest links with Matthew Arnold and his refusal of Philistine materialism. But he did not believe in art as a means of social education. He said: “You cannot paint or sing yourselves into being good men; you must be good men before you can

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either paint or sing, and then the colour and the sound will complete in you all that is best. … No noble or right style was ever yet founded but out of a sincere heart.” This does not mean, however, that Ruskin did not acknowledge the influence of the art on the soul of man. The thing which he repudiated was the utilitarian approach to human needs and the degradation of human labour in the industrial age. “It is not that men are ill fed, says Ruskin, but that they have no pleasure in their work by which they make their bread, and therefore look to wealth as the only means of pleasure.” Therefore it became necessary to return to art its original status of a creative element in every human labour. Art was deprived of this status by machine production and the division of labour. The smooth perfection of machine made ornaments or furniture in middle-class houses was achieved at the expense of tormenting fellow humans. The medieval civilization which did not know any division of labour gave the worker an unusual creative freedom which could make work a pleasure. …go forth…to gaze upon the old cathedral front, where you have smiled so often at the fantastic ignorance of the old sculptors: examine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters, and stern statues, anatomiless and rigid; but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone; a freedom of thought, and rank in scale of being, such as no laws, no charters, no charities can secure; but which must be the first aim of all Europe at this day to regain for her children. …It is verily this degradation of the operative into a machine which, more than any other evil of the times, is leading the mass of the nations into vain, incoherent, destructive struggling for a freedom of which they cannot explain the nature to themselves. (Ibid., p. 967) Ruskin’s first critical work was on contemporary painting: the first volume of his Modern Painters (1843) was written in defense of the paintings of William Turner. Then he began to study the principles of architecture, especially of the Gothic style. The results were published in Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849). His historical and aesthetic studies of architecture produced also a monograph on the city where the Gothic and later styles interpenetrate: The Stones of Venice (1851–1853). He examined closely all Gothic buildings in the city and studied

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Venetian history from original sources. Venice became for him a monument of the excellence of Gothic style and a ground for his statement that the aesthetic quality of the Gothic depended on the moral state of society. He ended his book with a eulogy on Venetian Gothic which then had a massive influence on the building trade, for all producers of ornaments and all architects started to copy his drawings of Venetian designs. Ruskin’s later works were more oriented toward the criticism of machine production and the results of the division of labour. Most of his writings are remarkable for their eloquence but they are often very difficult to read for the lack of coherence. Therefore it is also very difficult to abstract any principles of Ruskin’s theory of art from his voluminous oeuvre. In spite of this, Sir Kenneth Clark formulated eight points representing Ruskin’s most important aesthetic opinions: 1. That art is not a matter of taste, but involves the whole man. Whether in making or perceiving the art, we bring to bear on it feeling, intellect, morals, memory and every other human capacity, all focused in a flash on a single point. Aesthetic man is a concept as false and dehumanizing as economic man. 2. That even the most superior mind and most powerful imagination must found itself on facts, which must be recognized for what they are. The imagination will often reshape them in a way which the prosaic mind cannot understand; but this recreation will be based on facts, not formulas or illusions. 3. That these facts must be perceived by the senses or felt; not learnt. 4. That the greatest artists and schools of art have believed in their duty to impart important truths, not only about the facts of vision, but about religion and conduct of life. 5. That beauty of form is revealed in organisms which have developed perfectly according to their laws of growth, and so give, in his own words “the appearance of felicitous fulfilment of function”. 6. That this fulfilment of function depends on all part of an organism cohering and cooperating. This was what he called the “Law of Help”, one of Ruskin’s fundamental belief extending from nature and art to society.

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7. That good art is done with enjoyment. The artist must feel that, within certain reasonable limits, he is free, that he is wanted by society, and that the ideas he is asked to express are true and important. 8. That great art is the expression of epochs where people are united by a common faith and a common purpose, accept their laws, believe in their leaders, and take a serious view of human destiny. (Kenneth Clark, ed., Ruskin Today [Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963], pp. 133–134; emphasis added) These eight points demonstrate how much Ruskin drew from romantic aesthetics (especially from Hazlitt who in merging expressive and mimetic theories transformed the aesthetic orientated to objects into the aesthetic of life, and, at the same time, from the organic theory expressed by Coleridge). The most important part of Ruskin’s creed which gives it the feature of aesthetic ideology is the theory of the “Law of Help” where the structural coherence of an organism is expressed in moral (not economic) terms of human cooperation. In this way, Ruskin’s theory establishes art as the agent of social change. WILLIAM MORRIS (1834–1896) The understanding of art as a principal force of social change was a main feature of the theory of William Morris. Morris believed in “the lesser” or decorative arts and in the necessity of the revival of handicraft for the transformation of society. He adhered to Ruskin’s opinion expressed in The Stones of Venice that art should give people pleasure, but he reformulated this notion with respect to the contemporary social situation: “To give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is one great office of decoration; to give people the pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it.” In other words, decorative arts are not important because they give the freedom of the medieval craftsman to the greatest number of people, but because they concern the everyday life of people and at the same time their existential situation. While Ruskin’s ideas could serve any of the English classes, Morris aims his theory at those who must perforce use the cheap things, who cannot afford to and do not have the need to go to a concert, to see an art exhibition or to read a good book. And he directs his theory to these who make their living by making cheap things. Morris preaches a different social order in which it might be true that art was

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“made by the people for the people as a joy of the maker and the user”. What is necessary, according to him, is to stop the industrialization of the country and return to small communities which would be at least partially self-sufficient and would pursue local crafts based on the abilities of individual inhabitants. While Ruskin idealizes the freedom of a Gothic craftsman, Morris speaks enthusiastically of the Middle Ages as the time when art was “the art of free men”. This gives a medieval framework to his socialist utopias, e.g., A Dream of John Ball (1888) dealing with the peasant revolt of 1381. But today, Morris’s work as an artist who attempted to change the standards of English everyday life is seen to be much more important than his utopian visions. Morris studied the architecture of old peasant cottages and designed a new type of more habitable house where the kitchen was the central space for all members of the family. He designed numerous items of furniture (he became famous for his chairs) and other objects of household decoration, including stained-glass windows. He admired medieval art of illumination and established the Kelmscott Press which printed small series of books with richly illustrated and decorated pages. The development of this art of printing had fundamentally influenced the form of poetry. Poets became more conscious of the length of their lines and tried to match their text with the decoration. This meant a gradual retreat from the poetry written to be read aloud to a poetry whose aesthetic effect was based on the arrangement of the letters on the printed page. This also stimulated the avant-garde, and especially the English and American Vorticists and Imagists like Ezra Pound, e.e.cummings, Amy Lowell, or H.D. So we can say that in Morris’s work the aesthetic ideology was overcome by the artistic effort to make our world more habitable. WALTER PATER (1839–1894) In contrast to both Ruskin and Morris, Pater did not have any visions of a medieval utopia. Nor did he think of the transformation of society by means of applied arts. He also radically corrected Ruskin’s and Morris’s medievalism in his study of Renaissance art. The first result was the book entitled Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) where he not only examined the sophistication of Renaissance art and life but also stated the tenets of what is often called the “impressionist criticism”. In Pater’s opinion, impressionist criticism does not deal with the ways we express our impressions in the course of our perception of art (this would be Ruskin’s approach). Instead, it undertakes

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a precise analysis of our perception of aesthetic objects: “the first step towards seeing our object as it really is, is to know one’s impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly.” The centre of this process is the personality of the reader or spectator conceived as a lonely and isolated individual: “Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality…Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation.” This solitary state of a critical mind contemplating the art is in Pater’s theory, counterbalanced by his view of the Renaissance as the uniting and transforming movement. For us the Renaissance is the name of a many-sided but yet united movement, in which the love of the things of the intellect and the imagination for their own sake, the desire for a more liberal and comely way of conceiving life, make themselves felt, urging those who experience this desire to search out first one and then another means of intellectual or imaginative enjoyment, and directing them not only to the discovery of old and forgotten sources of this enjoyment, but to the divination of the fresh sources thereof – new experiences, new subjects of poetry, new forms of art. (Walter Pater, The Renaissance [London: Macmillan, 1910], p. 2) Thus, in Pater’s theory Renaissance becomes the power integrating the development of medieval arts and giving them the power to communicate with the antiquity and to anticipate the new forms of art and life. This is certainly true of the Italian Renaissance, but Pater extends his theory even to the French Renaissance and studies the interpenetration of chivalrous and sensuous, pagan elements in the medieval French poetry as well as in the tale of Amis and Amile. He concludes that “the Renaissance has not only the sweetness which it derives from the classical world, but also that curious strength of which there are great resources in the true middle age”. (Ibid., p. 15) What Pater values most is what he calls “a medieval Renaissance” and “its spirit of revolt and rebellion against the moral and religious ideas of the time”. This spirit he finds in the Provencal narrative of Aucassin and Nicolette. In other essays included in his book Pater further refines his theory by using German thought, especially the ideas of Winckelmann, the eighteenth century historian of Greek and Roman art, and the theory of the evolution of art forms

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as the expression of absolute spirit in Hegel’s Aesthetics. He distinguishes the individual arts according to their means of expression and form starting with the architecture (which begins in practical need and can hardly become a symbolic expression of the artist’s mind), continuing with sculpture, painting and poetry. He even tends to place statuary higher than poetry, music and painting and makes it comparable only to Greek tragedy. For him, as well as for Hegel and many other German writers, the true perfection of art lies in the “Hellenic ideal, in which man is at unity with himself, with his physical nature, with the outward world.” But he also realizes that this ideal already belongs to the past and cannot be revived. He then examines Goethe’s Hellenism with his ideals of Allgemeinheit (wholeness) and Heiterkeit (serenity) and rejects the philosophical interpretation of Goethe’s stance, stressing its transcendental, metaphysical moments, its reaching out for the world of ideas. And he asks a fundamental question: “Can the blitheness and universality of the antique ideal be communicated to artistic productions which shall contain the fullness of the experience of the modern world?” (Ibid., p. 230) In this way, he definitely turns the attention from the audience to the work of art itself. And the work of art becomes meaningful in the process of reflection which can satisfy the spirit of the individual to that extent to which the details of modern life are rearranged in it. What the spirit of the modern individual needs is not necessity but freedom and therefore the contemplation of art should extricate us not only from the world of everyday cares, but also from the larger world of “natural” and “social”, scientifically formulated necessities. And this leads Pater to the conviction that to connect the realm of life with the realm of art is hardly possible. Thus, he lays a foundation to the theory of the art-for-art’s-sake which influenced Oscar Wilde and the critic Arthur Symons. QUESTIONS 1. What general tendency characterizes the development of Victorian aesthetics? Can you describe it using Abrams’ categories? 2. Explain De Quincey’s notion of “the literature of power”. In what respect did it anticipate later theories of literature? 3. Can we say that Carlyle contributed to the ideologization of Victorian aesthetics? 4. Describe the main features of Matthew Arnold’s analysis of cultural situation of Victorian Britain. Why does Arnold’s approach combine

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cultural and social analysis? What solution of the contemporary crisis does it recommend? 5. Discuss the complementary roles of personality and education in Arnold’s view of social/cultural transformation. 6. How did Arnold influence later classifications of literary public? 7. Contrast Ruskin’s aesthetics and Arnold’s theory of culture. 8. Why did Ruskin study Gothic art? 9. Did Ruskin advocate an independent aesthetic stance? How does his theory of art differ from Romantic notions of imagination? Why and how does Ruskin relate beauty, organism, society, and epochs of great art? 10. Contrast Ruskin’s theory of art with William Morris’ aesthetic opinions. Why can Morris be called a socialist? What are his ideas of social revolution? 11. How did Morris’ approach to “lesser arts” influence modernist poetry? 12. Explain Walter Pater’s notion of “impressionist criticism.” How does it refer to Ruskin’s and Morris’ medievalism and socialism. 13. Why is the Renaissance so important for Pater’s aesthetic theory? 14. Why does Pater lay a foundation to the theory of the art-for-art’s-sake?

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New Criticism

The origins of New Criticism coincide with the beginnings of literary criticism as a serious academic discipline at British and American universities. But this does not mean that New Criticism is a product of the academic establishment. The theories and essays of its major representatives – I.A. Richards, William Empson and F.R. Leavis in Britain and J.C. Ransom, Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks and W.K. Wimsatt in the U.S. – were influenced by at least two major non-academic sources: by the Victorian critique of culture which started to differentiate, as we saw in Matthew Arnold’s case, between “high-brow”, “middle-brow” and “low-brow” audience and between minority culture and mass civilization, and by the romantic notions of organic form and imagination which were first discussed by S.T. Coleridge. Yet there were other equally important impulses and stimuli. Though the “new critics” often argued against the representatives of the aesthetic movement, like Ruskin or Morris, though they condemned the “impressionist criticism” of the turn of the century, they still believed in the aristocratic features of the “aesthetic stance”, i.e. the privileged attitude to art. And not only that: they also focused their attention on the work of art taken as the aesthetic object, which was one of the important features of, say, Walter Pater’s theory of the pure art. In doing so, they became the founders of literary studies as a new branch of university education: determining the character of the critic, the status of the work of art as an aesthetic object, the canon of the works of art, the purpose of criticism and its methods. According to most of the New Critics literature had an educational power, but no longer as a branch of social consciousness. Rather, they dealt with it as a cultured organ of human sensitivity whose only serious social “purpose” is to oppose the disintegration of human selves (the term used by T.S. Eliot was “the dissociation of sensibility”) exposed to the pressure of alienated mechanical civilisation. Even this had not been invented by them: they followed the way shown by the romantics: Wordsworth, Hazlitt or Shelley. 64

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The wave of New Criticism was risen by a long lasting process of changes in the reading public which occurred in the course of the nineteenth century. Throughout that age, the novel was the decisive factor which had been forming the literary public. It was also an expression of the liberal faith and ideals making the individual and his or her career the centre of the plot and unifying readers of different classes in their interest in the heroine’s or the hero’s progress. Now, this picture still typical of the times of the Brontës, Dickens and Thackeray, started to change in the latter half of the nineteenth century. To much greater extent than ever before, the commercial, low quality fiction started to influence a good deal of lower-class readers. And some of the “serious” novels that appeared – one of them was Middlemarch (1871) by George Eliot – were written for a much narrower, and more intellectual reading public. With this development, which culminated with the novels of Henry James appearing both in the U.S. and in Britain from the beginning of the 1870s, the separation of the “serious” fiction from entertainment literature was accomplished. Due to these events, the original purpose of a Victorian critic, to express the emotional experience from reading and to commend the new novel to the general public had – at least partially – lost its grounds. It was replaced by the first critical attempts to analyze the “craft of fiction”. The above phrase is the title of a book by Percy Lubbock (1879–1965), a British critic influenced by the thought of Henry James. Like Pater, Lubbock and James concentrated on the process of perceiving the literary work. But while Pater dwelt on the analysis of individual impressions, Lubbock understood perception as the reader’s part in creative process. The work, or “the book” as he used to say, does not exist in some objective form, neither material, nor ideal. It is a result of our investment of creative energy and also – our responsibility for the narrative and its structure. In other words it is up to the reader to recognize the author’s narrative strategies and patterns because only afterwards he may be able to do justice to the author and the book. Lubbock contended that all representations in any novel were readeroriented. From the critical reflections of Henry James and the novels of I.S. Turgenew he derived a typology of narrative strategies founded on two different representative orders: the picture and the drama. Those orders lead to two strategies: “showing,” or the unmediated narrative which makes the reader a direct witness of individual scenes, and “telling” in which the

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story is narrated (mediated) by a distinct voice or character (the firstperson narrative or ich-form), or in the third-person narrative (er-form). The preferable way, because the most “objective”, is the drama. As it does not need the narratorial mediation, it can affect the reader stronger than the picture or mediated narrative. It can become, as Lubbock says, the “performance” for the reader. This approach also includes the best known term by Lubbock, the point of view. Though generally linked to and confused with the author’s perspective or the perspective of the text, the point of view in Lubbock’s approach means a specific orientation of the narrative towards the reader. Or, which place is given to her or him as a result of the way in which the story or the individual scenes are narrated. This aspect was later reformulated and elaborated by the American critics Mark Schorer and Norman Friedman. Especially the latter came up with a more complex and more satisfactory typology of the point of view distinguishing between the editorial omniscience when the story is as if edited by the authorial narrator, neutral omniscience when it is related from the position of a single character who is an eye-witness, selective omniscience which selects the angles of individual character(s) and finally the dramatic scene and camera eye techniques. Though Lubbock approached the novel structure from its formal aspects and understood the novel form as the structuring and structural device, his emphasis on the reader’s role in the process of re-creating or re-constructing the text still did not allow him to proceed to major theoretical generalizations. These were made first by the British critic I.A. Richards (1893–1979) and his colleagues (C.K. Ogden and James Woods) in The Foundations of Aesthetics (1922). The book was the first consistent attempt to assess the aesthetic theories of the predecessors and contemporaries of the New Criticism including Ruskin, Morris, Herbert Spencer, L.N.Tolstoi, the Bloomsbury critic Clive Bell and others. Before proposing a new definition of the beautiful, Richards and his colleagues divided the previous ones into three main categories: those where beauty is an internal, unanalyzable quality, those where it is the result of imitation and those defining it in psychological terms. Richards’s definition connecting beauty with synaesthesia belongs to the last mentioned group. Richards did not understand synaesthesia conventionally as the attribution of the perceptions (or metaphors) made by one of the five senses to another (“I see the voice,” “the rays of sun sang on the roof”). He said that synaesthesia was the perception of two different or contradictory impulses (explained below).

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By this definition Richards opposed those contemporary critics (Bell) who maintained that aesthetic emotion is something exceptional and that it is caused by inherent, formal qualities of literary work. Contrary to this, Richards did not want to make a divide between art and experience: for him, art was just one of the forms of experience working by the self-same neurological and psychological mechanisms as its other forms. Therefore Richards’s theory uses terms of behaviourist psychology, like “stimulus,” “emotion,” “nervous system,” etc. Due to synaesthesia, art gives us the possibility to perceive our world in its complexity and richness. As we can see, Richards’s aesthetics did not originally focus on the text but on the mechanism of perception. This made Richards concentrate on the relationship between the work and the audience which however is not understood in pragmatic terms, as the orientation of the work on the reader. Instead, the reader’s responses to a certain psychological stimuli are analyzed. The work of art is thus dissociated into a series of stimuli which are studied only to the extent in which they influence not just psychic, but mainly physiological mechanisms (for instance, blood pressure) of the receiver. This psychologism also influenced the beginnings of semiotic theory in Richards’s and Ogden’s following book, The Meaning of Meaning (1923). The authors introduced their version of the semiotic triangle, a diagram which describes the relations between language (or any sign system) and reality. However, Richards and Ogden changed the Saussurean scheme fundamentally. Instead of defining the sign as the relationship between the signifier (i.e., the arbitrary mark designating some notion or concept; for instance, the sound of speech) and the signified (i.e., the notion or concept designated by the signifier), they spoke of the symbol (word in its denotative meaning) and the reference (no longer a concept or a notion, but, in psychological terms, the state of the consciousness of an individual user of language). Here again the emphasis is put on the psychic process as the mediating element between language and reality. This process is not interesting for semioticians like Saussure and enters only marginally into the field of pragmatics, a division of semiotics dealing with the relationship between the language and extralingual context or situation. All major features of Richards’s literary theory are discussed in his book entitled Principles of Literary Criticism which appeared in 1924. According to Richards, there are two principal divisions of criticism: theory of communication and theory of value. While the first develops the basic

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relationship between symbols, references (i.e., states of consciousness) and referents demonstrated by Richards’s and Ogden’s triangle, the latter should refer the social and moral aspects of art to the psychic mechanisms of human body and mind. This is the focus of Richards’s theory which does not deal with the technical, descriptive language of criticism (description of the plot, stanza, rhyme pattern, etc.), but with the value of the reader’s or receiver’s experience. Richards’s theory of value starts with the explication of “impulses” which are divided into the pleasant (appetencies) and repellent (aversions). All that satisfies our appetencies is valuable, says Richards, unless it prevents the satisfaction of other equally or more important desires. Now the importance of impulses is determined negatively: how effectively a certain impulse can eliminate another one, less important or desirable. The most valuable is a state of mind which enables the highest degree of coordination of impulses. The discussion of impulses is closely connected with Richards’s analysis of imagination and metre. Coleridge’s “synthetic and magic power” is explained as the result of a specific organization of appetencies and aversions. One of the principles of this organization is exclusion, i.e., the reduction and simplification of the complex experience, another – and more valuable – is inclusion, i.e. the synthesis of different and often opposite qualities which we can find for instance in Keats’s odes. The principle of inclusion involves that of irony which is understood, similar to the early German romantics, as the power harmonizing the contrasts and, at the same time, distancing the work from its audience. Richards however explains irony psychologically: to grasp all the impulses balanced in the work of art we must mobilize diverse aspects of our personality. This makes the impersonal, objective approach possible. Rhythm and metre are founded on our anticipation of certain impulses. This anticipation usually has two parts: repetition and our expectancy. The decisive value is the degree of expectancy which is much higher in poetry than in fiction. The opposite of expectancy is disappointment or betrayal which is equally important for the aesthetic effect of the metre. From the study of impulses Richards proceeded to the discussion of the way in which we read or perceive the poem. The first phase is the perception of the graphic form, the letters. This is followed by the sound images of individual words, these are called tied images. Another phase are the free images, i.e., the visual images which words evoke in our consciousness. Here

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Richards maintains that excessive visual imagination may even destroy the effect of the poem which is to produce the thoughts about the missing part of the sign or about what should transform the sign into a causal relationship and finally would produce certain emotions and attitudes. These are the most important, but only if they last. In this way art becomes the means of the enlargement of human sensibility. This also leads to the main theme of Richards’s book, the difference between the intellectual, symbolic language also called the language of science established by its claim on the truth or falseness of statements, and emotional language whose major purpose is to produce lasting emotions and attitudes. Other representatives of the New Criticism abandoned or refused Richards’s psychologism. Especially under the influence of U.S. critics – Cleanth Brooks, W.K.Wimsatt and others – New Criticism started to concentrate on textual analysis and its major instrument, the close reading. But that does not mean that it became less theoretical. William Empson’s notion of ambiguity is, in comparison with Richards’s synaesthesia, much closer to the textual analysis of meaning. Though his first type of ambiguity is defined as a linguistic structure opening the space for the ambiguous reaction of the receiver, the other types more or less correspond to the different literary and non-literary contexts of the text. Cleanth Brooks, the American critic, defined poetry as “the language of paradox”. Brooks however did not want to establish any psychological definition of paradox which would be understood as the major feature of the structure of a poem. The structure develops dynamically because it makes a synthesis of discordant elements, of semantic oppositions. The dynamism of a poetic structure is close to that of the dramatic plot. Those aspects of the poem which cannot be paraphrased (Brooks understood paraphrase as an instrument of criticism) are paradoxical and form the core of the dynamic structure of the poem. In his fundamental book The New Criticism (1941), John Crowe Ransom criticized the psychological orientation of I.A.Richards’s theory and maintains that the text as a “cognitive object” (which implies that the main function of literature is knowledge and not the production of emotions or attitudes) is the only subject of the study. This cognitive orientation is the result of another notion of the text: its understanding as a specific sign, as an icon. To interpret this icon we have to understand its structural principle. This we can do by taking note of and comparing the objective details, that is those details that are

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important for the order of content relating to an order of existence. Other details are no less important because they create the texture of the poem, that is, the minute network of connotations by which the structure refers itself to more subjective aspects of perception and reality. In contrast to structure which is rational and logical, the texture is free and does not bear any logical organization. In this way Ransom integrated Richards’s distinction between the language of science and the language of poetry into his theory. But, interestingly enough, he reinterpreted it in his other work as the opposition between the industrial North and agrarian South which was according to him the only part of America where the aesthetic way of life could still be followed. Some consequences of Ransom’s work are evident from The Verbal Icon by W.K. Wimsatt. With his collaborator M.K. Beardsley, Wimsatt analysed two major fallacies: intentional and pathetic. The former is typical of those critics who cannot interpret the work without references to the author and her or his intentions. The latter characterizes new critics like I.A. Richards who have based their theory on the distinction between referential and emotional language. Thus, Wimsatt turned the attention of criticism from the extra-literary aspects to the study of the dialectic relationship between the contents and the form. In this way, he, as well as some other new critics, approached the problems formulated by structuralism and semiotics. QUESTIONS 1. What caused the rise of New Criticism? What changes in British and American university education were initiated by this critical movement? 2. Explain Percy Lubbock’s terms CRAFT OF FICTION and POINTOF-VIEW. Characterize a narrative theory based on the latter concept. 3. What is the difference between traditional understanding of synaesthesia and Richards’ definition and use of this concept? 4. Why is Richards’ aesthetics psychological? How does it explain the work of art? 5. How does Richards’ psychologism influence his semiotic theory? Compare Richards’ semiotic triangle to Saussure’s definition of linguistic sign. 6. Why does Richards introduce the difference between the theory of communication and the theory of value? Which of these theories is more important for the critical interpretation of art? 7. What is the major feature of Richards’ theory of aesthetic value? To which other purpose does Richards use this main component of his theory?

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8. Which principles characterize the functioning of metre and imagination in Richards’ aesthetics? Why does Richards’ theory resemble romantic approaches to the meaning of art? 9. How does Richards’ theory of art perception transit from the personal nature of perception to the impersonality of the work of art? 10. Describe the individual phases of the poem’s perception according to I.A.Richards. 11. Compare William Empson’s notion of ambiguity to Richards’s “synaesthesia”. 12. What is the relationship between PARADOX and PARAPHRASE in Cleanth Brooks’ theory of literary interpretation? 13. How does American New Criticism differ from its British variety? Illustrate this difference using your knowledge of J.C. Ransom’s and W.K. Wimsatt’s theory. 14. How is American New Criticism linked to Southern literature?

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Structuralism and Semiotics

While New Criticism can be said to have established the study of literature as an academic discipline, structuralism, which was developing simultaneously on the European continent, brought in the requirement of a systematic and “scientific” character of literary criticism. The “scientific” nature of literary study had no longer to be derived from other disciplines, for instance from behaviourist psychology as it was in the aesthetics of Richards and Ogden, but should be proved in the examined object: in literature as verbal art. This definition still seems to link structuralism and later developments in New Criticism, especially the works of J.C. Ransom (who uses “structure” as a principal concept), Cleanth Brooks and W.K. Wimsatt. But the difference between these two trends becomes evident when we realize that the structuralist notion of “verbal art” is subordinated to general concepts of language and sign. Consequently, structuralism is a general methodology of the humanities (including linguistics, literary studies, aesthetics, art theories, general cultural studies, anthropology, ethnology, etc.) based on a universal linguistic model. How can the work of art be connected with everyday speech as well as with myth or the collective unconscious? It is made possible by the linguistic model: “our unconscious,” says the French psychiatrist Jacques Lacan, “is structured like a language.” What allows us to make this comparison? It is the semiotic theory of language treating language as a specific instance of a system of signs. The semiotic theory which becomes a foundation of European continental structuralism was developed by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) at the beginning of this century. In the Course of General Linguistic (Course de Linguistique Générale) which had been recorded by his students, Saussure distinguishes two basic oppositions of his semiotic system. For him, the sign is not an object but a relationship between a specific object, notion or phenomenon (a sound of speech, word, idea, concept, etc.) and 72

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the meaning it signifies. The former is called the signifier (signifiant in French) and the latter is referred to as the signified (signifié in French). The important aspect of the signifier is that it is not determined by the signified. There is not a causal, but arbitrary link between the two components of the sign. The awareness of the arbitrary nature of the sign is necessary for recognizing the importance of formal elements (phonological qualities of the sounds of speech in poetry, plots in novels etc.) in the work of art. As a predecessor of structuralism, Russian “formalist” or formal critic Viktor Shklovsky (1893–1984) shows in his Theory of Prose that the aesthetic form of the work of fiction, the sujet (i.e. the way in which the events are told, opposed to the fabula, or the story contained in the novel) or the specific, estranged form of language which breaks the rules of its conventional usage are not mere formal elements but the only ways in which meaning in the work of literature can exist. In brief, meaning is inseparable from form, and the critic should trace how the former is generated by the internal dynamism of the latter. Another important feature of the structuralist approach to the problem of language is the differentiation between the language (la langue) understood as a general system of signs and the speech (parole) indicating an immense number of individual utterances, or individual “realizations” of the general sign system. This also enables the structuralist critic to distinguish between the work of art as a structure of dialectical oppositions, whose major aim is to maintain a sort of balance or “norm”, and numerous individual readings, or “concretizations” (changes of the meaning produced by cultural, political, etc., situation). This leads us to the theory of the Prague Linguistic Circle and its major representative, Jan Mukařovský (1891–1975). In his definition of structure Mukařovský refused the rigid separation of langue and parole, the general structure and its individual manifestations. According to him structure is not a totality giving to its parts or components a special character. Principally, it can be only “that set of parts whose inner balance is permanently disrupted and renewed and whose unity therefore appears to us as a complex of dialectical oppositions”. (“O strukturalismu,” in Studie z estetiky [Praha: Odeon, 1966], p. 109). This definition shows that for the Prague Structuralism, the concept of norm was central and that there was a tendency towards historical interpretation of the art in its relation to society. This tendency culminated in the work of Mukařovský’s pupil Felix Vodička.

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One of the most important developments of Saussurean theory is Mukařovský’s later work on intentionality and unintentionality (arbitrariness) in art. Though the signifier may have an arbitrary nature, the work-of-art-as-sign should be regarded as primarily intentional. This intentionality, namely the presence of unifying “meaning” (smysl), is defined with respect to the receiver, rather than to the author, because it enables the receiver to recognize the work of art as an autonomous sign. This sign is something different from the experience, feelings or consciousness of the receiver, but it also does not coincide with the work of art as a made object (artefact) because it can change its meaning as every structure does. Therefore Mukařovský defined the autonomous sign as “the mediator among the members of a certain collective” (Ibid., p. 87). This autonomy can be given by the aesthetic function of the work of art, i.e. by the fact that the work of art does not need any practical purpose for its existence, that it exists because of its beauty which however is – according to Mukařovský – always related to “vital interests of the men” (p. 114). The intention which unites the individual components of the work of art (e.g., dramatic dialogue, gestures and movements of actors, sets and costumes, music and lighting) into an autonomous sign, was called by Mukařovský the semantic gesture. It is important to understand it as shared activity of the author and the reader/spectator/listener: both of them participate in creating the work as an aesthetic sign. This process also involves the communicative aspect of art which Mukařovský elsewhere defined in a simpler way as the ability of the work of art to communicate feelings, experience, truths, etc. But these cannot be treated separately from the structure of the work of art. But Mukařovský also showed that not everything in the work of art has to be intentional. The general unity of the work given by the semantic gesture is often broken. To give a simplest example: there may be inconsistencies in the utterance of characters (some characters contradict themselves) or in the plot. This unintentionality (or arbitrariness) is the denial of the semantic unity of the work of art. Though it is a semiotic phenomenon, it goes against the nature of the work of art as an autonomous sign, and brings it back to reality as a thing (which however is not the same as the material object or artefact). The workof-art-as-thing “can influence what is universal in an individual”: her or his ethical stance, emotions, unconscious. Conversely, the work-as-sign refers more to the social being of the receiver.

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ROMAN JAKOBSON (1896–1982) The theories of the Prague School were further developed by Roman Jakobson, a Russian Jew who was the propagator of Russian Formalism and subsequently brought the methods of Prague Structuralism to the U.S. where he emigrated in 1938. While still a member of Prague Linguistic Circle Jakobson became famous for his analysis of the sound patterns of verse based on phonological principles. In his article on “Linguistics and Poetics” (1960) Jakobson gave a most succinct expression to his theory. Language contains several parallel structures characterized by a specific function. This function depends on the general code of communication. The addresser sends a message to the addressee. To be efficient, this message must have a referent (i.e. an extralingual context), it requires the code known at least partially to both partners of the communication and some contact (a material channel and/or the psychic relationship between the partners of communication). Now in his characterization of diverse functions of language Jakobson made a model resembling in some respect the scheme of M.H. Abrams. Referential function is the orientation of the utterance to its denotate (to the object to which it refers), emotive function is the expression of the emotional attitude of the speaker, phatic function is the orientation to the contact in the process of the comunication, conative function is the orientation to the addressee and poetic function is the orientation to the message itself. Measured by Abrams’s criteria, Jakobson’s theory represents an objective approach to the work of art. How does this objective approach function in the explanation of verse? According to Jakobson, poetic function is established in two ways: by the principle of equivalence (i.e. choice of words and figures based on similarity and difference, synonymy and antonymy) and by the principle of combination based on contiguity. In poetry, the principle of combination generates a series of sounds or of rhythmic patterns. In a plot of a novel it accounts for a series of motifs. In spite of the serial principle, the literary work may contain recurrent figures whose recurrence is given by the existence of a dominant contrast or opposition. In verse the important contrasts are between individual phonemes or their groups, in larger units contrasts of motifs, images, rhetorical figures prevail. Due to these contrasts, syllabic prosody may be distinguished from, say, tonic or syllabotonic modes: while the former is based on the opposition between the core of the syllable and its margins, the latter are based on the opposition of different tonic peaks of the line and on the opposition of their relative lengths. These oppositions

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establish the predominance of the poetic function over the referential. But that does not mean that they eliminate the latter (this Jakobson shows in his analysis of Poe’s famous poem “The Raven”). According to Jakobson, in literary genres characterized by an interpenetration of poetic and referential functions, tropes and grammatical figures (metaphors, metonymies, synecdoches, etc.), rather than sounds of speech or rhythm, are the bearers of poetic qualities. RENÉ WELLEK AND AUSTIN WARREN: THEORY OF LITERATURE Jakobson’s work has not been the only instance of the structuralist influence in the U.S. Another member of the Prague linguistic circle who emigrated to the U.S. because of the Nazi danger is René Wellek. Together with Austin Warren he wrote perhaps the most widely used book on literary theory, The Theory of Literature (1949). The work was intended to sum up all relevant theoretical knowledge and to sort it out neatly using both new critical and structuralist principles. Thus, for instance, the definition of literature as an art, or of “imaginative literature” which includes also oral compositions, attempts to combine the new critical (and ultimately romantic) distinctions between the “language of science” and “language of poetry” or the referential and connotative languages. But the definition has also structuralist features: Wellek and Warren maintained that “a literary work of art is not a simple object but rather a highly complex organization of stratified character with multiple meanings and relationships.” (Theory of Literature, [New York: Jonathan Cape, 1949], p. 17). To explore these, one cannot use the “extrinsic” methods dealing with autobiographical, social, political, historical, psychological and other contexts of the work, but has to employ the “intrinsic”, analytical methods to identify the individual strata of meaning. The theory of these strata is influenced by the model of the work of literature presented by the German phenomenological structuralist, Roman Ingarden in his book Das literarische Kunstwerk (The Literary Work of Art, 1931). Ingarden distinguished four or five basic strata of the work of literature which he understood as an ideal object. The first is the level of sound patterns and their derivatives (rhymes, etc.), the second is the level of the units of meaning (morphemes, lexemes, sentences, statements) and includes the patterns characteristic of the individual style, the third includes specific, “schematic aspects,” i.e., the ways of representing “reality” in literature, and

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the fourth contains “representational objectivities”, or “themes”. They are connotations of symbols (not symbols themselves but the meanings implied by them) and can reveal abstract, “metaphysical” qualities of human life. These strata are intersected by the fifth which contains the qualities responsible for aesthetic value. Wellek’s approach basically preserves the first three strata of Ingarden’s structural model. He examines “euphony, rhythm and metre,” “style snd stylistics,” “image, metaphor, symbol and myth”. Instead of the discussion of metaphysical, ontological qualities, the “being” of the work of literature, Theory of Literature deals with the relationship of “fiction” and “reality” in the narrative work of literature. Fiction is upheld by “the plot” or “narrative structure” (here Wellek and Warren distinguish the time of the fabula, i.e., the progression of the story in time, and the time of the sujet, i.e., the order in which the events are narrated), by the characterization and by the description of environment. Another aspect of the highest level of the literary work of art is its genre. Wellek and Warren’s theory of genres rejects the purely structuralist attempts to derive genres from grammatical categories like the person or the tense (e.g. epic – third person past tense) and prefers the theory of elementary forms like song, dialogue, narrative, etc. The most general question addressed by Wellek and Warren corresponds to those raised in the discussion of the fifth stratum of Ingarden’s model. It is the problem of aesthetic value. Here, Wellek and Warren attempted to strike a balance between formalist approach to the poem as to “the specific, highly organized control of the reader’s experience” and the phenomenological approach according to which “the values exist potentially in literary structures: they are realized, actually valued only as they are contemplated by the readers who meet the requisite conditions”. (Ibid., p. 261) Similar to Ingarden, Wellek and Warren were not content with what may be called a synchronic study of literary work. Their effort to make Ingarden’s elaborate system accessible to the large number of especially American readers with little or no background in German philosophy is best demonstrated in the transformation of Ingarden’s notions of diachrony based on the “positional system of phases” consisting of all strata of the work. In contrast to Ingarden, Wellek and Warren have opened the question of literary history as a changeable, dynamic system. In this respect, they continue the tradition of the Prague School, namely Mukařovský’s definition of structure.

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NORTHROP FRYE AND ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM Apart from Wellek’s and Warren’s book, there is only one work in North American structuralist theory discussing literary theory with such a range and complexity: The Anatomy of Criticism (1957) written by a Canadian scholar Northrop Frye. In contrast to most structuralist works Frye combined the “scientific” and traditional notions of literary criticism and the synchronic and diachronic system. In his approach criticism is separated from literary theory which mostly ignores the process of evaluation. Frye distinguished several major types of criticism. The first is historical criticism which presents a theory of modes based on what Aristotle in his Poetics distinguishes as the six components of tragedy. According to Frye, there are two main modes: fictitious (novel and drama), accentuating action (which Aristotle says to be the most important component of the work of literature) and thematic modes (lyric and essay) accentuating ethos and dianoia (mission and meaning; which, apart from being rhetorical categories, are also components of characters and speech). Fictitious mode is based on the hero. In history, Frye reconstructed a descending sequence of hero-types starting with the divine hero of myths and continuing with the “romantic” hero of magic folktales, Christian legends and chivalrous narratives, the hero-leader typical of the Renaissance drama or epic, the character whose abilities are natural but higher than those of ordinary people, and the heroes of comedy and realistic novel who often are ordinary people. The last category are the heroes of ironic mode with their features of frustration and absurdity. In the thematic mode the hero is author himself. The second form of criticism is ethical criticism. This deals with the theory of symbols and is based on the medieval scheme of the strata of meaning in a sacred text. There are four strata of meaning: literal, allegorical, moral and anagogic (referring to universal, metaphysical or mystical truths like God’s creation, the Redemption, the Apocalypse, the book of Nature, etc.). All these strata manifest themselves in our reading of symbols. Accordingly, this reading has four phases: literal and descriptive (including two ways of reading – centrifugal, referring the word to the object, and centripetal, referring it to the structure of the work and creating verbal patterns), formal phase when symbol is understood as an allegorical image of some extraliterary event, mythical phase when symbol becomes an archetype (i.e. a typical or recurrent image, unifying the individual and collective experience and establishing literature as a social mode of communication) and anagogic phase when the

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symbol becomes a fully autonomous unit, a word containing all poetry in itself. According to Elizabeth Wright, it “represents the final wished-for union of desire and nature, taking on a symbolic form in which nature becomes the body itself of the divine poetic creator”. (Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism. Theory in Practice [London: Methuen, 1984], p.73). Thus it establishes literature as a reality of its own (as a “fearful symmetry”, a cryptic metaphor from William Blake’s poem “The Tyger”). The third form of criticism is archetypal criticism. Before discussing Frye’s theory the term “archetype” has to be explained. It was introduced by Carl Gustav Jung (1875–1961), a Swiss psychologist. Originally, Jung used to work with Sigmund Freud, but they soon started to differ in their notions of the unconscious. While the latter stressed a particular scope of its functioning (a specific cultural context, a specific individual) and its form (the libido as an energy underlying the transformation of individual sexual instincts, and the “typical symbols” – e.g., all long or tall protruding objects are called “phallic images” – are independent of the individual but can be properly interpreted only in the individual context), the former conceived the unconscious (or libido) as a collective and universal phenomenon: “a flux of undifferentiated energy” that “gets channelled into certain privileged symbols, detached from the workings of language”. (Cf. Wright, op.cit., p. 69, 70). In this way, says Jung, a common basis of the collective unconscious appears containing accumulated “primordial images” which can be perceived across cultures because they contain “the inherited possibilities of human imagination as it was from the time immemorial”. This fact also “explains the truly amazing phenomenon that certain motifs from myths and legends repeat themselves the world over in identical forms”. These repeating motifs are called the archetypes. (C.G. Jung, “On the relation of analytical psychology to poetry,” 1931, in: The Spirit of Man. Art and Literature. [Princeton: Princeton U.P., 1972], p. 65). Jung’s theory of archetypes produced doubts about the compatibility of their different forms. Can we speak of the archetypes as predominantly emotional structures of our psyche or should we regard them as images and representations transferred from generation to generation by the works of art? This dilemma had been discussed, but not resolved, by Maud Bodkin (Archetypal Patterns in Poetry, 1934). She inverted the causal relationship between the psychic manifestations of the unconscious and its representations in art, saying that it was the representations, i.e., the images and motifs of

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myths and works of art, that influenced and informed psychological archetypes. The problem of this simple reversal was the difficulty of tracing reliable links between the archetype as a structure of images in art and in our emotions. Therefore Bodkin later abandoned the Jungian connection of the archetype with the collective unconscious and became more interested in archetypes as phenomena of social consciousness and products of cultural history. Her theory was later developed by the American critic Leslie Fiedler who distinguished between the archetype as the structure of collective responses to literature and the signature as the features of an individual work of art or an individual author. According to Fiedler, the signature can influence and change the general structure of the archetype. In contrast to Bodkin, the French critic Gaston Bachelard saw the archetypes as the objectives of literature whose main purpose is the search of the “unconscious” which had to exist before any consciousness. This also implied the emphasis on a poetical change of the world which could overcome the difference between the scientific and emotional language and would return us to our natural environment, to its most essential figuration, i.e., the images of the four elements: water, fire, air and earth. But it was first Northrop Frye who asked a radical question about the structural meaning of archetypes in literature. Though his theory of archetypal criticism still takes account of human desires, he explains archetypes objectively, as principal features of aesthetic objects. In this way, he sees archetypes “as historically established patterns across texts…arising from the common desire to make form. The order of words we find in literature is structured by archetypes spread out over a series of “pregeneric” elements which he calls “mythoi”. (Cf. Wright, op. cit., p. 73). Thus, in Frye’s theory the archetype is transformed from a psychoanalytical category to the structural feature of both the universal myths and the particular genres born out of them. This is the major contribution of Frye’s book. But the structuralist bias of his theory does not necessarily imply that he resigns at a study of collective imagination. His theory deals with different kinds of this power which however are not discussed in their psychic manifestations (as energy, desire, repression, etc.), but structurally: as figures, images and corresponding genres. In terms of representations, Frye distinguished two basic types of images. 1. Apocalyptic images. Connected with Heaven, they represent reality in the forms of human desires. They include the main archetypal spaces of the

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garden, or the world of plants, the sheepfold, the world of domestic animals, and the city, the world of men made of stones and work. 2. Demonic images. Connected with hell, they represent scapegoats, slavery, pain and chaos. These polar oppositions are combined dialectically. In Romanticism, the apocalyptic world acquires its humanized counterpart, the world of innocence (as we can see in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience or in Wordsworth’s poems. There may also be other ways of organizing the basic oppositions. The “higher mimetic mode” is based on love and form. Its imagination provides analogies of nature and reason. This gives the opportunity to idealize the people and especially Kings or Queens as deities. (Spenser’s allegories in The Faerie Queene). The “lower mimetic mode” accentuating the demonic imagination is based on work. The gardens are changed into farms with toiling labourers. The cities are transformed into labyriths where people are lonely and lose their capacity to communicate. Archetypal criticism prepares a theory of myth which is not based on static distinctions between archetypes but on the dynamic progression of the narrative. This movement follows the cyclical pattern of seasonal change and also the alterations between the rise and fall, toil and rest in human life, and also includes death. The four seasons correspond to the four most important ages of human life (childhood, youth, maturity and old age) and establish four types of mythoi which are also four basic genres: mythos of spring (comedy), mythos of summer (romance), presenting a fight of an ideal hero with evil, the death of the hero and his resurrection, mythos of autumn (tragedy), in which the hero’s fate is determined by higher forces, and the mythos of winter which includes irony and satire. The fourth form of criticism is rhetorical criticism. It is focused on the theory of genres. Here Frye’s theory refers to the latter three components of the literary work discussed in Aristotle’s Poetics: lexis (speech, literature as verbal art), melos (song or music) and opsis (the setting of play, i.e., the relation of literature to visual arts). These categories are decisive for the classification of genres which are discussed in terms of rhetorical relationship between the author and his audience. The individual genres are distinguished by their specific rhythms: epic is characterized by the rhythm of repetition (and dependent on the metre and other verse qualities), fiction which has the rhythm of continuity (which is based on the recurrence of words, images and

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scenes with similar and contrasting meaning), drama which has the rhythm of decorum (i.e. is subject to the necessity to represent the characters by means of their speech so that the style must be commensurate to the content). The last main genre is lyric determined by the rhythm of associations. Frye defined it as a product of the unconscious whose disparate images, feelings and memories are unified by sound patterns. For lyric, the unity of sound and meaning is crucial as well as the close relationship between meaning and the visual element (ideograms, hieroglyphs). Having made this general classification Frye distinguished many specific genres of drama, lyric, epic, fiction, encyclopaedic form (the Bible) and the non-literary genres (the texts of the humanities) which are closest to literature. This typology concludes a remarkable work of criticism which no longer deals merely with literature, but – especially in the part dedicated to archetypal criticism – makes the whole of culture its subject. According to Frye, the archetypal study of culture does not merely result in the knowledge of the past but is orientated toward the forms of our present life. Thus, Frye’s major work not only sums up the development of structuralist, new critical and traditional methods in American and English criticism, but also shows how to transcend the limits of disciplines and to establish cultural studies. ROLAND BARTHES: MYTHOLOGIES However, further development of theory has shown that Frye’s system has not won such general authority as we could infer from its universal scope and structural versatility. In the same year when Anatomy of Criticism was published, Roland Barthes, who was soon to become the leading French nonacademic critic, made his fame as the author of a slender book called Mythologies. Barthes’ preface to the 1970 French edition of his book stated the case quite bluntly and with a good deal of irony: I just read Saussure and as a result acquired the conviction that by treating “collective representations” as sign-systems, one might hope to go further than the pious show of unmasking them and account in detail for the mystification which transforms petit-bourgeois culture into a universal nature. (Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Anette Lavers [New York: Hill and Wang, 1984], p. 9)

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In contrast to Frye’s archetypal approach which does not distinguish between Nature and History, Barthes insists that semiotics can and should make distinctions. Thus he does not merely use semiotics as an instrument of ideological criticism; on the other hand, his reflection of the seemingly “natural” foundations of the process of cultural communication, of “what-goes-withoutsaying” (Barthes, op.cit., p.11) runs counter to the structuralist idea of norm (e.g. in the theories of the Prague circle) as well as the main objective of archetypal criticism: to subsume all cultural forms under a universal mythological pattern. Thus, despite his semiotic and structuralist allegiances, Barthes introduces a new, deconstructive moment into literary and cultural studies. He deals with the myth as a conservative force of preservation and consolidation which works against the subversive and creative powers of the collective unconscious. As such, he says, myth can be deliberately used, especially by the mass media and publicity, to manipulate the people. “One immunizes the content of collective imagination by means of a small inoculation of acknowledged evil; one thus protects it against the risk of generalized subversion.” (Barthes, op.cit., p.150). This is Barthes’s definition of the first figure of the rhetoric of myth, inoculation: the following ones are the privation of history (“myth deprives the object of which it speaks of all History”, p. 151), identification (of the Other with stock images of the criminal, the people of another race, etc.), tautology (“a profound distrust of language, which is rejected because it has failed”, p. 153), neither-norism (an equilibrium is created by weighing two opposite but equally unacceptable alternatives, also, this is the scheme of dialectical opposition), quantification of quality (for instance, theatre is called the essence of society but contemporary commercial theatre is not founded on this “essence” at all), quantification of effects (in contemporary commercial theatre there must be a “quantitative equality between the cost of the ticket and the luxuriousness of the sets”), and the statement of facts (myth produces statements, maxims, which are “no longer directed towards a world to be made”, p. 154, and therefore also opposed to proverbs which still remind us of the active, productive use of language in folk tradition). Examining Barthes’s rhetoric of myth, one cannot resist the temptation to compare its seven figures with the six components of the work of literature determined by Aristotle and taken up by Frye to become the foundation of his literary modes. Thus, for instance, inocculation, corresponds to action but amounts to the repression of action by means of regulated counteraction, the privation of history and identification make the characters

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virtually impossible, tautology deprives discourse of meaning, neither-norism controls the rhetorical dynamic of speech, quantification of quality deals with theatricality as the effective and strategic use of sets and music, but also masks and pretensions. The only rhetorical figure which does not have any counterpart in the Aristotelian system, is, quite obviously, the statement of facts. This shows the danger of mythological and archetypal criticism as a whole: the repression of active speech and its petrification into “metalanguage”, “second-order language which bears on objects already prepared.” (p. 154) The most memorable part of Barthes’s book are not these theoretical conclusions but his short essays describing the operation of the individual figures of the rhetoric of myth in popular culture, in the media, in advertising and in the common habits of life. There are essays on a new Citroen, wrestling, striptease, ornamental cookery, and, last but not least, on “Soap-powders and Detergents”. Barthes starts by contrasting the connotations of purifying liquids (containing chlorine) and soap-powders (Persil at that time) used in the process of their marketing. Both of them are based on “the relations between the evil and the cure, between dirt and a given product”, but these relations are figured differently. Chlorinated liquids are experienced as a violent means, a “living fire” which “kills” the dirt, while the soap-powders are “separating agents” which “liberate” the piece of clothing without any damage: they only “force out” the enemy. In these dichotomy Barthes recognizes the “archetypal” background, based on different phases of the original, manual washing process which the liquids and powders facilitate. Thus, “the chemical fluid is an extension of the washerwoman’s movements when she beats the clothes, while powders rather replace those of the housewife pressing and rolling the washing against a sloping board”. (p. 36) But these “ethnographic correlatives” are soon covered up by other connotations. These are no longer produced by advertising based on psychology but by that based on psychoanalysis: “Persil Whiteness … bases its prestige on the evidence of the result; it calls into play vanity, a social concern with appearances, by offering for comparison two objects one of which is whiter than the other.” (p. 37) And the then new detergent called Omo, also had different advertising. Instead of concentrating on the result or effect, the producers show the process of washing and the deep and rich foam. “To say that Omo cleans in depth … is to assume that linen is deep…, and this unquestionably results in exalting it, by establishing it as an object favourable to those obscure tendencies to enfold and caress which are found in every human body.” The foam, on the other hand, connotes luxury, healthy and powerful essence, but also airiness,

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spirituality (making “something out of nothing”) and may also have a different psychoanalytical meaning “of a soothing kind” (Ibid.). In this way the advertisement covers up the abrasive nature of washing and fabricates a new myth of “something born out of nothing,” of soothing and caressing spiritual purity. And this “euphoria” Omo advertisements produce make us forget that Omo and Persil are the products of the same company. Barthes’s analysis shows the closeness of myth as the most universal and comprehensive form of human imagination to its shortest forms like the proverb or the anecdote. On a more general level it shows the insufficience of the structuralist belief in general linguistic models which led some critics to compare the work of art with an ideal object, general system (langue) or autonomous sign. What Barthes imagines in his later works is the pure textuality, writing which is not restricted by any official uses of language and which is characterized by “the vagueness of difference” (Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes [London: Methuen, 1977], p. 166). In contrast to older structuralists, Barthes privileges parole over the langue, but this can hardly solve the structuralist dilemma formulated by Christopher Norris: “What are we to make of this privileged status of speech…in a theory which is otherwise so heavily committed to the prior significance of language-assystem.” (Christopher Norris, Deconstruction. Theory and Practice [London: Methuen, 1982], p. 27). The answer to this question, articulated also by Barthes in his Elements of Semiology (1967), is not easy. It involves the deconstruction of the “langue-parole” opposition as an antinomy (i.e., a logically irreconcilable contradiction, a paradox). QUESTIONS 1. What quality of literary criticism does structuralism emphasize? To what general theory and principal notions is literature subordinated in structuralist approaches? 2. Explain the fundamental concepts of Saussure’s theory of sign. What is the most important quality of the relationhip between the signifier and the signified? 3. Why does structuralism focus on formal elements of the work of art? Give an example of a formalist approach. 4. How do the structuralists apply Saussurean langue – parole opposition when analyzing works of literature? Explain the term CONCRETIZATION.

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5. What characterizes Mukařovský’s concept of STRUCTURE? How does Mukařovský differ in this respect from other structuralists? 6. What is the major consequence of Mukařovský’s privileging the concept of NORM? 7. Explain Mukařovský’s notion of the work of art. What is intentional and what can be considered unintentional in it? What is the difference between the artefact, work-as-sign, and work-as-thing? 8. Describe Roman Jakobson’s theory of communication. What function does the literary work of art have in Jakobson’s system? What are the major principles establishing this function and how do they operate? 9. Explain the difference between “intrinsic” and “extrinsic” approach in René Wellek’s and Austin Warren’s Theory of Literature. 10. What structure characterizes the model of literary work in Wellek’s and Warren’s book? Compare it with a European model which influenced Wellek’s and Warren’s theory. Where can you perceive the influence of the Prague school? 11. Explain the difference between theory of literature and criticism in Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism. What are the main types of criticism according to Frye? 12. What major opposition characterizes Frye’s system of HISTORICAL CRITICISM? Why is this criticism called “historical”? 13. Describe Frye’s system of ETHICAL CRITICISM. Why does it use the system of strata for textual interpretation? 14. Contrast C.G. Jung’s, Maud Bodkin’s and Frye’s notions of ARCHETYPE. Explain the functioning of Frye’s system of ARCHETYPAL CRITICISM. What are the “higher” and “lower” mimetic modes? 15. What system of criticism describes the functioning of genres in Frye’s theory? What components of literary work does it deal with? Explain Frye’s notion of RHYTHM. 16. What is the significance of Frye’s critical work? 17. Contrast Roland Barthes’ notion of MYTHOLOGIES with Frye’s mythological criticism. What figures constitute Barthes’ rhetoric of myth? 18. How does Barthes’ structuralism differ from the structuralism of the Prague School? 19. Why does Barthes reach the limits of structuralism?

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Deconstruction: an Introduction

Discussing deconstruction and writing on it causes unexpected difficulties. In his Letter to a Japanese Friend (10 July 1983, first published 1986) Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher (1930–2004), playfully undermines the authority of this word which can be neither understood nor used as a concept: What deconstruction is not? everything of course! What is deconstruction? nothing of course! I do not think…that it is a good word [un bon mot]. It is certainly not elegant [beau]. It has definitely been of service in a highly determined situation. (A Derrida Reader, ed. Peggy Kamuf [New York: Columbia U.P., 1991, p. 275) Before explaining that “highly determined situation” I would like to point out the distorted word order of the first question. It reminds us of the elusive nature of meaning in language. If Derrida asked just What is not deconstruction? the question and answer would imply: “Of course, everything is deconstruction.” But the sentence, by playing with a syntactic error, indicates the negative meaning of deconstruction. Deconstruction cannot “be” in the traditional meaning of philosophical language. It cannot be an entity or have an essence. It is, Derrida claims, a word that became suitable in a situation which had a specific meaning and demanded a resolution. What kind of situation? Translating from one language to another. At the beginning of his letter Derrida recalls it in the following way: When I chose this word, or when it imposed itself upon me – I think it was in Of Grammatology – I little thought it would be credited with such a central role in the discourse that interested me at the time. Among other things I wished to translate and to adapt to my own ends the 87

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Heideggerian word Destruktion or Abbau. Each signified in its context an operation bearing on the structure or traditional architecture of the fundamental concepts of ontology or of Western metaphysics. But in French “destruction” too obviously implied an annihilation or a negative reduction much closer perhaps to Nietzschean “demolition” than to the Heideggerian interpretation of the type of reading that I proposed. (A Derrida Reader, pp. 270–271) Of course, the word “deconstruction” was no random product of Derrida’s effort to translate a difficult philosophical concept. But it is important that its first use was not determined by any “idea” but rather by a specific language situation. This is described by Derrida as an “inscription in a chain of possible substitutions, in what is too blithely called a ‘context’”. Let us return to the implications of the word. In French it means the same as the archaic English words “construction” or “construe,” that is, “to make a grammatical analysis of a sentence in a foreign language,” traditionally in Latin or Greek. Or to reduce a poem in verse to a prosaic statement, in order to understand its basic sense. On the other hand, it can also mean “to lose construction”, or to change structure. This is said in French about the changes which occur in the development of a language. In addition to the linguistic sense it can be used as a term concerning technology and, specifically, mechanisms. In French, the machine can be “deconstructed” which does not mean just “taken to pieces” but “disassembled” in order to be transported elsewhere. Consequently, the structure and emplacement of the machine are more important than its individual parts. The last comparison may produce an impression that deconstruction is a special kind of analysis. But, says Derrida, because “the dismantling of a structure is not a regression toward a simple element” (p. 273), deconstruction is not an analysis. Nor can it be called a critique (in the philosophical sense of “judgement” or “discernment”), for such a procedure implies the use of conceptual and methodological apparatus which itself is subject to deconstruction. The negative “definition” of deconstruction given by Derrida continues by mentioning the aspect of methods and methodology. Deconstruction is not a method because “it cannot be reduced…to a set of rules and transposable procedures” (p. 273). In other words the ways deconstruction operates cannot be generalized and “applied” to any text. Lastly, deconstruction “is not even an act or an operation” (Ibid.). The idea of the act implies “something

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‘patient’ or ‘passive’ affected by an action, but deconstruction cannot affect anything, or operate on anything. It simply “takes place”. “It deconstructs it-self. It can be deconstructed.” (p. 274) Consequently, it can be called an event. According to Derrida, anything unrelated to “egological subjectivity”, i.e., to the self posited in language and especially in philosophy, is in deconstruction. Only now, “in modernity” (the word should not be confused with “modernism” and contrasted with post-modernism) we are becoming dimly aware of what has been happening since the dawn of our civilization and is always present in the processes of nature. But this does not necessarily mean that we are living in an apocalyptic epoch. Even Heidegger’s term, “the epoch of being-indeconstruction”, is inadequate because it is based on the notion of an epoch which can also be deconstructed. Although Derrida distrusts any thought of “epochs,” he connects deconstruction with the development of what we call Western civilization. According to him, our civilization is not only determined by ideas, values and technology but chiefly by the use of writing. Nowhere else we can see such a dominant tendency to simplify the original pictographic or ideographic script (Egyptian, Babylonian, Chinese, etc.) and to reduce it finally into phonetic (or phonological) alphabet. While a Chinese character reads almost as a text ( meaning “inn” can be identified and remembered according to its three components “roof”, “man, people,” and “hundred”), the sign of a phonetic or phonological script suggests the presence of a sound of speech or of a structural pattern of a phonological system (e.g., in Czech it is the oppositions between a diphthong and a single vowel or between a consonant and a “soft” consonant signified by the diacritic called “the hook”). In this way, writing is believed to represent speech. Inasmuch as the alphabetical writing is able to create an illusion of the presence of someone’s speech, speech becomes more important than writing. The latter can then be understood as an inferior activity, as a mere record of spoken language. On the other hand, speech is given the privilege of making the meaning immediately present, and readily accessible to the listeners. Thus, a hierarchical relationship between speech and writing, characteristic of our culture is established. Writing is a mere record or representation of speech, but speech represents the LOGOS, the supreme law of God (embodied in Christ as the Messiah). “When all things began, the Word already was. The Word dwelt with God, and what God was, the Word was. The Word, then, was with God at the beginning,

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and through him all things came to be,” says the well known text of the Gospel according to St. John (The New English Bible, John 1.1–3). This Platonic, essentialist understanding of language (“essentialist” means that language is derived from a transcendental, spiritual essence which is believed to exist beyond the sensible world) is called logocentrism. Logocentrism is the most pervasive pattern of our culture. It gives birth to metaphysics which defines itself authoritatively as the only discourse about the true and universal Being. The deconstruction of logocentrism of course does not imply that Derrida denies the existence of God, he only warns us to read cautiously any text that claims its right of access to God or to any other transcendental essence of our being (ideas, intelligence, absolute subject). These discourses are not based on the knowledge of the universal but on the exclusion, marginalization or debasement of particulars which do not suit their notions of the unity and wholeness. Christianity excludes not only the Jews and other “pagans,” but also animals and plants from salvation. Metaphysical philosophy rules out everything which is not in keeping with its notions of method or philosophical speculation. And even democracy is impossible without exclusion: in Athens, liberty was believed to exist for men only: it was denied to women and slaves. Today we are aware of the tremendous difficulties to establish democracy in the eastern part of Europe. In spite of these evident limitations of any universal notion of truth and goodness, logocentric discourse refuses to question the limits of any universal idea and to understand the whole as something incomplete and decentered. This also implies that logocentrism conceives meaning as something ultimately expressible, available to us in its fullness and finitude. But deconstruction shows that meaning is deferred in language, we can never pretend to have formulated anything in an exhaustive and final way. To sum it up, deconstruction shows logocentrism as the basic paradox of Western culture, the metaphysics of violence committed in the name of the freedom of spirit, of individuals and of society. The most important thing, however, is that these thoughts are never articulated in Derrida’s writing in this generalized, overtly ideological way. What Derrida aims at is to examine the way the meaning is generated in the text in specific words, metaphors and concepts. But the problem is that these units can never be treated separately, outside their context and apart from the relationship of one text to another. Because of this, meaning can never be reached, but we can follow its workings if we concentrate on specific lexical, grammatical or graphic units which vary from text to text.

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Thus, the Greek word pharmakon, a metaphor for writing in Plato’s Phaedrus, means both the good thing, “the recipe…for both memory and wisdom,” and – from the position of the divine authority, of one who does not need writing because he only speaks, orders and dictates – “a criminal thing, a poisoned present,” “a patricidal subversion”. (A Derrida Reader, p. 118) Having deconstructed this metaphor, Derrida does not stop, but shows that such an opposition is a part of a complex set of necessary structural laws concerning the relationship of “life and death, father and son, legitimate and bastard, soul and body, good and evil, inside and outside, sun and moon” (p. 121). These cannot be inscribed in one text only: the “bad implications” of the word pharmakon are more evident from other dialogues, for instance from Philebus and Protagoras. Derrida also refers his examination to the notion of “living memory” in Plato’s Republic which needs no signs and no aids for remembrance, and to the linguistic theories of Rousseau and Ferdinand de Saussure. This brings him to the notion of writing as a dangerous supplement, threatening the structure of the whole (the knowledge, the learning, the doctrine) it should complete by its inessentiality, its simultaneous presence and absence, and the ability to penetrate things which would do without it, as for instance our memory. It does not give us the “full life” but mere “monuments.” This reasoning leads Derrida to the thought (concluding this essay entitled “Plato’s Pharmacy”) that the Saussurean difference between the signifier and the signified is an attempt to arrest the free movement of the inessential writing. According to Derrida, this difference frames not only the Saussurean theory of language, but also Plato’s speculations about writing and philosophy as well as his effort to distinguish between good and bad approaches to knowledge, between philosophy and sophistics. Apart from the words like “pharmakon” or “supplement” Derridean deconstruction deals with many other cases when meaning in language becomes aporetic (from aporia, the Greek word for an unresolvable opposition). The structure of this opposition can be demonstrated by the Derridean neologism – or, more precisely, neographism – différance („diferänce” in Miroslav Petříček’s translation). The grapheme a (or ä in Czech) which does not have any equivalent in speech (the French word différence and the Czech term diference are pronounced identically whether they are spelled in the anomalous way or not) shows that writing is autonomous from speech, that it can defer the meaning by making its own differences which are not identical with the differences of the phonological system. In this context, Derridean “differance” means both “to differ,” to be distinguished from something else on the

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basis of a fixed opposition (as in structuralist phonology: “p vs. b” equals to “voiceless vs. voiced”) and to “defer” (postpone) meaning in time, in the play of signification (here the anomalous spelling), which of course does not allow to establish any fixed opposition that would allow us to conceive of a determined meaning. It is impossible to describe all the important features of deconstruction in this brief introduction. In fact, the way deconstruction deals with language and meaning does not allow it. In spite of this I have chosen at least three relationships demonstrating some typical deconstructive strategies. Language and Writing The problem of language, writes Derrida in the introduction to the first part of his major book, Of Grammatology (De la grammatologie, 1967), “has never been simply one problem among others.” But only nowadays it has “invaded, as such, the global horizon” of our civilization. We have encountered it as a problem of “the devaluation of the word ‘language’” and of “the inflation of the sign ‘language’”. Everything can now be called a language because of “a loose vocabulary, a cheap seduction, the passive yielding to fashion, the consciousness of avant-garde.” In other words, this use of the word and sign “language” is a symptom of a crisis, indicating that a “historico-metaphysical epoch must finally determine as language the totality of its problematic horizon” (Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Spivak, [Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins U.P., 1976], p. 6). One of the major symptoms of the crisis is Saussure’s project of linguistics (in his Course de la linguistique générale) which announces semiology (the science of signs) as a general science of language. But as signs are chosen arbitrarily (that is, unrelated to the things they signify) we should be able to imagine all kinds of real and possible “languages”, i.e. sign systems with their own rules (traffic signs, Morse code, figures in the classical ballet, etc.). In spite of this, Saussure privileges the linguistic model, by stressing its phonological foundations. In this way, all sign systems may be generated from one pattern based on the oppositions between “distinctive qualities” of the sounds of speech. The reason is simple: in this phonemic basis the “articulated unity of sound and sense” (Ibid., p. 29) becomes evident. This makes Saussure reduce writing, which cannot achieve this privileged unity, “to the rank of an instrument”. Derrida, on the other hand, suggests that “writing … comprehends language” (p. 7). What does it mean?

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While speech gives us the illusion of the presence of meaning, language, or la langue in the structuralist sense, gives us the illusion of a finite structure of relationships generating the meaning in the form of a system. This system is necessarily connected with either an individual, or a collective subject (a linguist designing it or a community of the users of language). It does not draw its certainties from itself but from the subjectivity and/or the empirical world to which it refers. But this world, which we understand as “the outside, ‘spatial’ and ‘objective’ exteriority” and “believe we know…as familiarity itself, would not appear without the grammé [the inessentiality of writing, M.P.], without difference as temporalization, without the nonpresence of the other inscribed within the meaning of the present, without the relation to death as the concrete structure of the living present (pp. 42–43). In other words, by becoming a trace of the spoken language, writing can make us aware of the temporality of our existence and the mediated nature of all empirical world. Moreover, it dislocates the meaning from the subject as the creator and the centre of linguistic system, and traces it on the side of THE OTHER (anything which is not the subject and his notions of the “objective” world). The meaning, thus, ceases to be a “position”, and becomes “an ex-position to something (someone?) other” (Peggy Kamuf, “Introduction,” in: A Derrida Reader, p. xv). This makes us acknowledge writing as the creative potentiality of language liberated from the dominant subject which still remains a trace, a sign of its own absence, of death. Philosophy and Literature Derrida’s work is predominantly philosophical. It develops from his early study of Sartre, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and especially of Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology. In one of his first works, Speech and Phenomena (La Voix et le phénomène, 1967), Derrida deconstructs the phenomenological relation between the sign and the presence of meaning. And Of Grammatology shows that the relationship between individual signs (which become the signifier and the signified) is more relevant than the relationship between signs and objects of the outside world. In fact, writing does not allow us to differentiate between the inside and the outside, between the subjective and the objective, between the instrument and the aim. This also makes impossible any hierarchical relationship between philosophy and other branches of human activity. Philosophy can no longer be a privileged discourse, comprehending reality by its own concepts. In Derrida’s writing,

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philosophy acquires “literary” features and “literature” can be read as philosophy. This raises the question of literariness, of the literary quality of any text, rather than the “essence” of literature. Text and Intertextuality Because of the “comprehensive” nature of writing (writing “comprehends” language), the notion of the text as a fixed and definite entity becomes exceedingly problematic. The meaning cannot be present within one text, it has to be searched for in intertextual relationships on the interfaces of most dissimilar texts. Even some writings of Derrida’s have this intertextual nature: his essay “Tympan” for instance prints a philosophical text dealing with the problem of limits and margins alongside with an autobiographical memoir of Michel Leiris (1948). Both texts do not have common themes but the strategy of Derrida’s discourse makes the autobiographical text intrude on the space “reserved” to the philosopher and his abstract problem. Thus, not only a different spacing (given by the graphic layout of the page), but also a different temporality, an intertextual rhythm of reading and writing becomes possible. Similarly, a deconstructive reading of a work of literature should open it to different texts and commentaries. What is the meaning of deconstruction for “critical enterprise”? In his book On Deconstruction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), Jonathan Culler gives the following hints which I attempt to paraphrase and sometimes to specify. 1. It makes us aware that some “details” of a text may be more important than any generalizations about its meaning. For instance: the strange apostrophe “thou master-mistress of my passion” in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 20 can make us reconsider the problem of homosexuality and thus also the general value-hierarchy derived from the notions of Platonic love and creation as the transcendence, or survival of the individual. 2. Deconstruction makes the critic “look for points of condensation” (Culler, On Deconstruction, p. 213), the words which may become links between widely different texts, sets of values or lines of argument. This has been demonstrated above in the part describing Derrida’s reading of Plato’s pharmakon. 3. The text can never be identified with a single privileged interpretation. The relationship between text and commentary is intertextual, and nonhierarchical. The commentary is neither inferior nor superior to the text and the meaning of the text cannot be posited even in a great number and variety

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of critical readings, because the text, according to Derrida, “constantly goes beyond this representation [within the experience of a reader or a writer] by the entire system of its resources and its own rules”. (De la grammatologie, p. 149, quoted in Culler, op. cit., p. 215) 4. The text is “parergonal” (in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement the Greek word parergon means an ornament which becomes important as a bearer of the structural pattern of the whole it embellishes.), it refers to its structure by means of its details where it “folds back on itself”. In this way, Prospero refers in the Tempest to theatrical illusion both as a “dream” and a faded “insubstantial pageant” but, on the other hand, personifies its force as “Destiny that hath to instrument this lower world”. These and other similar details allow us to read The Tempest as a reflection of dramatic representation and its power in Shakespeare’s time. 5. Many conflicts among interpretations are mere re-enactments of the conflicting tendencies in the text. This is certainly true about different versions of “romantic” and “satirical” readings of Byron’s work. 6. Deconstruction is important because it focuses on textual features commonly interpreted as marginal. The marginal elements, excluded in traditional interpretations, can often subvert the assumed identity and authority of the text. An instance of a marginal phenomenon is the relationship of the autobiography to the name of the author inscribed on the title page. This apparently unimportant thing can make us ask whether the autobiographical project itself cannot create a life independent of the actual life of the author and whether it is necessary to value it with respect to the author’s life. These questions appear in Paul de Man’s commentary on Wordsworth’s Essay upon Epitaphs. QUESTIONS 1. Can deconstruction BE? Can it be defined? How does Derrida deal with this problem in his Letter to a Japanese Friend? 2. Can deconstruction be applied to texts as a method, analysis or critique? 3. How does the use of writing affect “Western” civilization? Contrast phonetic alphabet and Chinese characters. Why is speech privileged in Western civilization? How do you understand the LOGOCENTRISM of Western cultures? 4. What characterizes a deconstructive approach to meaning? Give examples of this approach. How do you understand the “neographism” of DIFFERANCE?

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5. Why does writing COMPREHEND language? How does writing change the meaning of language? 6. Describe the deconstructive approach to the relation between philosophy and literature. 7. Discuss the deconstructive approach to meaning and intertextuality. 8. How has deconstruction transformed contemporary critical enterprise?

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Deconstruction in America

The beginnings of deconstruction in America can be traced back to Derrida’s lecture delivered at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, in 1966. The lecture entitled “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” was also the first text by Derrida translated into English. Having discussed the structural anthropology of a French ethnologist, Claude LéviStrauss, Derrida demonstrated the danger of ethnocentrism in any human science based on European scientific tradition, and asked what precautions can be made against it: …it is a question both of a critical relation to the language of the social sciences and a critical responsibility of the discourse itself. It is a question of explicitly and systematically posing the problem of the status of a discourse which borrows from a heritage the resources necessary for the deconstruction of that heritage itself. A problem of economy and strategy. (Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass [Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1967], p. 289) Here, deconstruction implies “the distance from the structuring or construction of discourses … that have uncritically taken over the legacy of Western metaphysics” (i.e., speculative philosophy, but also the general, logocentric, way of thinking about culture) (Peggy Kamuf, “Preface,” in: A Derrida Reader, p. viii). It does not mean the destruction of any legacy or heritage but taking a responsibility for it and rethinking its terms and strategies in the course of their redeployment. Interestingly enough, a similar approach is typical of Thomas Jefferson’s uses of the heritage of British Enlightenment and especially of the legal theory of John Locke. But the emphasis on responsibility in Derrida’s lecture does not exclude another feature of his theory: the play as a determination of the field of the 97

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humanities. This field cannot be thought as a whole: it resists totalization. Not because of its infinitude: but as a result of the absence of a centre which would control and arrest the play of substitutions.2 This “movement of play … is the movement of supplementarity. One cannot determine the centre and exhaust totalization because the sign which replaces the centre, which supplements it, taking the centre’s place in its absence – this sign… occurs as a surplus, as a supplement.” (Ibid., p. 289)3 Due to these conflicting aspects of Derrida’s influence – stressing, on the one hand, the responsibility for humanities, and, on the other hand, the pervasiveness of “the play of substitutions” establishing their discourse – the position of deconstruction at American universities has been rather problematic. On the one hand, Derrida himself complains that the American academics tried to “domesticate” deconstruction as a general “method for reading and for interpretation” (“Letter to a Japanese Friend”, in A Derrida Reader, p. 273), on the other hand, there have been attempts to get rid of deconstruction as an irresponsible game clashing with requirements of political correctness. The greatest threat to deconstruction was the discovery (in 1987) of the collaborationist journalism of Paul de Man published during the Nazi occupation of his native Belgium. De Man’s moral failure was overstated as the failure of deconstruction. One journalist called deconstruction “a vast amnesty project for the politics of collaboration during World War II” (Newsweek, Feb. 15, 1988, p. 65). The fact that deconstruction was adopted by many American critics does not imply that their theoretical positions were close to that of Derrida. In his book From the New Criticism to Deconstruction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) Art Berman has shown that “the Americans have been using structuralism and post-structuralism for purposes of their own; they have not been simply following European practices.” (p. 60) The basic distinction in European (mainly French) and American critical writing “is the concept of 2

The term “play of substitutions” means the appearance of changes and modifications of any system which occur at random, without having been prescribed in its structure, and do not allow a rigid classification according to some central principle or value. Take different versions of the Promethean myth. In some of them Prometheus is a trickster and a thief, in others he is a creator of mankind. This is difficult to explain by means of the structural opposition trickster vs. god because Prometheus never has a divine role, not even in Shelley’s famous dramatic poem. 3 This passage of Derrida’s lecture describes the function of words like mana or taboo which are supplied for something non-existent, like the direct contact with the sacred or the name of the totem deity, but have a number of supplementary meanings in numerous cultural contexts and activities.

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‘self,’ its properties and practices, especially as these involve disputes concerning freedom of will and determinism” (pp. 60–61). Historically, this distinction is due to the enormous impact of new criticism, a critical project immediately preceding deconstruction. New criticism liberated literary studies from the influence of positivist philology and history. It also established the pattern of interaction of literary criticism with other disciplines (their different purposes are respected but their methods are compared, adapted, employed by literary critics). This interaction was occurring in different areas where also the most important features of the American concept of the self can be located: in social uses of science and technology, existentialist notions of freedom and the conceptions of human thought and action in behaviourist psychology. One of the most important results of new criticism is the continuation and deepening of the rupture between culture on the one hand, and science and technology, on the other hand. Some opinions (voiced for instance by Leo Marx in his Machine in the Garden, 1964) maintained that the technological civilization was the major factor that had severed America from European culture and isolated it from the rest of the world. According to Leo Marx, the original component of the American dream (the image of America as the Garden of Eden) was problematized mainly under the influence of technology. And Victor Ferkiss (in The Future of Technological Civilization, 1974) showed that the influence of technology on American civilization had been so massive that freedom had ceased to be understood in the European way, namely as a possibility of choice, and was determined mainly with regard to the self, or the identity of the person making this choice. The self is the I defined in existential or psychological terms, often with respect to the use of technology (the French philosopher and psychiatrist Michel Foucault developed the theory of the “technologies of the self”, i.e., of different practices maintaining the integrity of the I). The fact that the integrity of the self may be given by the use of technology also accounts for the deployment of deconstruction as a method, legitimizing the individual critical readings. The relation between the self and technology is modified by the influence of existentialism which emphasizes a distrust of language as the major instrument of philosophical analysis. This tendency is amply demonstrated in the work of a German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In America, Frank Lentricchia pointed out the parallels between the existentialist intention to analyze the exceptional, authentic experience of an individual and the new critical effort to interpret the

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tension and ambiguity in the language of a poem: “What we call existentialism in philosophy is merely a thinner, generalized version of the unresolvable experimental tensions that are ‘dramatically entangled’ in the linguistic complexities of the organic poem” [i.e. the poem having the complex organic form] (Criticism and Social Change [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983], p. 234). We have learned that one of the important categories of American new criticism (in The Well Wrought Urn by Cleanth Brooks) is paradox based on irony which transforms the existentialist emphasis on the individual experience into the new critical regard of the “general human experience” without damaging the privileged position of the poet able to express the infinite complexity of this experience. Thus, in the new critical understanding, literature is made superior to all human activities and even to philosophy. Apart from being able to name the existential dilemmas as does philosophy, it can harmonize them due to its esthetic function. Consequently, deconstruction in America is aimed more against this ambition of new criticism to elevate literature above all discourses than against the logocentrism of philosophy or culture. Moreover, it is not so much concerned with the subject and subjectivity in literature (also because of the introspective, psychological interpretation of the self and its freedom, established by thinkers like Erich Fromm) but is directed mainly against the objective interpretations of the literary work of art we know from Cleanth Brooks, J.C. Ransom or Wellek and Warren. Another development that influenced new criticism and deconstruction was the debate about the subject and methodology of psychology. It was already shown how the early new critics in England (I.A. Richards) attempted to combine the empirical description of mental processes (in the manner of Lockean and Hartleyan associationist psychology) and the romantic notions of creativity and “organic imagination”. In America, this synthesis was thought impossible, which caused a division between two concepts of psychology: as the science of “mind” and as the science of “behaviour”. Under the dominant influence of behaviourist psychology, the approach to language began to change. Language was no longer understood as “the expression or the communication of an individual or collective mind” but started to be investigated as a specific behaviour. This accounts, among others, for John Searle’s theory of speech acts (performative theory of language). This theory was deconstructed in Derrida’s essay “Limited Inc. a b c” (1977) showing that language is inconceivable as a system of speech acts but that its performative character establishes intercultural and intertextual links which cannot be

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explained from the intentionality of communication. The new critical concept of intentionality in literature was discussed by Paul de Man who showed that the mistaken notion of disinterested, objective character of the literary work of art was a product of a new critical misunderstanding of the nature of intentionality. They were connecting it with the empirical or pragmatic understanding of intention as “following a practical aim” and did not know the philosophical (structural) notion of intention as intent, i.e. the unifying meaning of a structure. The wavering of new criticism between semantic analysis of literary form (focusing on ambiguity, irony, paradox, etc.) and romantic analogies between the structure of mind and the meaning of literary work became a theme of deconstructive approaches (e.g. of Paul de Man’s article “Form and Intent in American New Criticism”, 1971). The most important deconstructionists in America – the Yale School – have taught at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. In 1979 they published a volume of essays entitled Deconstruction and Criticism. The contributors to this volume were Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman and Joseph Hillis Miller. In the preface to the volume Geoffrey Hartman writes that the “set of problems” shared by the members of the group is centered around two issues: “the situation of criticism itself,” namely, whether criticism may claim a “maturer function” – “a function beyond the obviously academic or pedagogical”. The answer is that “criticism is a part of the world of letters” (not a mere service done to literature), and that it “has its own mixed, philosophical and literary, reflective and figural, strength”. (Deconstruction and Criticism [New York: Seabury Press, 1979], p. vii) The second issue referred to by all contributors is the question of “the importance – or force – of literature”. This implies both the problem of the operation of this force and of the role of theory. In this respect, the force of literature consists in “the priority of language to meaning”, i.e. there cannot be any meaning embodied in literature. Therefore also literary language foregrounds language itself as something not reducible to meaning: it opens as well as closes the disparity between symbol and idea, between written sign and assigned meaning. (p. viii) With respect to this assumption, deconstruction can be defined as a rigorous discipline of close reading. Where the new critics speak of the harmonizing

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and synthetic nature of metaphors and symbols the deconstructionists see unresolvable antinomies of language and its figures. In this way they are more rigorous than the new critics who often abandon ambiguities of language and style for facile generalizations about the privileged position of literature. In this way, deconstruction cannot be seen as a novel enterprise for it only restates “what literature has always revealed”. It deals with several differences that constitute the force of literature: the differences between sound and sense, metaphor and term (the word it has displaced), text and commentary. Especially the last mentioned difference is important for it locates meaning in the intertextual sphere, between the text and the commentary. Thus, Hartman shows, “the received text means more than it says (it is ‘allegorical’), or … it subverts all possible meanings by its ‘irony’” (p. viii). In other words commentary is no longer understood as a mere “explication” of the text, but as another text which has a – meaningful as well as subversive – relationship to the text it comments on. Consequently, criticism may be regarded as a genuine LITERARY enterprise. This is certainly true of the work of all Yale deconstructionists and especially of the essays of Paul de Man (1919–1983). While Derrida represents the aspect of deconstruction which can be characterized as the rewriting of philosophical rationalism, de Man’s later work is characterized by the understanding of deconstruction as an existential gesture, a sacrifice as well as renunciation. The reason is the acceptance of the ALIEN nature of language whose randomness (the irregular, sudden occurence of figures and semantic structures) is similar to death. Thus, the chief relevant feature of language is its temporality, its inability to posit any meaning. However, by coming to terms with the randomness and temporality of language we can understand the relationship between the act (speech act or any other human action) and its interpretation which is of a similar nature as that between the poem and its reading. Nothing can supplant the reading, no imposition of preconceived meaning. Reading is the process which exposes us to the force of the text which can take on the face of someone absent or dead (this is called prosopopeia) and, at the same time, makes us aware of the “defacement” or “disfiguration” of the author. As a result, a meaningful correlation between life and death is established which changes our notions of responsibility and interpretation of texts as acts.

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A related interest of de Man’s is the deconstruction of a symbolic structure of literary work. While the new critics believed that thanks to its symbolic and symbolizing function the language could transcend its ambiguities (the symbol of the phoenix in Cleanth Brooks’ interpretation of Donne’s “Canonization”) and bear a true message about human nature, de Man tried to show that these opinions are fictions establishing aesthetic ideologies which, ultimately, are protective gestures of the academic environment against the increasing alienation of traditional humanistic values and ideals. These ideals created first during the Renaissance and emphasized by the early romantics (Rousseau, Hölderlin, Schiller, Novalis, Wordsworth) did not result from historical development but from rhetorical strategies of individual thinkers whose aim was to create “a mystified ontology of meaning and value” (i.e., to derive meaning and value in literature from invented, non-existent, yet centrally important grounds, like the “the cultivation of human senses,” “the organic community,” etc.). Most of de Man’s essays were published in three books: Blindness and Insight (1971; showing that the new critical emphasis on the transparence of form and on the necessity to penetrate into “deeper” layers of a text is a form of “blindness” to the complex and subtle differences of meaning in the rhetorical figures on the surface, rather than any “insight” – zření in Czech – of higher, transcendent meaning), Allegories of Reading (1979; showing that the “allegorical” approach to the text liberating it from all expectations that a “deeper” meaning will be revealed is more reliable than any symbolical reading looking for eternal truths “translucent” in the text) and the posthumously published Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984; focusing on the figurative meaning of romantic poetry, its religious and philosophical implications and on the questions of “aesthetic formalization” of the text as well as human behaviour). Another of the Yale critics, Joseph Hillis Miller, is believed to have invented the term “post-structuralism”. In his article on the poetry of Wallace Stevens (“Stevens’ Rock and the Cure of Criticism”) he explained the difference between the canny and uncanny (that is, “clear” or “logical” and “unclear”, “incomprehensible”) critics. This difference he derived from Socrates’ references to the illogical nature of the language of dramatic poets. While the “canny” critic is characterized by the Socratic faith in the ability of reason to penetrate the utmost depths of human being, the “uncanny” usually conducts the apparently logical reflections to absurd, paradoxical, aporetic

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ends. An interesting fact is that both types of critics have developed from the same tradition: for instance the French structuralist Gérard Genette and Jacques Derrida start from the French explication de texte. But they are not simple antipodes: the uncanny feel compelled by the canny to rethink the logical, structural relationships and the canny may be dissuaded by the uncanny from their comfortable dogmatic faith in human reason. The most important work by Miller is Fiction and Repetition (1982), a series of interpretations of seven English novels, including, for instance George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Miller’s book shows that “rhetorical fictions” cannot be confused with realities, and therefore the existence of any text is the effect of the difference between its readings in various, especially the ontological and semiotic, keys. While in the former the text seems to build a kind of relation to reality and to the time of its origin, in the latter it falls back on itself and subverts its own foundations. In his definition of the text as a “self-subverting heterogeneity” Miller approaches Derridean discussion of meaning as differance. In contrast to Derrida’s “writing” or “differance,” to de Man’s “temporality” or “rhetoric”, Harold Bloom’s vocabulary is characterized by apparently “nondeconstructive” words like individual will, the unconscious or misreading. For Bloom subjectivity does not seem to be the product of language, he thinks it the origin of the text. Text originates spontaneously from the will and unconscious impulses of the author which clash with those of other, dead or living writers. Feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar have noticed that Bloom’s theory of the subject as the origin of meaning has explicit sexual (and sexist) connotations: the struggle of the poet with the “father” about the possession of the Muse – Poetry. But apart from these psychological connotations, Bloom’s work, represented by his book A Map of Misreading (1975), also contains other moments placing the author’s position closer to de Man and his argument against the new critics. Bloom shows that close reading can lead only to specific, individual formulations of a reader’s experience. All these are “misreadings,” disinterpretations, of the text. While the “strong” misreadings may contribute to the reader’s self-knowledge, by helping her to find her own subjectivity (this pattern is analogous to Bloom’s interpretation of the origin of the text from the conflict of individual wills) the “weak” misreadings are mere random impositions of the meaning on the text. In contrast to Bloom’s emphasis on willfulness of writing and reading, Geoffrey Hartman thinks of the recuperative power of the critical enterprise. In his book Saving the Text (1981) he shows that deconstruction can make us

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aware of the existence of text as WORDS that do not have a simple, “assimilable” meaning. Saving the text then implies saving its words, namely all their potentialities to create meaning, including the imagined sound and rhythm. “To call a text literary,” says Hartman, is to trust that it will make sense eventually, even though its quality of reference may be complex, disturbed, unclear. It is a way of ‘saving the phenomena’ of words that are out of the ordinary or bordering the nonsensical – that have no stabilized reference.” (Saving the Text [Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins U.P., 1981], p. xxi). Though Hartman’s statement sounds like an expression of a new critical or hermeneutic approach, it is closely connected to the deconstructive notions of writing as the deferral of meaning and language as a random, alienated event because “writing destabilizes words … it makes us aware of their alien frame of reference … and of the active power of forgetfulness … which, in turn, enables us to write.” At this point Hartman finds the “talking about writing as such or about language as such too abstract and focuses on the “affective power of voice,” on “the relation of particular words to that resonating field we call the psyche” and to understanding the pathos or power of literature which consists in the “wound in the word”. QUESTIONS 1. What problems are raised by deconstruction according to Derrida’s lecture Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of Human Sciences? 2. Does deconstruction aim at a destruction of any legacy or heritage? 3. What does decontruction emphasize instead of continuity and wholeness of tradition (or any other system in society or social sciences)? How can it combine responsibility and play? 4. What contradictory features have marked American attitude to deconstruction? 5. What cultural factors have influenced the fate of deconstruction in America? 6. Can language be investigated as a system of speech acts? 7. Explain the relationship of criticism to literature. How do you understand the FORCE of literature? 8. Comment on the relationship of deconstruction to CLOSE READING. 9. Why does de Man relate RANDOMNESS and TEMPORALITY of language? Is, according to de Man, interpretation possible? Can we read literary work symbolically? Can we read “deeply” with an

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INSIGHT into a literary work? Why does de Man combine BLINDNESS and INSIGHT? 10. What is the major feature of AESTHETIC IDEOLOGIES? 11. What is text according to Joseph Hillis Miller? 12. How does literary text originate according to Harold Bloom? Explain Bloom’s use of MISREADING. 13. Does Hartman’s phrase “saving the text” imply the return to logocentrism? What establishes the literariness of a text?

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New Historicism

New Historicism is one of the most significant developments in American humanities after deconstruction. In Britain, a similar trend is called cultural materialism. It differs from new historicism by its overtly ideological nature (asserting the leftist stance of some British academics) which negatively influences treatments of particular subjects. After the appearance of new historicism in the late seventies and early eighties it became clear that it might replace deconstruction, for it had not only absorbed the deconstructive notion of writing (by tracing history in the differences of various texts which were no longer taken as “sources” giving access to historical facts but as literary productions), but also placed the deconstructive reading of a text in a broader context of various humanities and social sciences: especially anthropology, art history, sociology, law studies, medicine, psychology and, of course, historiography. Besides deconstruction, whose influence will be discussed later in greater detail, new historicism is based on the French tradition of la nouvelle histoire founded by the School of the Annales. Annales is an abbreviated title of a French journal founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch in 1929. It became a forum for four generations of scholars who introduced important methodological and structural changes into historical studies. First and foremost, they refused the privileged position of one branch of historical studies (political history in the West and socio-economic history in the East) and developed a structural interpretation of history as a set of relationships between diverse trends and events (political, economic, demographic, technological, cultural, climatic, environmental and others). According to Fernand Braudel, the representative of the second generation of the school, all these incongruous developments take place (and are structured) in three temporal levels: the longue durée or long term (dominant in the geological, biological and climatic changes), the conjoncture or medium term (typical of social changes), and the event (including politics and individual 107

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lives). Thus, a pluralistic view of history was developed, seeing it no longer as a string of contiguous events connected by relationships of cause and effect but as a number of various sets of relationships between human activities and changes in nature at different time levels. Another important feature of the School of the Annales was that individual events and social developments were studied as concrete phenomena, the interrelationships between, say, socio-economic issues like “class,” “production,” “employment,” demographic features like “age,” “population density,” and cultural aspects like “gender,” “confraternity,” “professionalism” and others. An important difference between the structural approach of the School of the Annales and structuralist models consists in the fact that the latter had been derived from the simplest empirical data (phonetic setup of a language) which were organized on the basis of theoretical, functional notions (e.g., the logical concept of binary oppositions, the idea of distinctive features, etc.). On the other hand, the structural analysis of the Annales school had removed the barrier between theoretical approaches to history (philosophy of history) and interpretations of “historical facts” (heuristics). In the early seventies this division became disputed also from a different position – that of the philosophy of history. In Metahistory (1973), Hayden White analyzed the relationships between the works of four great historians of the nineteenth century (Jules Michelet, Otto von Ranke, Alexis de Tocqueville and Jacob Burkhardt) and the major philosophical approaches to history (in Hegel’s Philosophy of History, Marx’s Capital, and Nietzsche’s and Croce’s reflections on history). Although these historians were privileging certain methods of analysis and interpretation of historical facts, and the philosophers claimed to have grasped the essential laws of historical development, the common feature of their works is not the true image of historical reality. Rather, their resemblances are due to common literary features, the use of the same rhetorical figures, plots, and narrative strategies. None of these literary features (e.g., the use of metaphoric or synecdochic figures, the narrative in novelistic form, the pattern of tragic conflict) can be privileged as the only “method” suitable for the representation of “historical reality“. And the same thing is true about the philosophical approaches to history: those privileging a certain method (Hegel’s dialectics, Marx’s analysis of value) as well as those refusing the “scientific” character of history (Nietzsche and Croce) owe their persuasiveness largely to the figurative structure of language. This implies that our thinking in general, and historical studies in particular, are determined by the patterns of language and especially by four

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major rhetorical figures: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony. “Metahistory,” then, does not point to any “higher truth” which is “beyond history.” It shows that the “tropes,” or “tropics,” i.e., the figurative nature of discourse are more determining for historical writing than the aim to learn the “true nature” of historical events. In his next book Tropics of Discourse (1978) White comments on the difference traditionally made between history and historicism. According to a conservative philosopher and historian Karl Raimund Popper, the historian should neither theorize nor speculate about the facts but should try to record history by a simple narration of events. The “historicist,” however, analyzes instead of narrates, using history for the interpretation of contemporary problems, and even for the prediction of future developments. In his comments on Popper’s theory, White shows that such a distinction obscures rather than clarifies the nature of historical writing. Both the historian and the “historicist” shape their materials “in response to the imperatives of the narrative discourse … These imperatives are rhetorical in nature.” (Hayden White, The Tropics of Discourse [Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins U.P., 1978], p. 102) Consequently, there is no substantial difference between the historian and the historicist because the common framework of their thought is not a method or historical fact, but language. White’s emphasis on rhetorical and poetical figures used in historical discourses shows that he anticipates the new-historical attention to the literariness of history. This implies that the sources should not be regarded as transparent “windows through which we look at reality” but chiefly as texts having their specific literary features and qualities. But it also means that historians themselves should be more conscious of the literary nature of their writing, of their use of figures, plot developments, of the way they combine tales, build up conflicts, etc. Though White prefigures the new-historical approach to texts, he cannot yet be called a new historicist. New Historicism problematizes traditional relationships between history, historiography and literature. No longer concentrated on history as the only object of research and the aim of our knowledge, it focuses our attention on the relations between historical and literary texts. These “texts” may not be just historical sources or literary works. They are texts of signs, including material objects, artefacts, institutions and their statutes of regulations, sets of practices like carnival rituals or ways of healing in primitive tribes and many others. In terms of scope, these texts

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may include anecdotes and individual objects or actions, documents, ensembles of objects, or practices such as sets of actions, and even whole archives, museums, and various social, or religious, institutions. New historicism acknowledges Michel Foucault’s notion of text which significantly differs from structuralist ideas. According to this French historian, psychiatrist and philosopher, each text is a mere instance of a DISCOURSE which produces authority and shapes our perceptions of reality both by individual REPRESENTATIONS (the signs standing for our ideas and experiences in social life) and by their ORDER (i.e., the general historically and culturally conditioned structure of representations privileging either relationships between words and things – the principle of resemblance, or mutual relationhips between words or other signs – the principle of similitude). This means that each text is more than an object, being a part of a DISCURSIVE PRACTICE, that is, of the operation of some POWER within a discourse and/or by its means. Most historical documents are not innocent texts, they were written with a specific purpose (e.g., to accuse or to defend) and even their further interpretations are not innocent because they serve various ideologies and beliefs of their authors. In this way, Foucault’s approach to texts problematizes the notion of the author. The author’s subjectivity does not inaugurate his freedom and independence. Rather it shows its dependence on the power operating in discourses which shape his texts. At the same time, the text, as a discursive field, is the only place where the author can articulate his subjectivity. Last but not least, Foucault’s (and the new-historical) notion of the text problematizes our ideas of history. Instead of one History (or master narrative), there are only individual REPRESENTATIONS (texts of signs), DISCOURSES (representations organized according to an order), and DISCURSIVE PRACTICES (discourses which become part of the operation of power for they create strategic distributions of power, e.g. the discourse of police as a way of improving the welfare of citizens leads to the creation of police forces, police academies). Therefore we can speak not only about the historicity of literature and the literariness of history, but about the non-existence of truly “reliable” sources and the impossibility to arrive at the only “correct” interpretation of history. This, however, does not imply the disappearance of history from the new-historical writing. “I began with the desire to speak with the dead.” wrote Stephen Greenblatt, the founder of New Historicism, in his book Shakespearean Negotiations

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(1988). These words announce a new approach to the study of humanities which refuses to accept the incorporeal objectivity of the text or the language as its only field. In his conclusions Greenblatt goes beyond both Hayden White and Foucault. Already in Foucault’s study of texts as discursive practices the difference between texts and bodies starts to disappear. For instance, Foucault’s book Discipline and Punish (Surveiller et punir, 1975) deals with the history of the modern prison. Foucault describes how “technologies of power,” whether they be architectonic (the design of jails), ritualistic or procedural (executions, transports of convicts) and legislative (regulations, prison order), construct the modern prisoner as a “docile body” and a “delinquent.” Instead of correction and re-integration, the prisoner is more and more excluded from ordinary life through these “technologies.” Complemetary to this development, according to Foucault, is a structural transformation of society, a change into a “carceral state”. In contrast to Foucault who, in his treatment of bodies, still stresses the role of impersonal structures (“carceral state”), the new historicists, such as Greenblatt, focus on individual bodies (and texts) and specific details. In such a context, research projects often begin with passion, sympathy, wonder, or horror. They strive to establish contact with someone whose body no longer exists and whose voice cannot be heard. In doing so, they show how difficult are language and text as the media of communication across history. This difficulty is expressed in an important new-historical term: negotiation(s) (which can be translated into Czech both as vyjednávání and as transakce). The text and the language are means of negotiations understood as chief market activities. Thanks to them the circulation of values and social energies can take place. Due to this circulation we cannot distinguish between the exchange value and the value of objects and work. In spite of this apparently economic model, new historicism, according to Greenblatt, aims at a kind of cultural poetics. This cultural poetics attempts to avoid the limitations of two major THEORETICAL approaches to history – Marxism and deconstruction. While a contemporary Marxist (Fredric Jameson in his book entitled The Political Unconscious) declares that capitalism is responsible for the gap between the political and the aesthetic, social and psychological, public and private, the individual and the society, for the division whose existence

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alienates and deforms us, Jean-Francois Lyotard, a leading French poststructuralist, claims that the pernicious effect of capitalism is the exact opposite. Instead of dividing, segmenting, creating gaps, capital unites. Its aim is to establish a single language and a homogenous economic system and “to strike from the history and from the map entire worlds of names” (J.F.Lyotard, “Judiciousness in Dispute, or, Kant after Marx,” in Murray Krieger, ed., The Aims of Representation, [New York: Routledge, 1987], p. 55) which prove to be incompatible with its global network. How can we negotiate between these oppositions? Is our relationship to beauty and art influenced by the dividing, alienating, or the integrating, globalizing power of capitalism? We cannot deal with this antinomy without realizing the poverty of theory in both approaches. In both, historical references, facts and their interpretations are understood as mere ornaments of theoretical discourse. Neither of the theories can deal with the oppositions of capitalism because they are themselves formulated in terms of oppositions. Marxism is searching for the signs of repressed class antagonisms and post-structuralism deconstructs the “spurious certainties of logocentrism”. In other words, theory is always in search “for the obstacle that blocks the realization of its eschatological vision” (Stephen Greenblatt, “Towards a Poetics of Culture,” in H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism [New York and London: Routledge, 1989], p. 5). To overcome this eschatological tendency of theories we have to realize that in capitalism, both tendencies (toward differentiation and integration) are concurrent. The real power of capitalism consists in oscillation between these two extremes. If the originally separate tendencies (towards a multitude of incongruous discourses and towards a monological unification of all discourses) are seen as parts of a single process, we can speak of circulation. This term may remind us of Derrida’s deconstruction. However, in new historicism it refers more to political power than to any theoretical notion. For instance, circulation may exist between some presidential speeches of Ronald Reagan in which he at crucial moments quoted (as if unaware) lines from his own popular films, and the world of American movies and television. In this way, American political discourse is linked with the private desires of a great number of Americans, “the fantasies we daily consume in televison or in the movies, the entertainments we characteristically make and take”. (Ibid., p. 8) It is this discursive situation, made up of our private fantasies as well as of the workings of state machine, that constitutes the field of the new cultural

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poetics. In this new setup both historical (sociological, economic, etc.) and aesthetic terminology must be modified. The modification, however, cannot be made outside the text, it must be contained in the information of the newhistorical text. In contrast to traditional historicism, new historicism does not believe in the transparence of signs. Due to this fact not even aesthetics can become a discipline dealing with “universal” values. “Rather the work of art is itself the product of a set of manipulations, some of them our own (most striking in the case of works that were not originally conceived as “art” at all but rather as something else – votive objects, propaganda, prayers, and so on).” (Ibid. p. 12) These manipulations are the negotiations “between a creator or class of creators, equipped with a complex, communally shared repertoire of conventions, and the institutions and practices of society”. (p. 12) The condition of these negotiations is not the creation of the work of art. Rather the artist creates a CURRENCY valid in “mutually profitable” EXCHANGE. Every artist and every historian is a part of a market whether he likes it or not. And if he does not introduce his own currency, his product will be introduced by someone else, at a different rate. In this understanding of the relationship of art to other human activities new historicism resembles some trends in deconstruction. But while the latter definitely prefers the problematic relationship of the Western culture to language, new historicism has chosen the interdependence of use and exchange value for its main point of departure. This also became the cause of many attacks against New Historicism. The deconstructionists (J. Hillis Miller) criticized the new historicists for their forgetfulness of a general principle that language itself is a product of history, culture, politics, etc., and that all events in these areas take place in language and acquire the form of a text. But new historicism can break this hegemony of language and text because it shows the difficulties of grasping the relations between the text and the body/the world: One of the principal achievements of post-structuralism has been to problematize the distinction between literary and non-literary texts, to challenge the stable difference between the fictive and the actual…If there is any value to what has become known as “new historicism”, it must be here, in an intensified willingness to read all of the textual traces of the past with the attention traditionally conferred only on literary texts…Our belief in language’s capacity for reference is part of

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our contract with the world; the contract may be playfully suspended, twisted into a lie, or broken altogether, but no abrogation is without consequences, and there are circumstances where the abrogation is unacceptable. The existence or absence of a real world, real body, real pain, makes a difference…any history and any textual interpretation worth doing will have to speak to this difference. (Stephen Greenblatt, “The Silence of the Criminal,” Litteraria Pragensia 1 [1991], pp. 59–60) In other words, new historicism seems to be a kind of response to American forms of deconstruction which has concentrated exclusively on the problems of text and language. New historicism respects the deconstructive notion of the universal scope of “the problem of language” but it refuses to accept the opinion that this problem is a closure (a universal limit) of our world. In the quoted article “The Silence of the Criminal”, Greenblatt points out that this silence is hardly identical with the deconstructive silence of the text. He also demonstrates, drawing on Elaine Scarry’s book Bodies in Pain (1988), that this closure, this universal limit may become the isolation of an individual due to her own pain and suffering. What are the major principles of the new historicist approach to the text? Stephen Greenblatt has summed them up in his “Introduction” to a collaborative volume entitled New World Encounters ([Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992], pp.xvi–xvii): 1. Interdisciplinarity. The readings bring together “the very different enterprises” of humanities and social sciences, e.g., history, ethnography, and literary criticism. 2. Textual opacity. No text is a window into reality; it is a part of a discursive practice, it does some work. 3. Textual complexity. No text is monolithic and monothematic. Rather, it is a field of potentially or sometimes overtly competing discourses, “systems that are perilously close to explosion or collapse”. 4. Textual otherness. “The voices of the other do not reach us in a pure, uncontaminated form,” we can hardly establish direct conversation with the dead. But we can find other meanings than those apparent from the text if we search for signals of vanished experiences of individuals. Most of them are not recorded but the strongest often appear: among them the expressions of wonder and marvel.

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5. Questioning the textual authority. Showing that the expected centre around which the text is built may not hold, that the text often proclaims to have a control (or even power) over something but it loses control over itself. QUESTIONS 1. Why did new historicism partially replace deconstruction in late 1980s? How did it change the context of deconstructive writing? 2. How does the New Historicism differ from “la nouvelle histoire”? Illustrate the methods of the latter. What is the meaning of the school of the Annales for the development of historiography? 3. What is the determining feature of historical writing according to Hayden White? Explain his notion of METAHISTORY. What is the difference between historiography and historicism? Compare Karl Popper’s and Hayden White’s interpretations. 4. Describe Foucault’s – and new historical – notion of text. Why cannot we separate text and power? Why is the notion of the author problematized by these approaches? What consequence do these changes have for our understanding of history and of its relationship to literature? 5. How does the New Historicism go beyond Hayden White and Foucault? 6. Explain the terms NEGOTIATION, CIRCULATION, CULTURAL POETICS. Why can the work of art be described as “a set of manipulations”? 7. Comment on the meaning of silence in a deconstructive and new historicist text. 8. Describe the main features of new historicist approach to texts.

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Feminist and Psychoanalytic Criticism

The link made between the two trends in the title is by no means arbitrary. In both fields, relations between natural and cultural aspects of sexuality are examined and redefined, which changes our perception of individuals and their identities, societies and their histories, arts and their techniques. Psychoanalysis has a crucial meaning for feminist theories because it is “one of the few places in our culture where it is recognised that most women do not painlessly slip into their roles as women”. (Jacqueline Rose, Sexuality and the Field of Vision [London: Routledge, 1986], p. 91) But the same, as Coppélia Kahn and Thomas Healy show, can be said of men. (Coppélia Kahn, “The Absent Mother in King Lear,” in Rewriting the Renaissance, Margaret Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan and Nancy J. Vickers, eds. [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986], pp. 33–49; Thomas Healy, New Latitudes [London: Edward Arnold, 1992], p. 148). Both feminism and psychoanalysis make us aware of the conventional and repressive nature of many differences between “male” and “female” roles and identities. As these differences are studied in literary or other (semiotically defined) texts, or in what deconstruction calls writing, they often lose their feminist specificity. According to Mary Jacobus, those feminist critics who ask about “the ways women are constructed in the texts” and search for a specific “female literary tradition” have to admit that all attempts to inscribe female difference within writing are a matter of inscribing women within fictions of one kind or another…and hence, that what is at stake for both women writing and writing about women is the rewriting of these fictions – the work of revision which makes “the difference of view” a question rather than an answer, and a question to be asked simply not of women, but of writing too. (Mary Jacobus, “The Difference of View,” quoted in Healy, op. cit., p. 147, my emphasis) 116

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This implies that feminist criticism, unless confined by its own ideological impositions (regarding itself as an instrument of women’s liberation from the patriarchal yoke), tends to develop towards deconstructive, psychoanalytical, cultural historical and other readings. Thus, the difference in writing may become the condition for understanding “the difference of view”. This marks the way from feminism towards gender studies which do not privilege any specific female, male, lesbian, gay, etc., approach to writing and reading. In gender studies, as well as in feminism, psychoanalysis is important for our understanding the very notion of gender. “Implications of gender,” says Healy, provide important insights into how individuals contend with the social forces which try to define them in ways incompatible with their unconscious. (Healy, op. cit., p. 149) In other words, psychoanalytic criticism gives another dimension to both the feminist and the deconstructive (or new historicist) enterprises. It accentuates the unconscious as a crucially important space between the text and the body (or the world) as well as between the natural and culturally constructed forms of sexuality. The following notes can provide just a very brief and considerably selective introduction into both fields. Their scope and focus can be disputed. Therefore, at least a mention must be made of the most important omissions. The section on feminism does not at all describe its historical development both as a social movement and as a branch of interdisciplinary studies. Similarly, the part dealing with psychoanalysis does not discuss the history of the discipline. Theories based on C.G. Jung’s notions of “collective unconscious” and “archetype” are mentioned in the chapter on “Structuralism” (in the passage on Frye’s archetypal criticism). And the work of Sigmund Freud is discussed only when it refers to contemporary feminist theory or to a more advanced psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan. FEMINIST CRITICISM The fundamental notion of this interdisciplinary study – gender – is a culturally constructed sexual identity: “that set of arrangements by which the raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human social intervention.” (Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political

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Economy’ of Sex,” in R.R. Reiter, ed., Toward an Anthropology of Women [New York: 1975], p. 165). This means that the specific status of women in any civilization is given by social and cultural factors rather than by mere biological differences. “One is not born but rather becomes a woman…it is civilization as a whole that produces this creature,” wrote the French feminist, Simone de Beauvoir, in her pioneering book entitled The Second Sex (trans. H.M. Parshley [New York: 1952], p. 301). Though all cultures and civilizations claim to be based on universal values, feminist critics argue that this universality (manifested in notions like the Man, mankind, humanism, virtue, vice, divine law, etc.) is a mere expression of male domination. To deconstruct this ideological cover-up of sexual and social repression is the main objective of many feminist critics. However many feminist projects aim beyond a mere ideological critique of the existing social order. By deconstructing the false assumptions of gender (for instance that women are not only “the fair sex” but also “the second sex”, that they are more “emotional” while men are rather “rational”, that they are “weaker” than men, both psychically and bodily, that they are “fragile,” “dependent on men,” etc.) women start to search for their own sexual AND cultural identity, rejecting the symbolical roles and subject positions created for them by male authority. They find that the twin images of woman, as on the one hand, the sexual property of men and, on the other, the chaste mothers of their children … [are] the means whereby men ensure both the sanctity and the inheritance of their families and their extrafamilial sexual pleasure. (Michele Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today [London: 1980], p. 45) The discovery that the conventional articulations of the difference between men and women are instruments of male domination leads feminist critics to appreciate the deconstructive notion of writing as “making the difference”. The search for identity often takes place in writing and critical reading rather than in the practices of everyday life. It includes both the deconstruction of “dominant male patterns of thought and social practice” and the reconstruction of the “female experience previously hidden or overlooked”. (Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn, eds., Making a Difference. Feminist Literary Criticism [London and New York: Methuen, 1985], p. 6).

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The important points of departure for feminist critical readings are, for instance, anthropological theories of kinship and traditional notions of the nature – culture relationship. According to the former, elaborated in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Structures of Kinship (1969), the origins of any social order are to be searched for in the relations of kinship based on the incest taboo and exogamy. These relations divide men and women into two distinct groups: those who are permitted to marry between themselves and those who cannot. This distinction is made and maintained by patriarchal authority which also forces women to accept a status of “the gifts which men exchange between each other” (Greene and Kahn, op. cit., p. 7). In this way, “prestige structures” start to determine sex – gender relations: it is men who marry women and not vice versa. Women become symbols of male prestige and power. Thus, the biological difference between the sexes is articulated in social and cultural terms which, as Gayle Rubin shows, has a great impact on female psychology. The original sign of sexual difference, the penis, is transformed into the phallus – “symbol of male power which determines all order and meaning” (Ibid., p. 8; phallic symbolism was recently explained by Jacques Lacan). In the process of the gift exchange which establishes patriarchal marriage women lose their own sexual identity while being identified with symbols or ornaments of male power. Therefore marriage starts to be regarded as “an expression of the transmission of male dominance which passes through women and settles upon men”. (Rubin, op. cit., p. 192). The patriarchal power expressed by phallic symbolism and the paradigms of gift and exchange forces women to adopt the behaviour and emotional life based on heterosexuality (which stresses the differences between men and women and establishes the hierarchy of power: men are stronger, more resistant, more rational, more determined, more courageous, more principled, etc., than women). In the process women forget their own sexual identity. Thus, the formation of gender in patriarchal society does not allow women to develop their own self-awareness, to speak or write from a distinct subject-position. Catherine Belsey describes the effects of this situation in sixteenth and seventeenth century society and literature: In the family as in the state women had no single, unified, fixed position from which to speak. Possessed of immortal souls and of eminently visible bodies, parents and mistresses but also wives, they were only inconsistently identified as subjects in the discourses about them which circulated predominantly among men. In consequence, during the

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sixteenth century and much of the seventeenth the speech attributed to women themselves tended to be radically discontinuous, inaudible or scandalous. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy, [London and New York: Routledge, 1985], p. 160) In this way, Belsey can explain for instance the inconsistency of Vittoria’s speeches in Webster’s tragedy The White Devil. The search for identity also becomes an important theme of many women’s autobiographical writing. The journals of Anais Nin start in a deep frustration of the author who thinks she has failed as mother when her child was stillborn. Subsequently she tries to forget herself in her efforts to achieve a mystical union with God. Later she finds the study of psychoanalysis and the help to the patients to be the way to her independence and identity. And finally she comes to understand that the process of writing and editing in which she shapes and re-shapes her different memories, experiences and attempts at self-identification gives her a new identity based on the difference between her body (experience) and the text. Other feminist approaches try to define the place of woman as a mediator between nature and culture. Women prepare food, educate (socialize) small children, keep things clean, which means that they support the culture as a field of male domination. But this definition is problematic because “neither the concept of nature nor that of culture is ‘given’” (Carol P. MacCormack, “Nature, Culture and Gender: A Critique,” in Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, eds., Nature, Culture and Gender [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980], p. 6). Our notions of nature are shaped by various “cultural myths” (romantic “return to nature,” classicist “la belle nature”) which do not allow women to establish their position as mediators between culture and its Other. Reading and writing remains means by which women may subvert traditional differences created by men. In literary studies, this means both “revising the traditional paradigm and restoring the female perspective”. (Judith Kegan Gardiner, et al., “An Interchange on Feminist Criticism: On ‘Dancing through the Minefield,’” Feminist Studies, 8 [1982], p. 629). This is also the purpose of the extensive project of literary studies focusing on women writer and called gynocriticism. The project launched by Elaine Showalter in her article “Towards a Feminist Poetic” (in Mary Jacobus, ed., Women Writing and Writing about Women [New York, 1979]) is a “historically grounded inquiry which probes the ideological assumptions of literary

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phenomena … [including] the images and stereotypes of women in literature, the omissions and misconceptions about women in criticism, and the fissures in male-constructed literary history”. (Showalter, op. cit., p. 25) But the exclusive study of “female literary tradition” leads only to new restrictions, canons and dogmas. The historical approach is very easily ideologized and liable to repeat the errors of Marxist sociology and aesthetics. Therefore many feminists warn against the dangers of gynocriticism in absolutizing the female identity and in looking at texts as transparent windows through which the “female experience” can be viewed. The only remaining way envisaged by Gayle Greene and Coppélia Kahn (op. cit., p. 26) is the deconstructive reading of texts which can undo and displace the concepts of male criticism. This reading includes also “listening for the silences, absences, the unspoken, the encoded” and “breaking the silences” (Adrienne Rich, “Taking Women Students Seriously,” in On Lies, Silence, and Secrets. Selected Prose 1966–1978 [New York: 1979], p. 245). Thus, feminist criticism “can gain from the practice that does not privilege the author’s intentions” (Roland Barthes, Image – Music – Text, trans. Stephen Heath, London 1977) and reveal the connection between authorship and patriarchal authority. Apart from the attempts of Elaine Showalter to establish a strong, homogenous, centralized discipline of gynocriticism, most feminist criticism is pluralistic and diversified. Sidney Janet Kaplan has defined several important trends in American and British women studies. One of the oldest is the search of a specific female experience in reading and imagination (Judith Fetterley, The Resisting Reader, 1978; Patricia Spacks, The Female Imagination, 1975; Arlyn Diamond and Lee Edwards, ed., The Authority of Experience, 1977; Annis Pratt, Archetypal Patterns in Women’s Fiction, 1981; Sidney Janet Kaplan, The Feminine Consciousness in the Modern British Novel, 1975). Another is the rediscovery of lost women writers (Charlotte Lennox, Felicia Hemans, Zora Neale Hurston, Paule Marshall, Kate Chopin). This rediscovery poses the question of canon in teaching and anthologizing literature. Are feminist critics just breaking old canons created by men or are they establishing new canons of women literature? Critics like Showalter (A Literature of Their Own, 1977) and Ellen Moers (Literary Women, 1977) certainly tend towards new canons and towards a formulation of a methodology of feminist criticism. Others realize that pluralism is necessary, which holds especially in cases of approaches dealing with literature, culture and experience of marginalized groups, like the African American women and lesbians. While the former

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trend often explores the links between racism and sexism, the latter shows the importance of deconstructing the heterosexual approach to women. The question of heterosexuality is also discussed in feminist psychoanalytic criticism. Though many critics accept Freud’s models of mental functioning, they do not agree with Freud’s theories of the female “envy” of the penis and its compensation in the desire of the baby. Therefore much of the feminist psychoanalysis is preoccupied either with the revisionary reading of Freudian approaches to literarature based on the Oedipus myth and in the attempt to redefine the mother-daughter relationship (Dorothy Dinnerstein, Nancy Chodorow, Adrienne Rich). A significant inspiration of all these projects comes from French feminist theories. Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian born critic, chose semiotics as her point of departure. She focuses on the process of the formation of language and the development of identity in mother-infant relationship, ways of controlling the female pleasure instinct (jouissance) by patriarchal power and the symbolic representations of Christianity like the Virgin Mary and the child (Stabat Mater, 1980). In contrast to Kristeva, Luce Irigaray’s background is deconstructive. She deals with the specific relationship of women to language and writing as the possibility of making the difference (from male norms, traditions, rationality). She criticizes the universality of Derrida’s “problem of language” and “imagines a specially feminine language, a parler femme” (Greene and Kahn, op. cit., p. 80). The sexual capacities of women form the basis of Hélène Cixous’s theory of “feminine writing” (écriture féminine) which, in contrast to Derrida’s notion (based on the difference of signifiers, or the ungendered distinction between the body and the text) brings into play the energies of female body. A polemical re-reading of Derrida appears also in the work of Monique Wittig. She rejects theoretical approaches to the difference between men and women, dissociates women from their myth and argues that female language is both a product of oppression and the way of fighting male dominance. PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM The undoubtedly most important development in post-war psychoanalysis was the revision of Freud’s theories accomplished by Jacques Lacan (1901–1981). Lacan focuses his attention on the play of language which constitutes our notions of illusion and reality. Because of this play we cannot speak of stable “objects” or “subjects”. Lacan also rejects Freud’s idea that the

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unconscious is a source of primal instincts which are controlled by our consciousness. According to him, “conscious and unconscious are asymmetrically co-present”: “the inner structure maps the outer conceptualizings. This mapping is above all governed by linguistic experience.” (Elizabeth Wright, Psychoanalytic Criticism [London and New York: Methuen, 1984], p. 107). The unconscious, no longer an id affecting the consciousness with the energies of the libido, is structured like a language. This is a result of a development of the human psyche during which the child passes from the imaginary to the symbolic order. The imaginary stage is narcissistic: the child is formed by the desire of its mirror-image which is the illusion of the omnipresent Mother, responding to every movement, every impulse of her baby. Similarly, the child becomes the illusion of all that would satisfy the mother’s lack, her feeling of deprivation caused by her separation from her own mother. The dominance of a different, symbolic order, appears when the child is initiated into language. The structures of language are marked with societal imperatives – the Father’s rules, laws and definitions among which are those of “child” and “mother”. Society’s injuction that desire must wait, that it must formulate in the constricting word whatever demand it may speak, is what effects the split between the conscious and unconscious, the repression that is the tax exacted by the use of language. (Wright, op. cit., p. 109) Lacan’s discussion of the symbolic order begins with a critique of the Saussurean theory of sign. According to him, the gap opens between the signifier and the signified. There is more than one signifier for one signified (the toilet door may have either a “Ladies” or a “Gentlemen” sign) and the identification of the signified “depends upon human judgements”, rather than being given by the sign. (Ibid.) The outcome of this division is the emergence of gender roles. “Language places the subject in the chain of words which binds it to one gender or another, but the force of the unconscious can subvert that definition.” (Ibid, p. 110). Since that time the unconscious desire may become the “hidden” signified governed by the “Father signifier” from the conscious language level. But the unconscious constantly eludes: it cannot suffer full control. In this contest, the notion of “the real” starts to appear as the conflicting field between the imaginary order of narcissism and desire, and the

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symbolic order of language. This tension between the symbolic and the imaginary corresponds to Roman Jakobson’s division between the metaphorical and the metonymic tropes as the prime constituents of language. But Lacan conceives the Jakobsonian paradigm in time and with respect to Freud’s theory of the unconscious. “For Lacan metaphor and metononymy are linguistic foundations of what Freud discerned in condensation and displacement (of type-images of “Mother”, “Father”, etc., Ibid. p. 111). Unconscious desire can mistake one appearance for another similar to it and be led to substitute one signifier for another, or it can shift from one thing to another found with it, discerned as being more significant for desire, so producing a metonym. Such metaphorical and metonymic effects are constantly at work in language without speakers being aware of it. (Ibid., p. 111) In this way the ego must move along a chain of words while the unconconscious permanently searches for its own lost object. Thus, both on the level of the conscious and on the level of unconscious language does not achieve the presence of meaning but is constituted by an elusive play of presence and absence of the subject and the object: “The object is not lost, but merely delayed” and the subject is constantly referred from one signifier to another. (Ibid., p. 112). This approach is typical both for Lacan’s reading of literature (for instance E.A. Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter,” in which he deals with symbolic repetitions of structuring fantasy and transference in language) and for his analysis of visual arts, especially the “illusion” of the cinema. QUESTIONS 1. What are the common features of the impact of feminist and psychoanalytic theories? 2. Define GENDER. 3. Comment on the relationship between the deconstructive notion of writing and feminist notion of “making the difference”. 4. How does feminist criticism transform anthropological theories? 5. Comment on theories of female subjectivity. 6. What is GYNOCRITICISM? Do you think that a consistent female literary tradition can be constructed?

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7. Can you name other features of feminist criticism? 8. How does French feminist criticism differ from British and American appraches? 9. How did Lacan change Freud’s theory of the unconscious? 10. Comment on Lacan’s notions of the imaginary and the symbolic order. 11. Can meaning, according to Lacan’s theory, be PRESENT in language?

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Metaphor

Metaphor is “a condensed verbal relationship in which an idea, image or a symbol (sign) may be…enhanced in vividness, complexity, or breadth of implication” (Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms). Aristotle’s definition of metaphor emphasizes transference (epiphora in Greek and translatio in Latin) of a “name” (i.e., of a word as a semantic unit, a signifier) into another context resulting in the connection of the word with a different idea, image, object than usual. “Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy.” (Poetics, 1457b) (Genus is a more general class of objects, while species is a more particular class). Later rhetoricians tended to stress the relationship of analogy (thus distinguishing metaphor from metonymy and synecdoche) and visual clarity (názornost) as the constitutive features of any metaphor. Tenor and Vehicle “To understand metaphors, one must find meanings not predetermined by language, logic or experience.” (The New Priceton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics) In the metaphor “maturing sun” in Keats’ “To Autumn” the unusual word “maturing” may be called “vehicle,” that is, the word which accomplishes the transference particular to the metaphor. The idea underlying this transference (i.e., that the sun in the autumn gradually moderates the intensity of its heat and light, like people who by maturing become moderate in their behaviour and habits) is called “tenor” (these terms were coined by I.A. Richards, an English representative of New Criticism). If the relationship between tenor and vehicle is too complicated and a metaphor becomes a complex figure, it can be called a conceit (a term used in the Renaissance). An example of conceit is from Shakespeare’s Sonnet 24: “Now 129

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see what good turns eyes for eyes have done: / Mine eyes have drawn thy shape, and thine for me/ Are windows to my breast, wherethrough the sun/ Delights to peep, to gaze therein on thee.” The basis of this conceit are four metaphors: 1. the poet’s eye as a mirror in which the form of his friend is reflected, 2. the friend’s eye as a window into his heart, 3. the poet’s eye looking as if a painter was drawing a picture (the first line of the poem begins “My eye hath played the painter…”), i.e., looking at the world creatively, being able to visualize the unseen (mental, emotional) features of the model, 4. the “light” of the poet’s art is like the light of the sun, i.e., his art is as true as reality; but this last metaphor is still more complicated by the use of the verb “peep” which implies the secrecy, and perhaps also homoerotic undertones, of the relationship between the poet and his friend, and thus relativizes the “objective” implications. If the relationship between tenor and vehicle is too far-fetched, a metaphor develops into a catachresis (“Man! Thou pendulum between smile and tears, / Thousands of years are written in this span.” – see below). Types of Metaphors Traditionally, metaphor was seen as based on two types of logical relationships: (1) “radical”: A is (like) B Then am I [like] happy fly (Blake) Instead of the verb is there may either be a mere juxtaposition of nouns (woman-sphinx, a Harris-tweed cat) or a verb in its full, lexical meaning: The ship ploughed the waves stressing the dynamism of the transformation. At other times this dynamism may be the result of a specific juxtaposition (of a noun in an adjectival function and an ordinary noun): a proud nostril-curve of a prow’s line, or of a connection of a noun with an adjective her head with its anchoring calm. (2) “analogical”: A is as B – that is, A is (like) X as B is (like) Y. Hatred infects the mind. = “Hatred is like an infection” and “The mind is sick (with hatred).” The analogical metaphor may be constructed as a simile (see below; “The mind is like a person sick with hatred.“) This type of metaphor is sometimes called metalepsis: I a child, & thou a lamb,/ We are called by his name (both names, X and Y – child and lamb – refer to Christ). The expanded metaphor of this type is called simile and is a feature of heroic epic (heroic, Homeric simile): “As when the Sun new risen/ Looks through the horizontal misty Air/ shorn of his Beams…/…Darken’d so,

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yet shone/Above them the Archangel” (Milton, Paradise Lost). The words as and so connect the two parts of the simile. The first part often refers to natural phenomena or animals, the second to human or divine beings. Aristotle in his Rhetoric and later Quintilian stress the distinction between metaphor and simile. Proper metaphors should not use “like” or “as” (e.g., “Achilles sprang at the foe as a lion” is a simile, but “a lion [i.e., Achilles] sprang at the foe” is a metaphor). Despite this, analogical metaphors are in fact elliptical, or condensed similes (Max Black). According to Max Black, there are two analytical views of metaphor: (1) metaphor is a condensed comparison (and therefore there is no fundamental difference between it and the simile) (2) metaphor is a (paradigmatic) substitution of a figurative word “lion” for a literal expression (Achilles). The second definition, however, is problematic, since sometimes it is very difficult to distinguish between literal and figurative meanings of words (e.g., all terms and even the word for them, “concept,” have developed from metaphors. A rhetorical figure, paronomasia, which is the basis of language puns, develops the ambivalence of literal and metaphorical meanings, often with a humorous effect: “Conception is a blessing, but not as your daughter might conceive.” (Hamlet, II.2.185–6) All theoreticians of metaphor agree that “metaphor creates meanings not readily accessible through literal language. Metaphor involves a transaction between words and things after which the words, things and thoughts are not quite the same.” (The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics.) “Fusion theorists” (some new critics, e.g., Cleanth Brooks) stress the transformative character of the metaphor and its symbolic potential (making one whole, connecting general and particular features of an object). Sometimes they disregard the differences between metaphor and synecdoche or metonymy and synecdoche (see below). Twentieth-century Approaches to Metaphor: (1) linguistic and semiotic (metaphor as a relationship between signs) Roman Jakobson (substitution on the paradigmatic axis of the system), Umberto Eco, La Groupe µ (a group of linguists and semioticians at the University of Liège) (2) pragmatic (metaphor as an act of speech) John Searle (trope as a performative: the modification of meaning is the act of speech)

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(3) philosophical (truth and falsity of metaphorical language) Donald Davidson, Nelson Goodman, Paul Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man; philosophy of science (the relation of metaphor to concepts and theories of especially natural sciences) Max Black, Mary Hesse, Thomas Kuhn, George Lakoff, M. Johnson Some Conclusions “The figural use of metaphor in modern theory leads to the question whether the literal and the figurative can be properly distinguished … Metaphor is not simply false, but that which marks the limits of the distinctions between true and false, or meaningful and deviant.” As Derrida says [in his essay “White Mythology” in Margins of Philosophy, 1972], “each time that a rhetoric defines a metaphor, not only is a philosophy implied, but also a conceptual network in which philosophy itself has been constituted.” (The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms) It appears that metaphor as a figure of speech (tropus) cannot be subordinated to the speculative philosophical discourse of being as some recent thinkers (Paul Ricoeur) have attempted to do. This gesture only repeats the strategy of Plato who strove to separate philosophy from rhetoric. Catachresis [kat∂’kri:zis] „misuse” in Greek, the unconscious misapplication of a word especially in a metaphor. It may be a ridiculous stylistic feature [the ballad] “shall be called Bottom’s Dream, because it hath no bottom” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) but also a deliberate wresting of a term from its habitual significance: “Or to take arms against a sea of troubles” (Hamlet). Used consciously, catachresis is an ironic figure (together with oxymoron) which implies the impossibility of representation, action, etc. (Hayden White, Metahistory, 1973).

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Metonymy

The term means a “change of name,” “misnomer” in Greek, denominatio in Latin. A trope in which one word is substituted for another on the basis of (a) MATERIAL (b) CAUSAL and (c) CONCEPTUAL relationship. (a) I’ll have a glass, (b) a bloody decade (a decade called so because of many instances of bloodshed or warfare), reading Wordsworth, (c) the Crown (the royal administration, a central political power in a traditional monarchy). Traditional specifications (Quintilian): “container for a thing contained” – (a), “agent for act, product or object in possession” – (b), “cause for effect” – (c), “associated object for its possessor.” Metonymies have been given less attention than metaphors since they are believed to express mostly ordinary, unpoetic, thoughts and perceptions. But this is not quite true: for instance in Dylan Thomas’ title “Altarwise by owl-light” the mysterious effect is created by the metonymies “altarwise” – i.e., ‘eastward’ – altars are situated in the eastern part of Christian churches (conceptual relationship: altar – east) – and “owl-light” – i.e., ‘darkness’ or ‘dusk’ as the causes of owl’s appearance (causal relationship – dusk causes the appearance of owls). (The supporters of the above theory according to which metaphor is a substitution of a figurative word for a literal word may still argue that Thomas’s figures are metaphors, since they create unusual associations of images – “owl-light,” but they are not based on analogies.) In fact, Thomas’ figure is a modern analogy of the kenning in Old English poetry. Kennings consist of two components: the base word (“light”) and the determinants (“owl” – designating the attribute by which the notion designated by the base word is known; for instance in Old English or Norse poetry battle may be called “spear-din” where “din” is the base and “spear” is the specifying attribute). The relation between the base and the determinant in kennings is either metonymical or metaphorical. 133

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An interesting example of composite words (and metonymies) used in modern literature are portmanteau words (kufříková slova), frequent, for instance, in Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or in Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In these words, neither the relation of their components can be determined, and often not even the components themselves can be distinguished. These words are based on a possible substitution of individual morphemes on the basis of their partial homonymy (“snark” – snail/snake/snout – shark/lark/ark). René Wellek and Austin Warren (using the conclusions of Jakobson) have divided tropes into (1) figures of similarity (metaphor) (2) figures of contiguity [contact] (metonymy and synecdoche) Thus, metaphor becomes a figure for any type of substitution (paradigm) and metonymy accounts for the positioning of elements – signifiers, units of meaning (syntagma) This contiguity of elements involves a reference to reality while metaphor can be developed without this reference. Jakobson (following partially Boris Eikhenbaum) distinguished between metaphor as a supralinguistic process (through which an idea or a theme are actualized in words, or a process uniting the poet’s being and his/her imagination or mythology) and metonymy as a change in the hierarchy of linguistic units (either affecting their order or substituting a part of the word’s meaning for the word itself). While a series of metaphors may pose a unifying theme in a poem, a chain of metonymies does not lead to any metalinguistic idea. However, the notion of “metalinguistic idea” is disputable: therefore metonymy can also be seen as a referential, as well as accidental, disruptive, and subversive figure which makes all thematic generalizations (the supralinguistic process) impossible (Paul de Man). For an example see above: Dylan Thomas’ metonymies (kennings) “Altarwise by owl-light,” or portmanteau words. Psychoanalytic theories: Jacques Lacan has proposed that the discourse (the symbolic) can be conceived as a continuous metonymy displaced from the “real” (the unspeakable) in which the metaphoric (unconscious) signifiers sometimes appear.

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Synecdoche

This Greek word means “taking together,” “understanding one thing with another.” Synecdoche is often regarded as a type of metonymy wherein the part is substituted for the whole: “hands” for “men,” “sail” for “ship,” genus for species “mortals” – “humans” or material for a thing “jeans.” Sometimes it also includes antonomasia – the substitution of a proper name for common name, e.g., Quisling (a Norwegian politician who collaborated with the Nazi) for “traitor.” Synecdochical relationships are seen mostly between nouns, sometimes, however adjectives and participles become synecdoches: “The shattered water made a misty din” – such a synecdoche is close to metaphor but is not based on any analogy; “shattered” expresses the part-to-whole or material-thing relationships. But here we can also argue that the figure is a catachresis.

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Allegory

The term, derived from Greek allos “other” and agoreuein “to speak” – to speak about the other, to speak otherwise, signifies a technique of literature or a fictional mode. (1) Technique of literature Allegory is used to construct a work so that its apparent sense refers to an “other” sense (2) Mode Allegory is a distinctive quality of a large number of works of art independent of their genre (e.g., allegorical drama, allegorical epic). Understanding fiction is impossible by means of its direct comparison with reality; the fiction requires allegorical interpretation: “explaining the work as if there were an ‘other’ sense to which it referred.” (The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics) Examples (1) Technique (according to Quintilian: Institutes of Oratory): (a) brief trope: a shepherd as the speaker in Vergil’s eclogue indicates the poet himself (b) sustained (continuous, developed) metaphor: a metaphor which becomes a major theme of a work of art and has unequivocal implications: President Lincoln as “Captain” in Whitman’s famous elegy (c) ironic form of discourse: praising instead of blaming (d) expressing the inexpressible (Friedrich Schlegel): Plato’s representation of the ascent of a lover to the world of ideas (using a sustained metaphor of a chariot, charioteer and a team of horses) (2) Mode (a) poetry: Dante’s Divine Comedy, Spenser’s Faerie Queene (allegorical epic) (b) fiction: Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (allegorical novel) (c) drama: moralities – Everyman (allegorical drama) 136

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For the allegorical mode it is significant that the text exhibits a certain fictional autonomy and, at the same time, its elements must imply a set of actions, circumstances or principles either commonly perceived or existing in another work (in Of Plymouth Plantation William Bradford compares the Puritans in America to the Jews wandering in the desert – in the biblical book of Exodus). Characteristic Features (1) progression of incidents – imitations of actions historical or political allegory: there are characters or events beyond those described in the narrative (in Spenser’s Faerie Queene the adventures of Redcross Knight represent the history of the Reformation, especially in England) (2) elements of text may exhibit a certain fictional autonomy (may not directly refer to abstract ideas): moral, philosophical, religious allegory (in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress there is a city called Vanity Fair representing moral depravity of society – commercial activities allegorically represent social corruption and the fallen state of mankind – its alienation from religious truths and life). Allegorical Reference (1) continuous (Spenser, Bunyan, Swift: Gulliver’s Travels, Book I), (2) occasional (Hawthorne, Minister’s Black Veil). In the latter case we may also speak about the allegorical tendencies of fiction. Complexity Criterion (1) simple allegory Fables (moral) directed primarily on the set of ideas expressed in their moral. Biblical prophecies (historical): Books of Old Testament referring to the events of the New Testament. Simple moral allegories are educational (Bunyan). (2) complex allegory: ironical or satiric. They employ an old, often familiar story for different purposes: the use of Biblical story about King David and his son Absalom in Dryden’s poem Absalom and Achitophel to satirize the opponents of strong monarchy. The references to The Tempest in John Fowles’s The Collector ironize Miranda’s intellectualism and satirize Clegg’s brutishness. Complex allegory may not have any extra-literary aim (To the Lighthouse, Donne’s Canonization).

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Allegory as a Method of Interpretation and Criticism (Allegorical Interpretation and Criticism) This does not include every “allegorical reading” of a work of art, but only those attentive to allegorical structures of meaning: a story referring to another to illuminate or satirize it, a concrete representation of an abstract idea. There are two major approaches and several forms of allegorical criticism: (1) allegory represents a concept (allegories of Justice, Vanity) (2) allegory represents a history (mock heroic epic: Pope: The Rape of the Lock) (a) Rationalization of myths: Prometheus as a creator of cultured mankind (b) Christian sacred history or theodicy: Old Testament anticipates New Testament. Also called typology: type (Jonah in the belly of the whale) and antitype (Christ in the grave). Allegorical reading of the Bible distinguishes four levels of signification: literal meaning, allegorical meaning (the departure of the Jews from Egypt as the redemption brought by Christ), moral meaning (the turning from sin to grace), universal (anagogic) meaning (the departure of the soul to eternal glory). (c) Allegorical structure of knowledge: hermetism: empirical world is an allegory of the higher invisible world (d) Allegorical reading of the works of literature: becomes current with the arrival of romantic symbolism: poet’s own “reading” of reality based on the resemblance between the poetic creation and the creation of the world (Coleridge’s definition of imagination in Biographia Litteraria). But romantic symbolism simultaneously devalues allegory as something trivial and mechanical, based only on the correspondence of abstract notions and representations of concrete objects. Nonetheless allegory has survived: Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, Keats’ Endymion. Twentieth-century allegorical interpretation of literature is boosted up by – psychoanalytical criticism (Freud: The Interpretation of Dreams, Jung’s archetypes) – anthropological research: structural patterns of rituals and myths: Frazer The Golden Bough, Weston, From Ritual to Romance. Old works of literature are analyzed as myths or structures related to old rituals – specific structuralist literary criticism sometimes called archetypal: N. Frye: Anatomy of Criticism

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Allegory in Poststructuralism In post-structuralist theory (Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading, 1979) allegory is understood as a feature common to all literary works. This means that all reading is self-reflective (you do not read just in order to “experience” a story but also to think of the way you have read and “experienced” it), and that it leads us to the discovery of the conflict of meanings in the work of art and discrepancies in its value system. For instance, the appearance of the figure of a divinely inspired poet towards the end of Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” may lead us to an understanding of the poem as a conflict between the romantic notion of imagination and the desire for an ideal personality whose power would surpass that of the fabulous Chinese (and Mongol) emperor Kubla Khan. Allegory vs. Symbol This is a difficult problem since the age of Romanticism (before that “symbol” meant simply “sign”). At that time critics started to argue that allegory was bad, since the image it creates can be separated from the object it represents. They thought that symbol, on the other hand, was synthetic, that it abolished the distinction between the image and the thing represented. According to Goethe symbolic image represents “totality,” wholeness of a thing, concept, etc., which does not appear to us in the ordinary perception of the world and reflection. According to Coleridge symbol (as well as imagination) is organic, all parts of an image combine to express the wholeness of an idea: this is possible only by means of the growth of understanding which is parallel to the growth of meaning in the work of art (vegetable – plant – metaphor). In contrast to this allegory is mechanical and cannot represent the whole: only fragments. Schelling said that the god of a myth (i.e., a unifying figure of a symbolic structure) was identical with the principle it embodied. Criticism of the romantic approach privileging symbol over allegory started in the twentieth century: Walter Benjamin: romantic symbol tends to obscure the disruptive effects of time, by stressing the wholeness, eternity, permanent growth, spiritual life. Deconstruction (Paul de Man): symbol represents a desire to construct a consistent image of the self or the world. This is impossible because meaning in language can never be fully determined or controlled.

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Symbol

Derived from Greek symballein, “to put together,” and the related noun symbolon, “mark,” “token,” “sign,” the term means a synthesis of the signifier and the signified (more frequently, the signifier is not a conventional sign, like the cross for the Christian faith and death, but is a work of imagination, like the symbols of the fountain and the “pleasure dome” in Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan”) as well as a mark or object which stands for or represents a whole complex of things (therefore symbols are said to have many meanings). The synthetic quality of the symbol has been explained as “basically a joining or combination and, consequently, something once so joined or combined that it stands for or represents, when seen alone, the entire complex” (The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics). Book is a part of the process of cognition and therefore it may represent knowledge (e.g., in university emblems or coats of arms). The relationship between the symbol and the thing represented is often in the direction from abstract to concrete or from material to immaterial. It can also be said that symbol means something more or something else than the image. The symbol connects an image and one or more ideas (climbing a staircase: spiritual purification, but also the imminent arrival of a new time, age, etc.). The connection between the image and the idea may be based on different principles (according to The Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics): (1) Resemblance (“phallic symbols,” climbing a mountain) (2) Repetition: a frequent appearance of a motif in a novel (repeated references to the letter “A” in The Scarlet Letter) (3) Relationship between the elements of the work (not only the appearance of the image is important but also the relationship between its different meanings in individual situations: e.g., various meanings of the “A” in The Scarlet Letter) (4) Ritual practices (the host symbolizing the spiritual body of Christ: this was established in gospels as a ritual by Christ himself – Last Supper; sterility/fertility symbols in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land) 140

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(5) Historical meaning (tradition): lily as chastity, rose as secret as well as passion, Christ as King Fisher (based on the gospel stories connecting Christ with fishing, feeding the crowd with five pieces of fish, finding some of his apostles among fishermen). Ritual and historical meaning are very close and they often interfere. (6) Some private system invented by a poet (“a myth”: J.R.R. Tolkien’s books) Unlike allegory, symbol does not comprise a story or a description of an action (this is inherent in myth which is a symbolical structure). Symbol is close to some rhetorical figures or tropes, as for instance metaphor or synecdoche. But it cannot be identified with tropes, because in symbol the subject and the analogy cannot be separated. The fountain is a symbol of a new life, resurrection. But if someone compares poetry to an overflowing fountain of powerful feelings (Wordsworth), he uses a metaphor. On the other hand, some symbols, for instance a decayed house of the family of Usher, are only expanded metaphors: human face is compared to a facade of a dilapidated building. Sometimes it is extremely difficult to distinguish between elaborate symbols and allegories. In such cases, the main criterion should be the complexity of the symbol and its tendency to closure of meaning. For instance, The Fall of the House of Usher can be read as a symbolic, rather than allegorical narrative because it aims at a synthesis of all that is said about the family and their house and it also refers this complex whole to a more abstract reality “human reason in the state of madness.” Another important criterion is that while allegorical meanings tend to be firmly fixed (we can speak about the allegory of vanity, for instance), there is nothing like a fixed symbolic language. Symbols are created and read individually, but in spite of this they tell us about things universal and common to all people – archetypes. In Hamlet, for instance, Claudius and the old King Hamlet are specific and distinct characters, yet they may be interpreted as forming together a split figure of the father in the archetypal myth of Oedipus.

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Metre

Metre is a (more or less) REGULAR poetic rhythm. To be more precise, it is a PLAN, BLUEPRINT of stresses and lengths – or sometimes only a NUMBER of syllables or stresses – in a line (or in several lines – a couplet, a triplet – two or three lines bound together by metre, or – in some rare cases – in a stanza). While METRE provides the PATTERN of recurrence of certain sounds and stresses, RHYTHM provides the MOVEMENT within this pattern. While METRE is a scheme which (a) exists IN OUR HEADS, (b) we have LEARNED by reading and studying poetry, (c) makes the reading of (traditional) poetry possible producing the ANTICIPATION of a rhythmic development of the poem (this anticipation can either be confirmed or unfulfilled: both developments may have an aesthetic effect. The example of disappointment: What immortal hand or eye / Could frame thy fearful symmetry? – Blake), RHYTHM is the actual ALTERNATION of stressed and unstressed or long and short syllables in a poem. Metre thus helps to recognize some QUALITIES of rhythm, its (a) regularity (e.g., hearing stresses at regular interval) and recurrence (repetition of some identical sequences, such as metric feet), (b) variation (a change or irregularity in repetition or recurrence), (c) articulation (monotonous stream of sounds is segmented by stresses or lengths), (d) hierarchization (some rhythmical sequences recur after a longer span of time and they establish higher rhytmical articulation; e.g., in the conclusion of Spenserian stanza: Time writes no wrinkle on thy azure brow / Such as creation’s dawn beheld, thou rollest now. [Byron] – the last line has two more syllables than the last but one, and this marks the ending of the stanza). 142

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Metre must be distinguished from the specific qualities of the PERFORMANCE of the poem (see below on accentual metre and isochrony) which are individual realizations of rhythmic patterns. Generally speaking, rhythm is an aspect of TEMPORALITY (an organization, or development in time) of any existence (the change of seasons, biorhythm). More specifically, it indicates a specific TEMPORALITY of a sound or sound sequence. In neither of these cases rhythm can be described as merely empirical (“I feel the beat”) or even material phenomenon (the vibrations of a source of a sound, of air), since the ABSENCE of sound (or motion) is as much important as its presence, and the above qualities are not bound exclusively to material phenomena: we can IMAGINE a rhythm when reading poetry or a musical score. In language rhythm is NOT NECESSARILY CONNECTED with meaning. Rhythm can go against articulation in language (the segmentation into units of meaning – words, etc.): juncture in speech (a name – an aim). Therefore, a rhythmical organization of a poem can go against its denoted (stated) meaning or can create ambiguities. (Shakespeare is playing games with this in Quince’s Prologue to the play-within-a-play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the lines “Our true intent is all for your delight. / We are not here…” can also be changed by a different rhythm and melody which cause a different thematic structuring of the message: “Our true intent is: All for your delight / We are not here.”) Therefore it is necessary to keep separate the metre itself and the linguistic resources which vary from language to language. Some metric features are close to linguistic means that establish meaning in any language (different forms of stress, emphasis, the binary opposition long vs. short vowel, the differences between tones on which vowels are pronounced in French, or, more substantially, in Chinese). But other features are independent from phonological patterns establishing specific meaning. For instance, comparative study of metre has discovered that the ends of metric strings are in general more constrained than their beginnings, or that shortening or lengthening the lines – e.g., the alternation of masculine and feminine endings in some Renaissance sonnets – does not depend on the meaning of words or phrases standing at the lines’ ends. We always have to distinguish between the PHONOLOGICAL FEATURE used as the MARKER of the metre (e.g., stress) and the

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PATTERN made by those markers. This pattern is abstract and independent from specific meanings. However, the problem of this distinction is that the intensity and pitch of a syllable often correlates with verbal or higher stress and also with emphasis. Moreover, metre always depends on phonetic and phonological features of a specific language (e.g., the twelve-syllable line concluding Spenserian stanza differs from the French alexandrine, since it usually does not break into two hemistichs – ‘half-lines’ – separated by a caesura). The smallest unit of any metre, the smallest METRIC PATTERN, is a METRIC FOOT. Usually, it is a series of syllables which more or less regularly repeats itself in the LINE. Line is defined either by the number of FEET (in accentual or syllabic accentual prosody; see below) or by the number of SYLLABLES or STRESSES (in syllabic or quantitative prosody; see below). Within each foot, the stressed (or, in general terms, marked – by stress, length or tone) part is called ICTUS. In modern Western poetry (since the Renaissance), there are several basic METRIC FEET (in the following examples, stressed syllables are marked by bold letters): TWO-SYLLABLE FEET the iamb [aiəem] – first syllable lightly stressed and second stressed, first syllable shorter, second longer (revolve, behind, before), the trochee [trəuki:] – reversed iamb (forward, rabbit) the spondee [spondi:] – two stressed long syllables (no more) often at the end of a line THREE-SYLLABLE FEET the dactyl [dæk-] – one stressed (and often long) syllable followed by two unstressed (short) syllables (agitate). Often occurs at the beginning of iambic lines: “What of this barren being do we reap?” (Byron). In this case which is quite frequent in English iambic metric, a tension between the ordinary and metric stress is evident: in metric scanning, the first foot of the line is trochaic, and the following feet are regular |′ ∪|∪ ′|∪ ′|∪ ′|∪ ′|. On the other hand, the initial dactyllic foot reinforces the ordinary stress which goes against the iambic metric pattern: |′ ∪∪|′ ∪|′ ∪| ′ |. anapaest [ænæpæst] – dactyl reversed (understand, reposses) the amphibrach [æmfi′bræk] – one stressed (longer) syllable flanked by two unstressed (short) syllables (redouble)

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The repetition of feet gives a measure to a line: the shortest line is called dimeter [dimi:tə] – it has two feet (e.g., a dactyloiambic-anapaestic dimeter: Over the mountains / And under the waves, or, a regular iambic dimeter: If thought is life / And strength and breath, Blake), the line of three feet is called trimeter (Lost in desart wild / Is your little child, Blake), the line of four feet is called tetrameter (Had we but world enough and time,/ This coyness, lady, were no crime, Marvell), and the line of five feet is called pentameter: The time is out of joint. O, cursed spite/ That ever I was born to set it right. – Hamlet). Hexameters are rather rare in English poetry (see the above example of the final line of Byron’s Spenserian stanza). Any line can have one syllable more or one syllable less and be still considered regular with respect to a specific metric pattern: One syllable LESS: truncated or catalectic line – (Little Fly/Thy summer’s play /My thoughtless hand / Has brush’d away – Blake, The Fly – the first line of this iambic dimeter has a shorter, one syllable foot at the beginning) One syllable MORE: hypercatalectic line. It most often appears in the form of a feminine ending of a line: last but one syllable is stressed and the last syllable is only lightly stressed (an incomplete iambic foot at the end of eleven-syllable lines: A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted / Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion. – Shakespeare, Sonnet 20). If the lines are rhymed, we speak of the feminine rhyme, while masculine rhyme has the number of syllables typical of a specific rhythmic pattern. There are FOUR BASIC TYPES OF METRE (metrical systems): (1) quantitative (časomíra): typical of old Indian (Sanskrit), Greek and Latin poetry. Very rare in English. The decisive value is the quantity of a syllable. A quantitative pentameter (including dactyllic, trocheic, spondeic and anapaestic feet) would look like this (bold letters indicate long syllables): Unhappy verse, the witness of my unhappy state, – | | – ∪ ∪ | – ∪ | – ∪ ∪| – – |∪ ∪ Make thyself flutt’ring wings of thy fast flying |– ∪ ∪| – ∪ | – ∪ | – – | – ∪| Thought, and fly forth to my love, wheresoe’er [weəsoeə] she be |– ∪|– – |∪∪ –|– ∪∪ |– –| (Spenser) (2) syllabic: typical of poetry in Romance or some Slavonic languages (Serbian), and especially in Japanese. The decisive value is the number of syllables

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in a line. Written e.g. by Robert Bridges, Dylan Thomas, W.H.Auden, Elizabeth Daryush: Through the open French window the warm sun / Lights up the polished breakfast table, laid / Round a bowl of crimson roses, for one (Elizabeth Daryush). Here, bold letters indicate stressed syllables; the number of syllables in each line is regular (10), but the pattern of stresses is irregular and also the number of stresses slightly varies (6–5–5); the second and third line, however, are close to regular accentual metre with five stresses. (3) accentual: typical of poetry in Germanic languages. The decisive value is the number of accents in the line. This feature has been called isochrony or isochronism. In isochronic metre unstressed syllables keep the equal length of feet (they are lengthened if they are few and shortened – as well as reduced – if they are many). A similar principle organizes the tones in music into bars: I sit in one of the dives/ On Fifty-Second Street/ Uncertain and afraid (W.H.Auden). Bold letters indicate stressed syllables. This is an unrhymed accentual iambic line: “loose iambic” – the first line has one more syllable (7–6–6). The notion of isochrony derives from Kenneth Pike’s distinction between the “stress-timed” and “syllable-timed” languages. While English is “stress-timed,” French and Czech are “syllable-timed.” There has been much argument about the objectivity of the evidence for Pike’s theory. Nevertheless, it is certain that isochrony and almost pure accentual prosody distinguish the balladic metre. Here the isochrony probably derives from the residue of musical structure: And a good south wind sprang up behind / The Albatross did follow (Coleridge). 4 stresses in the first line, 3 in the second; an alternative pattern of the first line based not only on stresses but also on emphases and metric accents. In alternative scanning, where the stress on “up” would be given by a metric stress (the imposition of the stress pattern of iambic metre on the rhythm of the line), the line would come closer to blankverse rhythm: And a good south wind sprang up behind). This pattern holds for many lines in the poem, such as: As if it had been a Christian soul / We hailed it in God’s name. Some scholars argue that isochrony is never a quality of a metre but of performance only. (4) accentual-syllabic (sylabotónický): both the number of accents and the number of syllables are important. The basic unit is the foot (see above). This means that the stress is linked with the syllable, especially with the

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quantity (length) of its vowel. Strict accentual-syllabic metre is typical especially of Classicist poetry (True Wit is Nature to advantage dress’d/ What oft was thought but ne’er [neə] so well express’d – Pope). While the quantity of vowels (long vs. short) is often found important in Czech, in English the quality of stressess is decisive. In the system introduced by George L. Trager and Henry Lee Smith, there are four levels of stress: (a) primary (heavy) stress marked with ′, (b) secondary (medium) stress marked with ˆ, (c) tertiary (medium-light) stress marked with `, and (d) weak stress marked with ˘. For instance in the above-quoted poem by Marvell, the first line has the following stress pattern: Had we but world enough and time. |ˆ ˘ | ˘ ′ | ˘ `| ˘ ′|

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Rhyme

The term is derived from the Greek word rhytmos transformed into medieval Latin word rithmus/rythmus which indicated that the poem was written in other metre than quantitative. Rhythmical verse started to appear in Latin from the 3rd and 4th centuries AD and prevailed over the quantitative in the 12th century. After 1700 rhythm started to indicate the recurrence of phenomena (especially sounds) and r(h)ime has been used for the description of the correspondence of line endings in a poem (or for a poem which used this correspondence – Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner). From the Renaissance, there was a pair rhyme/rime, and only since the eighteenth century the former spelling has prevailed. Definition A linkage in poetry of two syllables at line end (but there may also be internal rhymes, e.g. And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting – E.A. Poe; bold letters indicate stressed syllables) which have identical MEDIAL vowels and FINAL consonants, but differ in INITIAL consonants. More broadly, rhyme is the phonological correlation of differing semantic units at distinctive points of verse. (The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics.) Rhyme calls our attention both to identity (so-called “rich rhymes”) and to difference on phonic as well as semantic levels (identity of the vocalic element and the final consonant in two syllables, difference of the initial consonant; difference/similarity of the meaning of the words that rhyme, e.g., “moment” and “comment” in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15). In this way, the equivalence of recurrent segments of the soundstream, that is, lines, is established. Rhyme is created at the intersection of euphonic (alliteration, consonance, assonance, onomatopoeia) and positional (rhythmic) features of a poem (Yurii Lotman). Rhyme includes several types of all possible combinations of consonants and vowels (repeating sounds are indicated by italics and the forms of rhyme are printed in boldface): 148

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1. CVC, CVC – alliteration (bad – boy) 2. CVC, CVC – assonance (back – rat) 3. CVC, CVC – consonance (back – neck) 4. CVC, CVC – reverse rhyme (back – bat) 5. CVC, CVC – para-rhyme (back – buck) 6. CVC, CVC – rhyme proper (back – rack) 7. CVC, CVC – rich rhyme (flitting – sitting), or identical rhyme (bat – bat, his deed – indeed) However, 4. and 5. are not “proper rhymes” in English, and 7. is not required. “Rich rhyme” – rime riche is a device of French poetry. If the vowel of the preceding syllable also rhymes, “rich rhyme” is called rime léonine in French (no term in English) and plný rým in Czech. 3. is sometimes identified with para-rhymes (see below). In English prosody, rhyme most often echoes (a) whole words (dawn-fawn) (b) ends of words (applaud-defraud) (c) groups of words (stayed with us-played with us) (d) ends of words followed by one or more whole words (see above; beseech him-impeach him) In this way, so called rhyme-fellows appear. The basis of every rhyme-fellow is a stem which must be vocalic, i.e., vowel or diphthong (awe-[o:]). The stem carries the last metrical stress of the line (feeling-ceiling). Sometimes it may carry the last but one stress of the line (make of it – take of it) The stem may have an initial which must be consonantal (low-blow) and may have a terminal which may be consonantal (live-give), rarely vocalic (higher-spire [ha:iə-spa:iə]), and often both consonantal and vocalic (deeming-seeming; a feminine rhyme – see below, the terminal is the unstressed syllable printed here in bold letters). The sound identity in a perfect rhyme must begin with the stem and continue in the terminal (if there is any). The sound identity of initials is not required (bestows-God knows). The most frequent rhymes in English are monosyllabic. Even two-syllable words may have monosyllabic rhymes if the second syllable carries the main stress (admired-inspired) Feminine rhymes are dissyllabic (blowing-flowing). There may be also treble, triple and more-syllable rhymes (Thackerayquackery).

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NEAR RHYMES (PARA-RHYMES, HALF-RHYMES, SLANT-RHYMES) These rhymes are a special case of consonance when the vowel (diphthong) in the stem is changed, but the consonant(s) in the initial or terminal or both remain (grope-cup), sometimes may exist also in feminine rhymes (drunkardconquered). The aesthetic effect of near rhymes is either based on the similarity of the vowels/diphthongs in the pair, that is, on the sound variation that disappoints our expectation of the same sound. This effect often occurs in comic or satiric poetry, e.g., Because at least the past were past away/And for the future—(but I write this reeling/Having got drunk exceedingly today/So that I seem to stand upon the ceiling)/I say—the future is a serious matter—/And so—for Godsake—Hock and Soda water. (Byron) Here the regular recurrence of [ei] and [i:ling] is expected also in the last rhyme, in the couplet which concludes the stanza. But this rhyming pattern changes because of the stanzaic form (ottava rima – abababcc). In the last couplet, Byron modifies [ae] to [o:] (matter – water), thus attracting our attention to the contrast between the “serious” future and the trivial things (“Hock” and “Soda water”), on which his immediate survival, immediate future, seems to depend. This change of meaning also depends on a harsh contrast of sounds which disrupts the vocalic harmony and underlines the disharmonic nature of poetic imagery. Compare similar effects in Emily Dickinson’s poems: e.g., I like a look of Agony,/ Because I know it’s true—/Men do not sham Convulsion,/ Nor simulate, a Throe. Here even the consonance is partially impaired by an alternation of [t] (true) and [θ] (Throe), still we can speak about a slanted rhyme. Near-rhymes originated in Welsh, Irish and Icelandic verse and were brought into English by Henry Vaughan, a 17th century metaphysical poet of Welsh extraction. In some languages – such as Russian – near-rhymes are very often used, especially in the avant-garde poetry (Mayakovski, Blok, Pasternak and others). In other tongues, like French, half-rhymes are not perceived as rhymes. EYE-RHYMES Eye-rhymes create an impression of a perfect rhyme when reading a line, but in pronunciation the two words differ (prove-love). This rises the question whether the poem is a visual or sound entity which cannot be unambiguously

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answered. There are, however, purely visual poems that cannot be read aloud („concrete“, “visual” or “graphic” poetry, for instance, e.e. cummings’ poem “r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r” [= grasshopper]). The original, oral poetry was purely aural (for listening). Sometimes, eye-rhymes may be of historic origin, the line-endings that originally used to rhyme aurally but their pronunciation has changed over centuries; for instance in Pope tea, then pronounced [tei], could rhyme with obey. Stanzaic structure is established by a series of rhymes (for stanzas, see the chapter on Narrative Poetry).

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Free Verse

Free verse is based on the difference between heavily stressed words and weakly stressed words which runs across the line structure. The heavily stressed words carry the rhythmical impulse. If there are more heavily stressed words in a line, the line thrusts (gives a rhythmical impulse to the following line or lines). If there are a few or none heavily stressed words in a line, the line receives the thrust (rhythmical impulse). In the following extract, the line which gives the thrust is marked », the line which receives the thrust is marked «, heavily stressed syllables are printed in bold fonts, and less heavily stressed syllables (medium and medium-light stresses) are printed in italics: »One must have a mind of winter «To regard the frost and the boughs « Of the pine trees crusted with snow (Wallace Stevens) There are two important sources of free verse: (1) Blankverse, if it becomes irregular, i.e., if the five stress pattern is not maintained (already in Jacobean drama). This type of free verse is often used by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land, for instance: The chair she sat in, like a burnished throne, Glowed on the marble, where the glass Held up by standards wrought with fruited vines From which a golden Cupidon peeped out The first and the third line are regular blankverses, whereas the second and fourth lines have a smaller number of stresses whose distribution (in the fourth line) is more irregular than the strict metric pattern would allow. T.S. Eliot 152

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drew on the irregular blankverse of Jacobean drama (John Webster and others). (2) Biblical or cadenced verse whose basis is hexameter, a line with six heavy or medium stresses. Shorter lines are more heavily stressed (Whitman). Sometimes this verse is identified with free verse proper (see above) stemming from the avant-garde tradition (The New Princeton Encyclopaedia of Poetry and Poetics). »This is the female form, «A divine nimbus exhales from it from head to foot, »It attracts with fierce undeniable attraction, «I am drawn by its breath as if I were no more than a helpless vapor Here the rhythmical thrust or its receptivity do not depend just on the number of heavy stresses as in the abstract from Stevens but also on the density of heavy stresses (the second and fourth lines are long and especially the latter one has a lower density of heavily stressed syllables; the former one has a lower density of heavy stresses in its second half). Free verse proper (see the abstract from Stevens above) does not resemble any of the traditional metric patterns, but its rhythmic patterns must be (a) distinguishable (b) directly connected with the meaning of the poem (emphasis, relation to syntactic structures and the thematic structure of the utterance).

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Drama

Drama may be understood as a central category in the system of basic kinds and modes of literature. In the following scheme, the major kinds of literature (genres) are given in block letters. The main modes (the ways of composition and representation which can coexist in a single work of a certain genre, e.g. lyrical drama, dramatic prose) are printed in small letters:

POETRY narrative EPIC/NARRATIVE (FICTION) narrative

dramatic DRAMA dramatic

lyrical LYRIC (PROSE POEM) lyrical

PROSE

There is an age-old relationship between Drama and Poetry (which may be both narrative/epic and lyrical), as well as between Drama and Narrative (which exists both in poetry – the epic – and in prose – fiction): Drama and Poetry: the role of rhythm and music (melody). Their close connection with speech and acting is more conspicuous as well as formalized in Oriental theatre (Japanese Noh plays), but it is important in most cultures and dramatic forms (even in the drama of the absurd). Drama and Narrative: only some actions in drama are represented by acting, other actions (e.g., heroes’ past, events at other places) are mostly narrated in 154

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monologues. For instance, in some dramatic forms of the antiquity (Senecan tragedy) murders happened off-stage and were only reported. In some psychological dramas as well as in one-woman or one-man shows the proportion of narrative sequences is fairly high. Definition of Drama In contrast to other major kinds of literature drama does not necessarily create the illusion of the speaker who experiences sensations and/or emotions, reflects on his and other people’s experience and narrates his own or other people’s actions/stories. In contrast to dramatic poetry drama poses a question whose answer must be unfolded in terms of human relationships. These features are evident since beginnings of drama in Greece. During Dionysus festivals a speaker was added to the traditional chorus. He was called hypocrites (answerer) who answered questions put to him by the chorus. In contrast to dramatic poetry, drama must represent acting – derived from the Greek dran (a dialectal word synonymous with prattein – to act). Dramatic Poetry The emphasis on dramatic poetry emerged considerably late in the development of drama, when the possibility of acting became limited first by neo-classical rules (French drama of the 17th century, Racine, Molière), and then by the development of the scenic devices in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Drama concentrated on producing stage pictures, rather than representing action. This dissolved the link between poetry and representation of action and transformed theatre into declamatory performance or technological show. The resistance of the English romantics to spectacularity in the theatre is the evidence of the internalization of dramatic conflict (“mental theatre,” Coleridge’s emphasis on the role of imagination, “willing suspension of disbelief” in creating dramatic & even theatrical illusion). Common Features of Narrative & Drama Drama makes a specific use of the performative aspect of the narrative. In drama, as well as in the narrative, a fiction is created (performed) and the author (narrator) may disappear in the course of its creation. Therefore also drama became a model for narrative fiction (In Tom Jones Fielding compares the representation of the world in the novel to a performance of a drama; the dialogue in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice is sometimes developed

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in the form of a dramatic scene; in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair the theme of the puppet play points out an ironic attitude to the actions and emotions, and to the setting; Henry James distinguishes between the narrative techniques of “showing” and “telling”: you may show either drama or a picture). Roman Jakobson thought that metonymy was a major constituent figure of drama, theatre and performance in general (in this respect, theatre would differ from poetry where the basic figure is metaphor). In theatre, the stylization of acting, utterances, objects is of synecdochic nature (in this respect, synecdoche is a form of metonymy). A single characteristic feature passes for the whole phenomenon in the experience: “the concrete present [on the stage] standing for a real absent present which is much greater: the stage object thus indicates the place of the unrepresentable.” (Anne Ubersfeld, L’ Ecole du spectateur, Paris 1981). Major Difference between Narrative & Drama In contrast to narrative genres, the creation of fiction on the stage requires dramatic illusion. This means that the action on the stage is willingly accepted as acts and events in real life. Dramatic illusion is produced by different and more complex means than the illusion in fiction. While the latter is based only on language and rhetoric, the former requires physical acting, sets, music and/or sound effects, etc. Although the illusion is responsible for the disappearance of the dramatist, in traditional drama there are ways of making the authorial voice present. In the antiquity it is mainly the chorus. Later some characters may become speakers of the authorial (choric) commentary. Thus, drama differs from narrative especially by the non-existence of a distinct role of the narrator. The receiver cannot establish the relationship to the “real” speaker who is dispersed among many roles. This emphasizes the importance of the situation. While in the narrative, situation is created by the specific focus and perspective, in the theatre the things are placed – as Roland Barthes said – “as they are observed.” The simultaneity of watching and the development of the story is necessary. But there are also plays “staging” long narratives, for instance Shakespeare’s Tempest. Origins of Drama In the antiquity, the “unrepresentable” to which the dramatic world is related was the sacred of myth & ritual. Only later a complex reality, namely political tensions in Greek comedies or mythical history in Greek tragedies, substituted the unrepresentable sacred.

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Tragedy Definition The central moment of tragedy is a misfortune and death which can be connected with a sacrifice (one of the oldest interpretations is that tragedy was connected with the ritual sacrifice of a goat). The death of this “scapegoat” causes feelings of horror which are resolved in a kind of purification, “catharsis” in the course of which each member of a community renews his social bond. In this way, even the audience watching the play was originally taking part in the ritual action. The “true” watchers of the drama were the gods (cf. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy which is watched by subterraneous gods and the ghosts of the deceased). Origins Tragedy originated during Dionysus festivals in ancient Greece when a speaker exchanged dialogue with the chorus which sang in a rhythmic movement. This innovation is attributed to Arion. Only later this was developed by Thespis in Athens (traditionally in the latter half of the 6th century BC), with whom the speaker becomes the actor: hypocrites (he who answers, explains). In the fifth century BC Aeschylus introduced the second actor and Sophocles the third one. The material of Aeschylus’ plays was mythical and the fate was understood as the inevitable decree of gods. This had an influence on the structure of the drama: there was not yet peripety which pointed out that the guilt of the characters was not only decreed by the gods but also had the cause in them and their previous lives. Peripety was connected with anagnorisis and was often produced by arbitrariness or coincidence. Euripides did not rely too much of the chorus and stressed the importance and psychological depth of the conflict. Tragedies were mostly performed in contests: trilogy of tragedies plus one satyr play: more farcical and comical, giving more space to the members of the chorus. Originally the conclusion of the series (tetralogy), later as dramatic scene prefixed to a tragedy and still later substituted by comedy. The Structure of Greek Tragedy Prologue, chorus (or parodos), spoken parts (episodes: in attic dialect with an iambic six-syllable meter) alternate with songs of the chorus (stasimon: in

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lyrical metres and Doric dialect), also merry choric dances (komos), dirges, solo songs and songs of two or three actors. The fully developed Greek tragedy and all later “regular” tragedies had five components of the tragic conflict: exposition, collision, crisis, peripety, catastrophe. The six parts of tragedy and the three dramatic unities have been defined in Aristotle’s Poetics. Tragedy in the Ancient Rome Senecan tragedy (named after the Stoic philosopher Lucius Annaeus Seneca, first century AD) became the source of Renaissance tragedies. It was more suited for reading than for performance. The golden age of Roman tragedy came earlier in the third and second centuries BC: Naevius, Ennius, Pacuvius, Accius. Medieval Drama: Problematization of Tragedy Drama became a representation of biblical texts (tropus Quem quaeritis?) or a means of amplifying a religious ceremony. The problem of tragedy in the Middle Ages: The existence of one God and the predetermined character of events, limited possibilities for the conflict of destiny and individual will. Moralities: only allegorical visions of human destiny. Modern Tragedy: starting from the Renaissance Tragedy increasingly depends on the forms of power in society. Modern tragedy locates the paradigms of power on the stage and therefore it is freer or less free in their representation. The reference to the sacred gradually loses its importance and the conflict of characters becomes the centre of action. The power gives also formal restriction: the question of dramatic unities which marks the end of traditional tragedy. Shakespearean tragedy deals chiefly with the destruction of values important for the whole society and woven into individual lives and conflicts. Macrocosm-microcosm correspondence enables the direct overlap of individual life and social cataclysm: King Lear. Other English Renaissance tragedies are concentrated either on the more intimate conflicts – family tragedy (Thomas Heywood, The Woman Killed With Kindness) or on spectacular representation of horrors and cruel scenes (John Webster). French tragedy is based on the conflict of principles (humanist tradition) projected into the life of characters (Corneille: Cid, Racine, Phèdre).

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Spectacularization of tragedy in heroic drama and opera: simplification and stylization of the conflict, emphasis on theatrical, rhetorical and lyrical moments. Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Drama uses only elements of tragedy (Ibsen, Shaw, Chekhov). The reason is psychological or ideological focus on the representation of the conflict: there is no longer a direct connection with the metaphysics of myth and religion, no longer a notion of the sacred. Tragicomedy becomes an important genre in the Elizabethan drama (but it develops since Roman times: Plautus: Amphitryon, and the late Italian Renaissance: Guarini, Il Pastor Fido, 1590). In the twentieth century it may be said to replace tragedy entirely. It gives origin for instance to the drama of the absurd. Comedy Definition Comedy is a kind of drama whose conflict is represented by means of hyperbole, parody or travesty (including also the confusion of identities) and has a happy ending or ends in a compromise. The sacred is not directly referred to (only indirectly by means of parodical inversion of values, rituals, etc., which is also the origin of the carnivalesque). The name comes from the Greek word komos, a merry procession. The chorus was performing obscene pageants and using drastic comical means. In the Greek antiquity comedy used to be political and satirical. It employed phantasy and transposed sacred myths and rituals. For instance, in Aristophanes’ Frogs the contest between Aeschylus and Euripides in the underworld is parodied. History Greek Comedy First composed by Epikharmos (5th century BC): so-called Doric farces. In the latter half of 5th century BC the Old Attic Comedy developed (Cratinus, Eupolis, Aristophanes). In the so-called Middle Attic Comedy (4th century BC), political themes and travesties were losing power and the action was located more in private than in public settings. No complete play has been preserved despite the reported great number (about six hundred) of comedies. New Attic Comedy (3rd and 2nd century BC) which was purged of obscenities was influenced by the tragedies of Euripides (no travesty, no chorus). It produced a set of stable comic types: miles gloriosus, courtesan, enamoured youth, bawd, clever slave. The plot and dialogue development was

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stressed. The comedy had developed into individual genres: satirical, character, situational, farce, burlesque (using travesty) which helped to separate the themes and ways of acting acceptable and unacceptable for specific audience (this is a major theme during the rehearsal of the farce in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream). The most important authors of new Attic comedy were Menander and Philemon. Origins of Farce Greek comedy also originated a Sicilian farce called atellana which together with mimus became the origin of early modern Italian commedia dell’ arte. For atellana the use of masks was typical. There were four important characters and/or masks: Maccus – a dunce and glutton, Bucco – clever & talkative, and two old men: Pappus – a niggard, Dossenus – an intriguing quack. Mimus was not using masks, but introduced another set of stock characters, such as Mimus and his antagonist, stupid and often beaten Sannio (in comedia dell’ arte he became the intriguing Zanni; Pierrot in France). In commedia dell’ arte the more passive role of Sannio was partially transferred to the Harlequin (Arlecchino); and the conflict was based more on the pattern of atellana: it was the clash between two young men (and their female partners) and the old men Pantalone and Dottore. Other characters of Roman mimus included a married lady – Callida Nupta and her bawdy handmaid. These roles were acted by women. In Roman times mimus got to big public stages and was performed after tragedies. After the fall of the Roman Empire it directly influenced the development of medieval popular theatre which later appeared as interludes. Roman Comedy had developed from the Greek models: fabula palliata (pallium was a Latin word for a Greek cloak) which was still using songs but dropped the chorus (Plautus, Terentius who composed more serious pieces). Only later the Romans developed their own form of comedy: fabula togata having Latin character names and dress. Renaissance Comedy had developed from several sources: (1) Medieval religious plays were recast and moralized: transformed into dialogues or dramatic scenes with educational function (Fulgens and Lucrece, The Play of the Three P’s). In England all these come from the circle of Sir Thomas More. (2) Imitations of early Roman comedy (fabula palliata): first produced also for educational reasons: Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister

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(3) Commedia Erudita (comedy of/for the educated) of the Italian Renaissance (Macchiavelli, Ariosto I suppositi, Gascoigne, The Supposes). Parody of some elements of commedia erudita: Shakespeare’s Love’s Labours Lost. (4) Popular drama and carnival culture is traceable in the Festive Comedy (a performance of which was a part of a wedding or some popular feast: Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, where the carnivalesque mingles with court pageant and pastoral). The Influence of Tragedy and Tragicomedy on Comedy The features of tragedy and tragicomedy appear in England especially in Shakespearean dark comedy (Measure for Measure, All’s Well that Ends Well). The features of dark comedy are also inherent in the late Renaissance and early Classicist dramatic genres: the comedy of humours – using schematic secondary characters and the comedy of manners (using the contrast between two meanings of manners: as a social convention and as a specific feature of an individual: balance between reason and sentiment, cultivation or lack of cultivation). In the latter half of the eighteenth century comedy of manners develops into comédie larmoyante tearful, sentimental comedy. Features of both types can be found in the comedies of R.B. Sheridan. When combined with decaying forms of festive and carnivalesque comédie larmoyante may engender local farce of the nineteenth-century. Other farcical forms in the late 18th century, especially vaudeville are more connected with the development of comic opera. Situational Comedy develops during the nineteenth century and generates conversational comedy (Wilde) or crazy comedy. There is a good deal of comedy and farce in the drama of the absurd. Some authors – Pinter – have created marginal forms: the comedy of menace.

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Narrative Poetry

Narrative poetry tells a story. It has two basic kinds: epic (+ metrical romance) and ballad and is a result of a long development of oral tradition through pre-historic times (The Táin – Irish epic which might have originated more than two thousand years ago, but was recorded in the twelfth century). Origins Sometimes traced to the chanting of myth related to ritual. The verse had a magical purpose and was probably not developed as a mnemonic aid. Reasons for this: (a) verse suits magic purpose: incantation (b) alliteration and assonance current in early epic (c) structure of early epic stories coincides with that of the myths (d) singing of epic first associated with religious festivals (e) according to most traditions, the bard who composes poetry is a seer (he can prophesy future events: Welsh poetry: Myrddin, Taliesin. Genre of prophetic poems: Armes Prydaine – the prophecy of Britain (Welsh), aisling [ejšling] in the Irish poetry The original function of the poet: mediator between this world and other worlds who is inspired, gifted by Gods & spirits (the Muses). He can bring the audience in touch with the sacred. Both epic and ballad originated from rituals, the latter was not born of the former. Ballad: narrative joined with dance Epic: narrative joined with incantation (drama preserves both elements) Form of Narrative Poetry The most usual form of narrative poetry is a structure based on individual lines or couplets, the so-called stichic verse. The basic unit is the line, not 162

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stanza. But there was a tendency to stanzaic structure since very early times two lines linked into couplets: (heroic distich: hexameter + pentameter, modern heroic couplet). Stanzas: ottava rima (8 lines: abababcc – Ariosto, Byron), rhyme royal (7 lines: ababbcc – Chaucer), Spenserian stanza (9 lines: ababbcbcc, Spenser, Thomson, Byron), terza rima (3 lines: aba bcb cdc…) developed later under the influence of music and dance: lyrical poetry (songs) and ballads – the word originated in 12th century in the Provence and means a dancing song. Ballads have a specific stanzaic form (balladic stanza – basically a quatrain – four lines alternatively of eight and seven syllables – of which only two are rhymed: abcb. May be developed into five- and six-line stanzas: abccb, abcbdb – Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner). Development of Oral Epic The narrative about gods (epic of creation, etc.) gradually changes to the narrative about human heroes and loses an ostensible magic purpose. The god of the myth is first identified with the divine king and later this king becomes a hero. This is called the secularization of the epic: the result is heroic epic (hrdinská epika, hrdinský epos). The first phases of the epic are preserved in the Bible (the five books of Moses, the books of the Kings). Other epical works, Gilgamesh, the Illiad, the Odyssey, Beowulf, The Song of Roland, are based exclusively on the hero. The elements of the supernatural only contribute to the hero’s greatness, but he can never be greater than gods: this explains the tragic death of the hero in many epic poems. At the beginning of the Middle Ages, the epic developed in the oral verbal art of most tribes in the North-Western Europe: the Ulster Cycle and Fenian Cycles in Ireland, Y Goddodin and The Mabinogion (Mabinogi) in Wales, Beowulf in England, the eddas in Scandinavia, the Nibelungen epic in Germany. Later, in the Middle Ages, the epic ceased to belong to a limited circle of listeners whose myths and “history” it expressed – the tribe (even the Aeneid, although written for all Romans, still has this feature) – and became international. This shift is connected with the development of literary epic (see below) and translation: chivalrous romance or chanson de geste (the supernatural + love interest which was often missing in older epic).

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There are at least four major cycles of medieval epic narratives: Arthurian, Carolingian (or Carolinian; about the deeds of Charlemagne and his knights, including Roland), Alexandrian (about Alexander the Great) and Trojan (about the War of Troy and the return of the fighters to their homes, including the story of Brut – i.e. Brutus – a legendary founder of Britain who should not be confused with the murderer of Julius Caesar). Four main periods in which oral epic was recorded: (1) Ca 2000 BC: Sumer, Egypt, Middle & Near East (2) 1000–400 BC: Babylon, Palestine, Greece (3) the Middle Ages in Europe (from about 1000) (4) modern times (from 1750), the beginnings of ethnography, but also romantic adaptations and forgeries (James Macpherson: The Poems of Ossian) Development of Written Epic It begins only in Hellenic times: Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica (3rd century BC). Epyllion – short epic. Major authors: Callimachus (late 4th century BC, his texts were preserved only in Roman transcripts): Hecale – the heroine, an old spinster, entertaining Theseus on his way to kill the Minotaur, similar to the story of Philemon and Baucis, The Lock of Berenice (included in Aitia – a series of short epic narratives anticipating Ovid’s Metamorphoses). Theocritus (Callimachus’s younger contemporary): Helen, Hylas, The Infant Heracles, The Dioscuri. Roman Epic: first authors – Gnaeus Naevius (Bellum Punicum – the war with Carthage) and Ennius (Annales) Classic Age – Virgil, Ovid, Lucan (Bellum Civile – on the Civil War in the early first century BC), Statius (Thebais or Thebaid, Achilleis). This tradition continues to the fourth century AD (Claudian, De Raptu Proserpinae – The Rape of Proserpine). In Greece under the Roman and Byzantine Empires the epic is composed until much later, the last influential classical work is Hero and Leander by Musaios (Musaeus, mid-sixth century AD). In contrast to the Romans, the Greeks never wrote epic on historical themes. Medieval Epic: (1) Religious and hagiographic (lives of the saints) since the 4th century AD: Religious: Juvencus – the Gospels – Evangeliorum Libri,

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Sedulius – Paschal Poem (the suffering of Christ, first half of 5th century) Draconius – a poem on the Creation of the World In Praise of God (end of 5th century) All these poets are imitating Virgil. Hagiographic: begins early in the 8th century: Bede – Baeda Venerabilis: the Life of St.Cuthbert, Heiric of Auxerre: the life of St.Germanus (St.Germain) – 9th century, etc. Anglo-Saxon vernacurlar epic 10th–11th centuries. The first Germanic vernacular religious epic: Liber Evangeliorum by Otfried of Weisenburg (9th century) and the poem Heiland (the Saviour), ca 830. (2) Historical begins in the 9th century: “the Saxon Poet” – annals of Charlemagne, the Abbot of St. Germain, epic on Norman attack on Paris, Ermoldus Nigellius, the deeds of Louis the Pious, the founder of the Capet Dynasty. (3) Chivalrous Romance anticipated in the Greek tales of Alexander: The Pseudo-Callisthenes (ca 2nd century AD), the source of most tales of the Alexander Cycle. The earliest Alexander tales come only from the 13th century (Alexandreis by Quilichinus of Spoleto). The earliest written vernacular romance (i.e. not in Latin or Greek) is a fragmentary text from the late 11th century written attributed to a Provencal poet Albéric of Besançon. The Trojan Cycle: sources: the prose of Dictys Cretensis (4th century AD) and of Dares (around 500). The first epic poems appeared in the 12th century: Joseph of Exeter – in Latin – De Bello Troiano, Simon Chèvre d’Or, Joanes Tzetzes, Illiaca, Benoît de Sainte-Maure, Roman de Troie. Other epic cycles have oral origins and were being recorded since the 12th century. (4) Allegorical Epic: the story which is narrated points to abstract ideas (the Story of the Redcrosse Knight and his pursuit of Una in the First Book of Spenser’s Faerie Queene points to the search of religious truth – “una” means “the one” – during the Reformation. The name Redcrosse Knight refers to the St.George’s Cross – the banner of England). All allegorical epic is based on the tradition of other epic forms: it is the most significant attempt at the synthesis of epic tradition.

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The first is a Latin poem called Psychomachia by Prudentius (348–410); later works include Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meung: Roman de la Rose (ca 1230–1270) (the influence of chivalrous romance) or Dante’s Divine Comedy (the journey to the Other World), Piers Plowman (the vision in a dream), etc. Renaissance Epic develops from the chivalrous romance: Matteo Maria Boiardo (1441–94) Orlando Inamorato, Lodovico Ariosto (1474–1553) Orlando Furioso, Torquato Tasso (1544–95) Jerusalem Delivered – the history of the first Crusade. From there the epic develops more in the direction of historical narrative: e.g. Luis de Camoëns, Lusiad, or to the Biblical themes Guillaume Salluste du Bartas, La Semaine (on the week in which the World was created), or of pastoral romance: J. Sannazaro, Arcadia (1504), derived from the Greek tradition of Theocritus and Latin tradition of Virgil’s eclogues. Spenser’s Faerie Queene is the synthesis of most of the preceding forms, allegorizes also the previous Renaissance works (Boiardo, Ariosto). Modern Epic (since the Renaissance): (1) The problem of the hero: Who is the hero of Milton’s Paradise Lost? The Messiah, Satan, or Adam and Eve? The hero no longer embodies merely the highest and most positive values, and he may not be able to do the bravest deeds. Significantly, the Messiah is not in the centre of Paradise Lost, he becomes important only in Paradise Regained, which, however, is rather an epyllion. (2) The focus is on the painful contrast between the ancient (heroic) and modern (unheroic, decayed) world: (3) The interpenetration of epic and satire: epic often replaced by the mock epic: based on the burlesque, parody and travesty. Pope: The Rape of the Lock (burlesque: “cosmic powers” substituted by “cosmetic powers,” parody: the story of heroic pursuit of a magic object – like that of the golden bough in the Aeneid – replaced by a petty innuendo with half-covered sexual implications, travesty: the event takes place in eighteenth-century England in the aristocratic environment, the heroine treated as the hero of old epic). Romantic Epic: (1) Starts by imitating folk-ballads and chivalrous romances (lai, the lays): Walter Scott (taking up the model of James Macpherson’s Ossian) – the

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modern poem understood as the echo of the old songs of itinerant minstrels. Byron: inserting a dark, Gothic villain into these tales. Focusing on the problem of the hero’s personality and deeds: Eastern (Oriental) Tales. (2) Brings in the autobiographical element: Wordsworth: The Prelude, or the Growth of the Poet’s Mind, Byron: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage – an autobiographic travelogue, combined with the satire on the imitations of chivalrous poetry in the 18th century, as well as on the contemporary political and cultural situation. Keats, The Fall of Hyperion – the focus shifted from the fate of the Greek gods to the autobiographical figure of the narrator. (3) Problematizes the supernatural: Coleridge (Ancient Mariner, Christabel). The supernatural is no longer subject to the traditional Christian notion of ordered universe which is divided between the powers of Good and Evil. This also puts an emphasis on the problem of imagination – the poem may become more concerned with the means of poetic expression than with the hero’s fate: Shelley’s dramatic poem Prometheus Unbound (the new world created by means of poetic language, the hero gradually loses his importance). Victorian Epic: mostly eclectic (i.e., based on medieval, classical and other models, as well as on the legacy of Romantic epic): Tennyson Idylls of the King, Macaulay, Lays of the Ancient Rome, William Morris, The Earthly Paradise, Matthew Arnold, Sohrab and Rustum, etc. Epic and Novel Since the 1750s (Fielding, Richardson) novel becomes more important than epic. The major problem of epic is, as the Russian scholar M.M. Bakhtin has shown, that it is bound to the ideal notion of the past as the source of the highest values. While in the epic the world is separated from the audience by the so-called absolute epic distance, the novel may be said to have established a continuum of time and value relationships between the world which is represented and the world of the audience. This continuum is called chronotope (i.e., time-and-place) by Bakhtin. It is dynamic and is based on the dialogical principle: whereas the epic is dominated by a single style and a rhetoric confirming a specific set of values, the novel is based on the clash between (socially, culturally, aesthetically) different ways of speaking and writing which enable the audience to perceive the shifts of perspective and point-of-view.

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(Fielding both satirizes Squire Western in Tom Jones as a brutish person and enemy of the government, but also shows his superiority to corrupt London aristocrats.) This also points out the importance of narrators and narrative techniques in the novel. Other, more traditional ways of defining the distinctions between the epic and the novel are much less satisfactory: e.g., “the development of the hero”: this we find in the epic since Milton, and, on the other hand, some heroes of old novels do not develop at all (ancient Greek novels).

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Narrative Structures

(based on: Franz Stanzel, Teorie vyprávění [Praha: Odeon, 1989] and modified) Every narrative is characterized by specific mediation. The absence of verbal mediation is typical of drama. In contrast to drama, lyrical poetry most often has some degree of mediation: speaker of the poem, persona = lyrical hero. The specificity of this mediation can be perceived as a narrative situation. The lack of mediation is apparent in the synopses of the story (so-called arguments), which follow the titles of chapters in many eighteenth and some nineteenth century novels (Fielding, Thackeray). Most novels are based on more than one narrative situations. (But some novels, as for instance those where the author represents himself as the editor of the memoirs of the main hero – e.g., Defoe in Moll Flanders, are framed by a single narrative situation.) Often these situations are not static: they develop and thus form a different line of narrative than that of the story (what happens). In this way, the opposition of fabula (the story) and sujet (the way in which the story is narrated and the plot) is constituted. There are novels whose aesthetic value owes much to the tension between the story (fabula) and the plot (sujet). One of the first novels which displays a high degree of awareness of this opposition is Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy analyzed in Viktor Shklovsky’s Theory of Fiction. Analysis of Narrative Situations isolates their most important constitutive elements and thus lays the foundations of the typology of narratives (narrative techniques, strategies). (1) NARRATIVE MODE Distinctive opposition: narrator vs. non-narrator (reflector), telling vs. showing 169

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Who narrates the story? The story is either told by the narrator (Fielding’s Tom Jones), or the narrator may be partially or totally absent. In the former case, it is telling that prevails, in the latter case showing is the main way (these concepts were introduced by Henry James, Percy Lubbock & Norman Friedman; alternative terms: panoramic presentation vs. scenic presentation). If the narrator is absent, the reflector (“non-narrator”) becomes the main mediator of showing (Stephen Dedalus in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and in the beginning chapters of Ulysses). In some novels, there is a productive tension between the narrator and the reflector (Walter Scott, Waverley) in others, there are more narrators (Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights) or more reflectors (William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, which also makes a productive use of the polarity between narrators and reflectors). (2) NARRATIVE PERSON Distinctive opposition: the narrator belongs to the world inhabited by the characters vs. is separated from this world; the existential sphere of the narrator is identical with that of the characters vs. …is non-identical… Is the narrator inside or outside the novelistic world? It may appear that if the narrator is inside the world represented in the novel and is one of the characters, the novel is a first-person narrative, it is in ichform (Dickens’ David Copperfield). Yet there are examples of the novels told in the first person (Fielding’s Tom Jones) where the narrator is separated from the characters by his omniscience. In this case, the relationship of the narrator to the main hero has the priority: such novels are often told as a third-person narrative, narrated in er-form. In some novels (George Eliot’s Middlemarch, Henry James’ The Ambassadors) the er-form of the narrative corresponds to the position of the narrator outside the represented world. In other novels, e.g., Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the narrator is, on the one hand, a part of the world of the characters (the novel tells especially about events from Tristram’s childhood), but, on the other hand, he is separated from them by a specific narrative situation (the conversation with a lady and a gentleman, who represent the readers).

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(3) NARRATIVE PERSPECTIVE (point-of-view) Distinctive opposition: the novel is narrated “from inside” vs. “from outside”; “inner” vs. “outer” perspective; the reader is encouraged vs. discouraged to identify with the experience of the main hero(es) How does the reader experience the story, the represented reality? In Melville’s Moby Dick the readers are continuously invited to experience the events of the whaling voyage in different ways, from the direct participation in “dramatic scenes” to some very abstract reflections of the narrator. In contrast to this “inner” perspective, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy develops “outer” perspective based on the ironic distancing of the narrator from the novelistic world. This outer perspective achieves objectivist features in many of nineteenth century novels: especially in the works of Naturalism (Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Hardy).

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