The Three Genres and the Interpretation of Lyric [Course Book ed.] 9781400856671

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THE THREE GENRES AND THE INTERPRETATION OF LYRIC

THE THREE GENRES AND THE INTERPRETATION OF LYRIC

WILLIAM ELFORD ROGERS

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY

Copyright © 1983 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom Princeton University Press, Guildford, Surrey ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data will be found on the last printed page of this book This book has been composed in Lmotron Bembo Clothbound editions of Princeton University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and binding materials are chosen for strength and durability Paperbacks, while satisfactory for personal collections, are not usually suitable for library rebinding Printed in the United States of America by Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey

Acknowledgments

I gratefully acknowledge the support from the National En­ dowment for the Humanities that made the writing of this book possible. I wish also to thank Professor Helen Vendler, whose intellect, critical sensitivity, and human kindness have inspired and encouraged me for several years now, and with­ out whom this book might have been conceived, but cer­ tainly would not have been delivered in its present form. Several people have read and commented on drafts of var­ ious portions, and have discussed the ideas in the book with me. In this category I wish to mention especially Professor T. Price Caldwell, Professor Paul L. Gaston, Professor Mary I. Oates, and Professor Marx Wartofsky. The administration of Furman University granted me a leave of absence to work on the book, and I thank my colleagues at Furman, who provided a congenial atmosphere for work and thought. Professor Gilbert Allen and Professor Alan Axelrod of the Furman University faculty read the whole manuscript of the book and commented helpfully. I thank William Hively of Princeton University Press for his careful editing of the man­ uscript. The errors that remain are due to my own dullness, sloth, or perversity. Finally, I affectionately acknowledge the support of my wife, who listened to my ideas at every stage from the in­ choate to the (I hope) coherent, with interest that was either genuine or at least successfully feigned. Greenville, South Carolina, 1981

Emily Dickinson, "Because I could not stop for Death," reprinted by permission of the publishers and the Trustees of Amherst Col­ lege from The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by Thomas H. John­ son, Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Copyright 1951, © 1955, 1979 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College.

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John Donne, "Show me deare Christ," reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press from Helen Gardner, ed.,John Donne: The Divine Poems, corrected edition, Oxford University Press, 1966. George Herbert, "The British Church," reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press from F. E. Hutchinson, ed., The Works of George Herbert, corrected edition, Oxford University Press, 1972. Andrew Marvell, "On a Drop of Dew," reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press from H. M. Margoliouth, ed., The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, 1967. "Nou goth sonne vnder wod," reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press from Carleton Brown, ed., English Lyrics of the XIIIth Century, Oxford University Press, 1932. Edmund Spenser, Fowre Hymnes and The Faerie Queene, reprinted by permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press from Edwin Greenlaw et al., eds., The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, TheJohns Hopkins University Press, 1932—47. Wallace Stevens, "The Rock," reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1972. William Carlos Williams, "Spring and All," Collected Earlier Poems: Copyright 1944 by William Carlos Williams. Reprinted by permis­ sion of New Directions Publishing Corporation. William Carlos Williams, "A Sort of Song," Collected Later Poems: Copyright 1938 by New Directions. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Rec­ ollections of Early Childhood," reprinted by permission of Oxford University Press from E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, ed., The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, Oxford University Press, 1947. William Butler Yeats, "Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop," re­ printed with permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., from Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. William Butler Yeats, "Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman," re­ printed with permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., from

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

vii

Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats. Copyright 1933 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1961 by Bertha Georgie Yeats. William Butler Yeats, "Leda and the Swan," reprinted with per­ mission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., from Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats. Copyright 1928 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1956 by Georgie Yeats. William Butler Yeats, "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," re­ printed with permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., from Collected Poems by William Butler Yeats. Copyright 1919 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1947 by Bertha Georgie Yeats.

Table of Contents

CHAPTER Ι CHAPTER II

Introduction

3

Lyric, Epic, Dramatic: Genres as Interpretive Models

9

The Anomalous Voice and the Impersonal Lyric

77

CHAPTER HI Standards of Interpretation and

Evaluation

121

CHAPTER iv Gestures Toward a Literary History of

Lyric

176

Index

271

THE THREE GENRES AND THE INTERPRETATION OF LYRIC

Introduction

The discipline of hermeneutics in general, and of literary crit­ icism in particular, is in a state of extraordinary ferment. Ferment is healthy when it calls into question the assump­ tions that we have never articulated or that we have forgot­ ten we ever made. One's assumptions perhaps depend ulti­ mately on one's temperament or even one's faith, but that is all the more reason for articulating them. In this book I shall try to articulate certain assumptions about literary works and the nature and ends of criticism, and I shall try to see what consequences follow. My assumptions depend on who I am. I am, among other things, an academic literary critic. This book is directed to other academic literary critics. I teach literature, and that means that I hold forth as though there is a discipline of literary criticism, internally consistent, valid for others, and com­ municable. Perhaps my leading assumption, then, is that lit­ erary criticism is in some sense possible as philosophical in­ quiry, that there is something intellectually valuable about the activities of interpreting and evaluating, beyond the aes­ thetic or purely subjective benefits. This assumption of course begs the fundamental question about literary criticism. But I think that the fundamental question will not be answered until we have a philosophy of language adequate to explain what literary works are and how language itself is possible. To my mind, it follows from this leading assumption that the literary critic does not claim to be either a scientist or a metaphysician. He cannot approach the object of his study as something existing apart from himself and his apprehen­ sion of it. The literary critic does not predict; there are no empirical tests for the correctness of an interpretation or a value-judgment. There is no scientific "knowledge," in the narrow sense, of the literary "object." And if that is the only

4

THE THREE GENRES

kind of knowledge we accept as valid, then I think we have to admit that literary criticism does not produce valid knowl­ edge. On the other hand, the literary critic cannot derive his understanding of works by a necessary chain of reasoning from an ultimate set of abstract propositions about Being. Experience contradicts. And besides, the ground contested by various metaphysical theories is where most literary crit­ ics wisely fear to tread. But I would argue that literary critics do have something in common with both the scientist and the metaphysician. All are committed, first, to approaching human experience rationally. That is an assumption about literary criticism that would be challenged in some quarters. Nevertheless, I be­ lieve that the academic literary critic, at least, holds his place in the university both philosophically and traditionally by virtue of his commitment to rationality. By "commitment to rationality" I mean a commitment to employing logical demonstration at certain levels of the inquiry. Second, I would argue that scientist, metaphysician, and literary critic are all model-builders. Many scientists consciously think of them­ selves this way, and I shall discuss scientific models at some length in the first chapter. Metaphysicians must be modelbuilders at least insofar as they conceive of articulating the nature of reality in linguistic terms. Perhaps rationality itself, and the logical demonstration characteristic of it, are "only" models. And perhaps some of the metaphysicians, like George Santayana, conceive of themselves as building models in a more profound sense—though Santayana insisted for that very reason that he was not writing metaphysics. Another of my assumptions, then, is that the literary critic is building models that will help him articulate insights into literary works, and that he should always think of himself that way. He is nei­ ther accumulating knowledge nor making statements about the ultimate nature of Being. From the critic's commitment to rationality and to modelbuilding, it follows that the critic is not a "deconstructor" of texts, to adapt a term currently fashionable. The deconstruc-

INTRODUCTION

5

tor uses the vocabulary of traditional logic and Western met­ aphysics to overturn logic and metaphysics, and he uses any particular model only to demonstrate its failure. The "deconstruction" of texts might produce interesting readings, but the process is founded on an assumption that, to the extent that it can be articulated at all, means that criticism is not philosophically possible in the sense in which I want to use that term. The critic who is neither scientist, metaphysician, nor deconstructor builds his models ex post facto, and he uses them not to produce his understanding of works, but to articulate his understanding. The distinctions I shall make in this book, and I think ultimately all critical distinctions, arise not be­ cause of the nature of things in general or of literary works in particular, but because of the nature of the act of interpre­ tation. That is, the distinctions appear and can be made sense of only after interpretation has occurred. Realizing this saves the critic from claiming to produce scientific or metaphysical knowledge. Hoping that the distinctions can nevertheless be made part of a logically coherent interpretive model saves him from being a deconstructor. Instead of showing how traditional critical concepts fail, I want to see what, if any­ thing, can be done with them. I want to begin with certain traditional concepts that for a long time have seemed to make a certain kind of sense. I want to strip them down, as it were, to a minimum signification, to see what kind of sense they can make, exactly, if we are going to retain them in critical discourse and use them in the way we want to use them. I assume, then, that it makes sense to think of some terms as problematic or "axiomatic"—that is, as terms at first only loosely, vaguely, or operationally defined, but allowed into discourse precisely to explore the nature of the terms them­ selves and to allow them gradually to emerge into fuller explicitness. I do not think of myself as deriving the three tra­ ditional genres by means of metaphysical argument. I think of myself as finding them already immanent in critical dis­ course, as problematic but perhaps useful terms. Then, I want

6

THE THREE GENRES

to explain how those concepts can legitimately enter into the interpretive process and thereby themselves achieve fuller explicitness. In this book I am primarily concerned with the interpre­ tation of lyric poetry. But the concept of "lyric" is itself problematic, so the first task is to construct an interpretive model in terms of which "lyric" can begin to achieve some definite meaning. That is what I attempt to do in Chapter I, and since the model erected there also produces the concepts of "epic" and "dramatic," I have a good deal to say about these traditional broad genres as well. Chapter I necessarily proceeds in a backward way. The academic literary critic is by trade conservative, a preserver and transmitter of the tra­ dition. Originality is not impossible for him, certainly; but when he transcends his tradition, he does so not by design but because he cannot help doing so. The immediate ques­ tion about "lyric" is whether that concept and the more gen­ eral concept of "genre" itself need to be discarded. I am ar­ guing that we need not discard the concepts, but that preserving them requires looking at them in a special way. I first take up, then, the strongest arguments I know against preserving the concept of "genre," in order to see what char­ acteristics any genre-theory must have that hopes to meet these objections. My genre-theory is what it is because I think it provides a way of retaining and making useful the prob­ lematic concept of "genre," and not because I think the the­ ory necessarily corresponds to real categories of being. Chapter II deals with two different problematic cases— poems of anomalous voice, and impersonal poems—in an attempt to define more precisely what it means to read a poem as lyrical. In other words, in Chapter III hope to show how the concept "lyric" can be useful to the critic in articu­ lating felt distinctions between works. But this book is about the interpretation of lyric. The con­ cept of "interpretation" is also a problem, in that there are important questions about the possibility of "valid" interpre­ tation. Chapter III addresses the general problem of correct-

INTRODUCTION

7

ness in interpretation, and argues that the concept of "cor­ rectness" is compatible with my interpretive model. It will soon appear that my genre-theory does not provide a way of arguing whether interpretations are correct. And yet, the central issue in hermeneutic theory is the issue of correctness. Because of the circumstances of its birth from the Heideggerian tradition, my genre-theory might, indeed, be taken to suggest that any interpretation is as correct as any other. In Chapter III, I am concerned to show that the theory does not require one to adopt a theory of interpretation as free play. Many academic critics, and I myself, would not be satisfied with a genre-theory that demanded an understanding of reading as free play or as deconstruction. Indeed, one would have to question the intellectual honesty of the academic critic who holds such a theory and at the same time imposes on his students his own interpretive disciplines. Because of my guiding assumptions, it seems to me of fundamental impor­ tance to demonstrate that my genre-theory, in spite of its affinities with the Heideggerian tradition, is compatible with the concept of "correctness" in interpretation. Also in Chap­ ter III, I try to define the relationship between interpretation and evaluation, and to enunciate some possible criteria of evaluation consistent with my model. Finally, Chapter IV applies the model to particular poems from various literary periods, showing how the model can provide a basis for making critical distinctions and a structure for articulating similarities and differences between poems. Articulating comparisons is the preliminary task of any "lit­ erary history" that aspires to organize interpretive statements or to classify works. Thus, the book is about one-half theory (Chapters I and III) and about one-half application (Chapters II and IV). The deficiencies of this plan are obvious. A book like this cannot do justice to the large body of hermeneutic theory and genre-theory, and still get around to talking about par­ ticular literary works in full detail. Nor, on the other hand, can I often give full readings of poems, since every poem

8

THE THREE GENRES

must be chosen to illustrate some theoretical point. I can hope only to have struck some sort of balance between theory and exemplification. Not the least of the deficiencies in a work with a theoretical dimension is that all of my examples come from English and American poetry. I am not competent to write on other literatures, and I cannot pretend even to be expert in the literary periods the examples come from. I have, I think, never done full justice to the literary works. It seems to be precisely the characteristic of good literary works that they never yield fully to theory. But I have tried to be as faithful as possible to my experience of the poems as poles of the interpretive act.

CHAPTER I

Lyric, Epic, Dramatic: Genres as Interpretive Models

A theory of genre that will produce certainty about the real nature of literary works must await an answer to the ques­ tion, "How is language possible?" Current theories that treat language "scientifically" in the narrow sense, as an object among other objects, must fail to deal adequately with the consciousness of meaning in the speaking and understanding subject. Precisely where the structuralist enterprise attempts to usurp the task of hermeneutics, as Paul Ricoeur points out, it oversteps its limits as a science.1 On the other hand, philosophies of language that begin from the thinking sub­ ject and postulate a prehnguistic consciousness soon run against the problem of accounting for the objectivity of the spoken or written word. Maurice Merleau-Ponty labels the latter ap­ proach "intellectuahst." The intellectualist fails to explain "why thought tends towards expression as towards its completion, . . . why the thinking subject himself is in a kind of igno­ rance of his thoughts so long as he has not formulated them for himself, or even spoken and written them . "2 MerIeau-Ponty adopts a phenomenological point of view toward language, and in Phenomenology of Perception he calls the "open and indefinite power of giving significance" in language an "ultimate fact" (p. 194). We are invited to discern beneath thinking which basks in its acquisitions, and offers merely a brief resting-place ' "Structure and Hermeneutics," trans Kathleen McLaughlin, m The Conflict of Interpretations Essays in Hermeneutics, ed Don Ihde (Evanston, 111 North­ western University Press, 1974) 2 Phenomenology of Perception, trans Colin Smith (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, c!962), ρ 177

10

THE THREE GENRES

in the unending process of expression, another thought which is struggling to establish itself, and succeeds only by bending the resources of constituted language to some fresh usage. This operation must be considered as an ultimate fact, since any explanation of it—whether empiricist, reducing new meanings to given ones; or idealist, positing an absolute knowledge immanent in the most primitive forms of knowledge—would amount to a denial of it. Language outruns us. . . . (pp. 390-91) It follows that "There is no analysis capable of making lan­ guage crystal clear and arraying it before us as if it were an object. The act of speech is clear only for the person who is actually speaking or listening ..." (p.391). Kant attempted to place the cognitive knowledge of math­ ematics and the natural sciences on a firm basis by answering the question, "How are synthetic a priori judgments possi­ ble?" If Merleau-Ponty is right, there will be no Kant to answer the question, "How is language possible?" If so, then no philosophy of culture is possible that aims at cognitive knowledge in the same sense as the natural sciences. Lan­ guage is the cultural object par excellence, if not the ground of all other cultural objects. It is clear only that, as Ernst Cassirer says, "A critical philosophy of culture . . . must avoid both the Scylla of naturalism and the Charybdis of metaphysics."3 By "metaphysics" here I think Cassirer means something like Merleau-Ponty's "idealism" or "intellectualism." But scientists and mathematicians were elaborating their concepts and accumulating knowledge before Kant, and there is no reason why historians, philosophers of culture, and lit­ erary critics cannot do the same thing in some sense, even if the human studies never find their Kant. The writings of Cassirer himself (The Logic of the Humanities and The Philos­ ophy of Symbolic Forms, in particular) and of Wilhelm Dilthey, for example, are valuable even if they are unsatisfactory 3 The Logic of the Humanities, trans. Clarence Smith Howe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 109.

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

11

as metaphysics. Dilthey tried to enunciate the categories of the "human sciences" as Kant had done for the natural sci­ ences. If hermeneutics is the central discipline of the human studies, as Dilthey thought, then we must have interpretive concepts before we can take even the first step in the disci­ pline. To "interpret" or to "understand" a cultural object is the counterpart of "knowing" a natural law, and there must be interpretive concepts to bring order to our understanding of cultural objects if our work is to be worthy of the name of "discipline"—or, as Dilthey would have it, the name of "science" in the broad sense. There is every reason, how­ ever, to be as clear as possible from the beginning about the nature of these interpretive concepts. The concepts of literary genre are interpretive concepts that belong to a particular branch of the human studies. But we do not know how language is possible, and we would have to know that to give genre-concepts genuine metaphysical status. When I speak of metaphysics, I mean a philosophical system (therefore logically consistent) that at­ tempts to explain (in one way or another) on rational grounds the totality of being, including the possibility of having knowledge of that being. Until we can fully explain the pos­ sibility of language, we can scarcely expect to see how pro­ visional concepts of literary analysis might fit into such a system. The problem of language itself is a stumbling-block for many metaphysical systems, if not all of them. In short, we do not know what metaphysical status, if any, genreconcepts have. Although I shall be concerned only with broad genres (lyric, epic, dramatic), the same holds for narrow genreconcepts, too—even if narrow genres (e.g., ode, sonnet, bal­ lad) should appear to be different sorts of things from broad genres. However much the interpretive concepts proposed here resemble metaphysical categories, then, they are valid only as models. The concepts are non-metaphysical, in the sense that Santayana claims in Scepticism and Animal Faith that his philosophy is not metaphysics: it is instead a way to account

12

THE THREE GENRES

for human experience as economically and as satisfyingly as possible, and everyone remains free to "clean the windows of his own soul" in some better way if he can. For me, the notion of the model is crucial in genre-theory. That does not necessarily detract from the cognitive significance of genretheory. There is perhaps not even a sharp distinction be­ tween the natural sciences and the human studies in just this specific respect. In this century even the natural sciences con­ ceive of cognition as modeling. Physics, always the exem­ plary natural science, in the quantum formalism abandons causal explanation for mathematical modeling that results in probabilistic predictions. And indeed, until we have a meta­ physics that does everything it is supposed to do, we might do well to avoid drawing a sharp distinction between models and metaphysics. It seems obvious, though, that some models are better than others—but discriminating in the human studies is a tricky business. In physics, the mathematical model that most economically "accounts for" all the data is the best. But in the human studies it is not always so clear what one means by "accounting for." Does it mean causal explanation? Does it mean explaining the significance of a cultural object in its own time, or its significance to the present time? Nor is it clear in the human studies what the "data" are. Indeed, "finding" the datum itself requires an act of interpretation, since the datum represented by a cultural object is never just an event in space and time. A meaning is also "attached" to the event. Thus, the data that a literary critic finds depend on the questions he is asking of his text. That is why R. S. Crane recommends that we accept a "critical pluralism": The pluralistic critic . . . would take the view that the basic principles and methods of any distinguishable mode of criticism are tools of inquiry and interpretation rather than formulations of the "real" nature of things and that the choice of any special "language" among the many possible for the study of poetry, is a practical decision to

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

13

be justified solely in terms of the kind of knowledge the critic wants to attain.4 I do not agree with Crane that criticism is therefore doomed to "strict relativity" (p. 27), and I shall discuss the matter further in Chapter III. Ricoeur tries to reduce, at least, the critical pluralism. He admits that "For a linguistic philoso­ phy, all interpretations are equally valid within the limits of the theory which founds the given rules of reading"; but Ricoeur also says that such interpretations are only "lan­ guage games" unless the theory grounds the interpretation in "a particular existential function."5 For Ricoeur the pri­ mary interpretations are (1) the psychoanalytic, (2) that of the "phenomenology of the spirit," and (3) that of the "phe­ nomenology of religion" (p. 23). The existential functions in question are Heideggerian—roughly, the human being (1) finds himself "thrown" into the world as a personality formed by a past he cannot control; (2) is in the present as in a "situa­ tion" defined by his own possibilities with respect to that situation; and (3) looks toward his end (death) as that which lends "authenticity" to his existence. Thus, while Ricoeur admits that any particular hermeneutic model is to be justi­ fied on the basis of what one wants to know from a text, he nevertheless suggests that some things are more important to know than others. Questions still nag, of course. But Ricoeur's remarks do bring into sharp focus the difficulty that follows immediately when we admit that genre-theory con­ structs models instead of metaphysical systems—namely, the difficulty of knowing just what the models tell us and just what they can reasonably be expected to do. One way to approach the question is to examine existing genre-theories to see what problems present themselves. But before doing that, I want once again to contrast the methods 4 The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto· University of Toronto Press, 1953), p. 31. 5 "Existence and Hermeneutics," trans. Kathleen McLaughlin, in The Conflict of Interpretations, p. 23.

14

THE THREE GENRES

and assumptions of the natural sciences with those of the human studies, in order to distinguish from each other the three important and problematic concepts "knowledge," "understanding," and "interpretation."

The Nature of Understanding Many of the most important models of the natural sciences aim at a causal explanation of phenomena. Notable examples of such models are the Copernican universe, classical New­ tonian mechanics, and the Bohr atom. Models in the human studies are not fundamentally of the same nature. We can assign causes for a historical event, even for the production of a literary work, and that might be an important part of our task. But cultural objects are essentially characterized by meaning. Causal categories cannot exhaust what is to be understood about the cultural object. As Dilthey says, "Any empiricism which foregoes an explanation of what happens in the mind in terms of the understood connections of mental life is necessarily sterile."6 Most important, models in the human studies cannot be called upon to predict. Thus, those models are set apart from even the scientific models that, like the quantum formalism, do not necessarily make statements about cause and effect. It is a familiar, and unsatisfactory, distinction that the natural sciences formulate laws subsum­ ing many individual phenomena, whereas the human studies are concerned with fully understanding individual phenom­ ena in their concreteness. A more satisfactory way of for­ mulating this distinction is to say that models in the human studies are not predictive. For the individuals that are objects of the human studies may be anything from a fragment of a poem to the philosophy of Plato to the history of nineteenthcentury Britain—and somewhere along the line the word in­ dividual seems to lose its application, however much one is 6 "Ideas about a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology," in W Dilthey Selected Writings, trans. H. P. Rickman (Cambridge. At the University Press, cl976), p. 90.

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

15

concerned with seeing each object as unique. But still, un­ derstanding the poetic fragment, the philosophy of Plato, or the history of Britain will only in the vaguest and most in­ direct way help to predict what another poem, another phi­ losophy, or another state will be like. If, therefore, apart from such subsidiary disciplines as phi­ lology, paleography, and textual editing, the models of the human studies are not causal and so do not predict, what should they be called upon to do? I cannot do better here than to turn to the reflections of Dilthey and Heidegger on the nature of understanding. I should make it very clear at this point that I do not wish to subscribe wholeheartedly to Dilthey's ideas about the human studies, nor do I wish to "de­ rive" a genre-theory from the philosophy of Heidegger. I do wish, however, to distinguish, with these two philosophers, between the "knowledge" of science and the "understand­ ing" of the human studies. At this point, I do not mean to borrow from Dilthey and Heidegger any more than that dis­ tinction—but the distinction is crucial for my genre-theory and for my conception of what a literary critic does. Nor am I interested here in doing full justice to the concept of "sci­ entific cognition"—a very complex matter. I bring scientific cognition into the discussion only to help in clarifying the crucial concept of "understanding." And that is also how Dilthey uses the concept of scientific knowledge: . . . the sciences arrive at connections within nature through inferences by means of a combination of hypotheses while the human sciences are based on directly given mental connections. We explain nature but we understand mental life. 7 Science analyses and develops the general relationships of homogenous facts which it has thus isolated; religion, poetry and spontaneous metaphysics articulate the 7 Dilthey, "Ideas about a Descriptive and Analytical Psychology," in Se­ lected Writings, p. 89.

16

THE THREE GENRES

meaning and sense of the whole. The one knows, the other understands.8 [The disciplines of the human studies and those of the natural sciences] differ in the way in which their subjectmatter is formed, that is, in the procedure which constitutes these disciplines. In the one a mental object emerges in the understanding; in the other a physical object in knowledge.9 In his drafts toward a "Critique of Historical Reason" on the Kantian model, Dilthey points out that understanding re­ quires empathy, that it rests on a "special, personal inspira­ tion" that can nevertheless be developed as a "technique," and that it always "contains something irrational because life is irrational."10 Heidegger's Being and Time, on the other hand, stresses the dependence of the natural sciences themselves on the pri­ mary understanding of the world as the "there" of Dasein's "There-being." This primary understanding precedes all ex­ plicit cognition. In Heidegger's philosophy, "Both the hu­ man and the natural sciences are to be derived from the achievements of the intentionality of universal life. . . . Un­ derstanding is the original character of the being of human life itself."11 Dasein's (the human being's) understanding of its involvements with the world precedes conceptualization and explicit interpretation.12 We need not go far into the difficulties of Heidegger's ter­ minology to see how there arises the concept of the "hermeneutic circle," which he shares with Dilthey. Whether un8Dilthey,

"The Types of World-view and their Development in the Metaphysical Systems," in Selected Writings, p. 137. 9 Dilthey, "The Construction of the Historical World in the Human Stud­ ies," in Selected Writings, p. 175. 10 Dilthey, Selected Writings, pp. 226, 228, 230. 11 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, cl975), translation of Wahrheit und Methode, cl975 by Sheed and Ward, p. 230. 12 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, cl962), p. 191.

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

17

demanding is set over against knowledge as a distinct species, as with Dilthey, or whether it is seen as the ground of sci­ entific cognition, as with Heidegger, all interpretation already presupposes understanding. Dilthey formulates the problem thus as regards textual interpretation: the "general difficulty of all interpretation" is that "The whole of a work must be understood from individual words and their combination but full understanding of an individual part presupposes under­ standing of the whole."13 Heidegger says, "Any interpreta­ tion which is to contribute understanding, must already have understood what is to be interpreted."14 Heidegger argues that the circle is not vicious, and is not to be avoided in any case: "What is decisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way."15 That is the central problem of all interpretation, including literary interpretation. We are left, then, with the concept of interpretation as a makingexplicit of what is already understood, and understood in a way that is either different from (Dilthey), or more funda­ mental than (Heidegger), cognitive scientific knowledge. In interpretation, . . . the understanding appropriates understandingly that which is understood by it. In interpretation, understanding does not become something different. It becomes itself. Such interpretation is grounded existentially in understanding; the latter does not arise from the former. Nor is interpretation the acquiring of information about what is understood; it is rather the working-out of possibilities projected in understanding.16 It is not surprising, then, that hermeneutics has come to seem the central discipline of the human studies, with textual her­ meneutics as its exemplar. We might consider one final formulation of the difference 13

Dilthey, "The Development of Hermeneutics," in Selected Writings, p.

259. 14 15 16

Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 194. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 194—95. Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 188-89.

18

THE THREE GENRES

between the human studies and the natural sciences. Follow­ ing the lines of Heidegger's philosophy, Hans-Georg Gadamer writes that . . . in the human sciences the interest in tradition is motivated in a special way by the present and its interests. The theme and area of research are actually constituted by the motivation of the inquiry. Hence historical research is based on the historical movement in which life itself stands and cannot be understood teleologically in terms of the object into which it is enquiring. Such an object clearly does not exist at all in itself. . . . Whereas the object of the natural sciences can be described idealiter as what would be known in the perfect knowledge of nature, it is senseless to speak of a perfect knowledge of history, and for this reason it is not possible to speak of an object in itself towards which its research is directed.17 I shall take up in Chapter III the question of whether Gadamer opens the door to a vicious relativism or an unavoidable subjectivity. But certainly to see interpretation, particularly literary interpretation, as a making-explicit of understanding corresponds closely to critical experience. Before writing criticism, we generally have a sense of understanding the work, along with the sense that our task is not so much to add to our knowledge as to bring that non-explicit understanding into the light and fix it in language. We bring what we al­ ready possess into a different, explicit kind of possession that will allow us to share it. What we are doing is equivalent to assuming from the beginning that there is an understanding of literary works prior to an explicit cognitive knowing of them; that there is some sort of meaningful commerce (with­ out specifying, for the moment, just what sort) between the creator of the work and its reader; that the interpretive doc­ ument with its models can take its place in the understanding of other readers—in short, that the critical enterprise is pos17

Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 253.

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

19

sible and in some sense valid. When I say that I adopt a Heideggerian model of interpretation, I shall mean just these assumptions and no more—I shall not mean, in particular, that we are to accept Heidegger's system as the base accord­ ing to which we erect and validate all interpretations. To grant these assumptions is to grant a great deal. But it is nevertheless good to know just what model can be con­ structed on this foundation. Instead of helping us to predict, then, interpretive models in the human studies should help us to make explicit our understanding of cultural objects. I have said that genre-concepts must remain non-metaphysical as long as we cannot explain how language is possible. I shall soon try to show the objections to regarding broad genre-concepts as taxonomic, like the classifying concepts of the biological sci­ ences. If genre-concepts are to be anything in a model of interpretation constructed along Heideggerian lines, the con­ cepts themselves must be interpretive models of a particular sort. The purpose of such concepts is the making-explicit of literary understanding. Furthermore, the interpretive model should help us to make explicit our understanding of literary genre itself. Genre-concepts must have a certain peculiar na­ ture because of the nature of understanding itself. Under­ standing, as Dilthey often stresses, is always the understand­ ing of a whole. The understanding of the literary work is also at the same time an understanding of its genre, and so the genre-concept in interpreting the work must also interpret itself. I describe this peculiar nature of genre-concepts by saying that the concepts must be "reflexive" in a way that the models of the natural sciences are not. In the natural sciences a thing is always explained in terms of something else. One might explain the apparent vagaries in the motions of the planets by referring to the motion of the earth, and one might then explain the earth's motion in terms of its participation in the solar system, and the system itself in terms of gravitation, gravity perhaps in terms of fundamental properties of matter

20

THE THREE GENRES

or energy, and so ever back into obscurer first principles. Or, in a non-causal scientific model, one might "explain" the behavior of an atom in terms of some mathematical con­ struct. But at every stage it is possible to have rather exact and relatively full observation of the phenomenon before ap­ pealing to the explanatory model. We can have detailed charts of apparent planetary motions, even observe cycles and pat­ terns, before we hypothesize that the earth moves. We can observe, and even describe, without explaining. That, at least, is the regulatory idea (in the Kantian sense) of the natural sciences. It is not the same with cultural objects. To describe is al­ ways already to interpret, and already presupposes under­ standing. We understand the object at once (or we do not), and that means also already understanding whatever models will enable us to interpret it. Interpretation of the text in terms of the model constitutes also an interpretation of the model itself. The interpretive models for cultural objects must always come from the realm of what is already understood in the objects themselves—namely, the realm of mind. To understand a cultural object is precisely to place it as meaning in relation to one's own mind. Let me put this specifically in terms of literary genre. If, as I assume, genres can be in­ terpretive models, it must be, by the very nature of under­ standing, that the understanding of the work and the under­ standing of its genre are mutually constitutive; that is, we understand the work by understanding the genre, and we understand genre by understanding the work. To interpret the work in terms of the genre-concept will necessarily con­ stitute an interpretation of the genre-concept itself. But, someone might object, if understanding the work is the same as understanding the genre, why do we need sep­ arate genre-concepts at all? Will we not ultimately have as many genres as there are works? And there is a different but related objection: Must the genre-concept not already be made explicit before it can be used as an interpretive model? And in that case, will we not always be interpreting literary works

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

21

in terms of something else, some model that has already been interpreted and made explicit? One answer to these objec­ tions is of course that we might not "need" genre-concepts, but that we have them, immanent in critical discourse; so we should try to make some sense out of them. But suppose further that we can find a genre-concept such that (1) its em­ ployment does not already presuppose an explicit under­ standing of the literary work, and (2) the genre-concept, al­ though initially explicit, is explicit in an "empty" way—that is, as a concept whose meaning cannot be filled out except in the act of interpretation itself. Then the genre-concept would, as it were, reappear in the interpretation, revealed as having been primordially constitutive of the understanding of the work. If we could find genre-concepts fulfilling these requirements, we might hope to enter in the right way into the hermeneutic circle. What, then, can we say the genres are? What kind of model might result from the assumption that there are genres and that we can use them in interpre­ tation? Where might we find those peculiar reflexive con­ cepts? Much of the theoretical discussion of genre in this century has maintained that the concept of "genre" is false and mis­ leading in various ways. I believe that these objections to the concept are often forceful or even unanswerable, as long as we conceive of genre in the traditional ways. Many of the objections, I think, can be reduced to questions about the validity of genre-concepts as elements in the interpretive process. Theoreticians object to genre-theory, that is, pre­ cisely because genres as traditionally conceived cannot be properly employed as interpretive concepts. Genres as tradi­ tionally conceived are not reflexive concepts; they do not in­ terpret themselves as they interpret the work. I want to show that the strongest arguments against genre-theory are argu­ ments of this sort, because I think those arguments must ultimately be the motivation for any new genre-theory. If we want to preserve the notion of genre, then we must learn

22

THE THREE GENRES

to think of genre in ways that are not infected by the fatal problems that beset traditional genre-criticism Modem Objections to Genre-Theory I have selected the following discussions of genre not so much to exhaust the possibilities as to clarify the requirements of the model I am seeking Here and everywhere in this book, it is important to keep in mind that I am discussing genres as interpretive models That is, I am concerned with the read­ er's sense of genre in interpretation, and not with the au­ thor's sense of genre in composition It is legitimate, of course, to inquire also into the effects of an author's genre-concepts on his work, but that is not my inquiry My genre-theory is strictly a theory of interpretation, and not a theory of artistic creation One problem, indeed, with some of the genre-the­ ories that I shall discuss later is that they attempt to do both things at once account for artistic creation, and provide a theory of interpretation And theoreticians who repudiate genre-theory do so because they find the concept of "genre" destructive of sound hermeneutic practice—not necessarily because the concept is useless for explaining the process of artistic creation One such repudiation of genre-theory is Rene Wellek's 18 His sharply critical observations show especially clearly why genre-concepts, if we are going to use them as interpretive concepts, must be reflexive Wellek's objection to genre-theory, based on a survey of theories, is particularly directed at the theory of the lyric One must abandon attempts to define the general nature of the lyric or the lyrical Nothing beyond generalities of the tntest kind can result from it It seems much more profitable to turn to a study of the variety of poetry and to the history and thus to the description of genres which can be grasped in their concrete conventions and traditions (p 252) 18

"Genre Theory, the Lyric, and Erlebnts," in Discriminations Further Con­

cepts of Criticism (New Haven Yale University Press, 1970), pp 225-52

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

23

I shall have more to say about the notion of genres as "con­ crete conventions." But the immediate point is Wellek's re­ curring criticism of genre-theories: their lack of relation to the literature they are supposed to illuminate. He criticizes Emil Staiger's genre-theory, for example, because of its "lack of relation to actual poetry" and because "It could be arrived at without any literary evidence" (p. 239). Lyrical theory is at a "complete impasse" because of the nature of the terms in which the lyric is commonly explained: . . . Erlebnis, subjective, presence, Stimmung. . . . These terms cannot take care of the enormous variety, in history and in the different literatures, of lyrical forms and constantly lead into an insoluble psychological culde-sac: the supposed intensity, inwardness, immediacy of an experience which can never be demonstrated as certain and can never be shown to be relevant to the quality of art. (pp. 251-52) There are really two separate objections here. The first is that the categories people have chosen to explain the lyric are not inclusive enough. That objection is not fatal to any theory, of course. Wellek implicitly assumes that we must regard as lyric anything that substantial numbers of people have been pleased to call such, and that assumption is certainly ques­ tionable. But the second objection is more telling, and it is also more closely allied to Wellek's criticism of Staiger's the­ ory. It is precisely the objection that the theories attempt to explain literature in terms of something else—perhaps psy­ chology, or, in Staiger's case, the philosophical categories of Heidegger. Such genre-concepts lack the reflexive quality we have demanded. The psychological "intensity, inwardness, immediacy" themselves remain uninterpreted; more impor­ tant, the interpretation of the work can perfectly well go on without reference to intensity, inwardness, or immediacy. By their "lack of relation" to the literary work, Wellek seems to mean precisely that the genre-concepts are not revealed in

24

THE THREE GENRES

the interpretation as constitutive (in the Kantian sense) of the understanding of the work Wellek cites the work of Benedetto Croce, an important influence on the American New Critics, who "in his Estetica (1902), launched an attack on the concept [of genre] from which it has not recovered . . " (p. 225). Croce's aesthetic certainly provides much of the theoretical underpinning of Wellek's attack on genre, and so it is profitable to see just what Croce has to say against genre. The main thrust of Croce's attack is directed against the normative employment of genre-concepts. It is not scientifically incorrect to talk of tragedies, comedies, dramas, romances, . poems, versicles, lyrics, and the like, if it be only with a view to be understood, and to draw attention to certain groups of works, in general and approximately. . To employ words and phrases is not to establish laws and definitions. The mistake only arises when the weight of a scientific definition is given to a word. . . 19 Croce's aesthetic theory turns on the distinction between two forms of knowledge, Art and Science, respectively associated with intuitive knowledge and conceptual knowledge Croce's famous dictum that intuition is expression entails, among other things, that the expressive object (the art-work) cannot be known through concepts—and that is the problem with genretheory: "Error begins when we try to deduce the expression from the concept, and to find in what takes its place the laws of the thing whose place is taken . . This error is known as the theory of artistic and literary kinds" (p. 36) Croce's argument seems compelling as far as any normative employment of genre-concepts is concerned. But what about genre-concepts that are not normatively employed? Are such things possible? Certainly they are not, if we start with an explicit concept and then ask to what extent the work, al19 Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic as science of expression and general linguistic, trans Douglas Ainslie, rev ed (New York Noonday Press, 1953), ρ 38

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

25

ready explicitly understood, is adequate to that concept. We will not fall into that trap, however, if our genre-concepts do not presuppose an explicit understanding of the work be­ fore they can be applied. But Croce is also arguing that we are in error whenever we replace the expression with the concept—whenever, that is, we try to know art-objects through conceptual means. Croce's line of argument is still consistent with Dilthey's and Heidegger's distinction be­ tween conceptual knowledge and understanding. We interpret understood cultural objects explicitly, perhaps by means of conceptual tools (models), without knowing them through concepts. But any model that is to avoid the force of Croce's arguments must avoid imposing the genre-concepts on the work as any kind of law or rule is imposed—not even in the way that the Kantian empirical concept is a "rule" for syn­ thesizing the particulars of sensation. Avoiding Croce's ar­ gument, which is also at the heart of Wellek's criticisms, will be possible only through a kind of genre-concept that by its nature is reflexive, that itself can become fully determinate only as it makes explicit the understanding of the work. The notion of genres as "conventions," a notion Wellek apparently adapts from Croce, need not lead to Wellek's con­ clusion that genre-theory should be scrapped. E. D. Hirsch, Jr., for example, also thinks of genres as conventions, but for him genre-concepts are extremely important in interpre­ tation. Both Hirsch's and Croce's arguments suggest, how­ ever, that there are ultimately as many genres as there are works, that there is finally only the individual work to be considered apart from its affinities with other works. For Hirsch, each work has its "intrinsic genre," or that sense of the whole by means of which an interpreter can correctly understand any part in its determinacy. Since the interpreter can do this before he knows the precise sequence of words in the utterance as a whole, and since more than one sequence of words can fulfill his generic expectations without altering his understanding of the parts he has understood, it follows that this determining

26

THE THREE GENRES

sense of the whole is not identical with the particular meaning of the utterance.20 Hirsch erects the concept of intrinsic genre to provide a prin­ ciple for determining which implications belong to the au­ thor's meaning and which do not. Hirsch believes that one can argue only to probability when attempting to determine the author's meaning: "the intrinsic genre is always con­ strued, that is, guessed, and is never in any important sense given"; there can be a "wrong guess," that is, a "final, ge­ neric sense of the whole different from the speaker's" (p 88). Although Hirsch insists that he does not accept all the con­ sequences of Heidegger's doctrine of understanding and interpretation, nevertheless in his theory of intrinsic genre he comes very close to admitting that one must understand a text (at least, must have an idea of "what it is") before he can interpret it. In other words, some kind of conceptual model comes into play whenever understanding is made ex­ plicit. Hirsch is not talking only about the traditional genres, of course, but about any sort of conceptual "whole" that enters into interpretation. But his arguments certainly apply to the traditional genres—as his choice of the word genre sug­ gests—when those genres are conceived as they traditionally are. Hirsch repeats that genre-concepts are both "heuristic" and "constitutive." What we find is determined by what we are looking for, and vice versa, at all stages of interpretation but the last. Then, the final revision of the genre-concept should "cease to be heuristic at all, for knowledge of mean­ ing . . . cannot be more explicit than its object permits" (p 274). One need not make what Hirsch calls the "ethical choice"—that is, to adopt the author's intention as the stand­ ard of interpretation—to see Hirsch's important insight into the nature of genre-concepts The genre-concepts themselves are unavoidably involved in the hermeneutic circle But Hirsch 20

Validity in Interpretation (New Haven Y a l e University P r e s s , 1967), ρ

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

27

believes that the circularity ultimately means having to dis­ card every genre-concept but the last. Hirsch, then, thinks that genre-concepts get altered and then discarded in the process of interpretation. For Hirsch, this process of alteration makes the broad genre-concepts suspect, and the broader they are, the more suspect they are. Although it is by means of "broad, heuristic type concepts" that "new intrinsic genres are able to come into existence and are capable of being understood" (p. 104), nevertheless At the level of history there is no real entity such as a genre if by that word we mean a type concept that can adequately define and subsume all the individuals that are called by the same generic name. . . . Obviously such a broad type concept can validly represent some abstractedly identical traits among all the individuals it subsumes, but it is certainly not a species concept which sufficiently defines those individuals. . . . The larger genre concepts represent something real only to the extent that they represent norms and conventions that were actually brought into play. (pp. 108-9) Hirsch correctly concludes from this line of argument that definitions of genres, considered as conventions, cannot properly be used to interpret individual texts, because the text must be interpreted before it can be subsumed under the genre; because, indeed, large numbers of texts must be in­ terpreted before the genre can be defined. Hirsch's argument is forceful, and it might at first seem sufficient to discourage any attempts to employ broad genre-concepts interpretively. Hirsch arrives at a conclusion (with respect to broad genres only, of course) similar to Croce's, but by a different route. Whereas Croce argues that no conceptual knowledge is ade­ quate to the intuitive expression of Art, and therefore a for­ tiori that no pre-formulated genre-concept can be adequate to the intuitive understanding of the work, Hirsch argues that conceptual knowledge can be adequate to the meaning of a work, but that for that very reason any concept broader

28

THE THREE GENRES

than the meaning the author had in mind is ultimately inad­ equate for interpretation. But it is noteworthy that Hirsch's model of interpretation at least allows for employing relatively broad genre-con­ cepts. That is, to put it crudely, when we begin reading we may have no more definite idea than that we will be con­ fronted with a poem; we might then observe that we have a sonnet, and a Renaissance love-sonnet at that; and finally we see that we have this sonnet. So an increasing specification of genre-concept goes on at every stage. The trick, in Hirsch's model, is simply not to stop too soon and attribute to this sonnet some characteristic that many Renaissance love-sonnets share but that the author of this sonnet did not intend. Hirsch's arguments have force as long as we regard genres as being essentially conventions. To regard genres as con­ ventions is to regard genre-concepts as merely descriptive instead of interpretive. If we say that something is a "con­ vention," we are merely describing the phenomenon and not interpreting it explicitly. Even an author who adopts a par­ ticular mode of speaking because it is conventional does not interpret the convention explicitly—he merely understands and adopts it. This can be made clear by thinking about the state­ ment that language is "conventional." The statement sub­ sumes language under another category, but it is a category that by its nature is not interpreted. If we ask why the con­ vention is what it is, the answer is that we do not know. The "conventional" is essentially that which is understood without being explicitly interpreted. Hissing, for example, is a convention that connotes one thing in Japan and another thing entirely in the United States. But we do not normally explain why these two peoples have hit upon hissing to ex­ press what it expresses for them—unless we are anthropol­ ogists. Wejust hiss at the appropriate times in the appropri­ ate places, if we understand the convention, and when anyone asks us why we are hissing we say that it is conventional in such a situation. The case is similar with literary genres, con­ sidered as conventions. In an important sense, to say that

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

29

literary genres are conventions is to say no more than that they are one phenomenon, a large and complex phenome­ non, of language. Genre-concepts for the interpreter then be­ come descriptive concepts, arrived at by abstracting from in­ dividual interpreted texts certain shared qualities; and the nature of genre itself is not interpreted except insofar as it is seen to belong to the overarching system of conventions that is lan­ guage. It follows that broad genre-concepts may be useful for describing literature or language considered as objects of scientific research, but that broad genre-concepts must al­ ways be transcended, left behind, in the interpretation of any particular work. By insisting that broad genres are in some sense not "real," Hirsch seems to mean that they are uninterpretable—that they are intelligible only as conventions. Hirsch's genre-theory is not a theory of genres, but an ar­ gument that such a theory is impossible. If genres are con­ ventions, Hirsch's argument is decisive. Hirsch's objections help us to see that the model we are seeking—namely, one that assumes the interpretive validity of broad genre-con­ cepts—must be such that the broad genre remains constitutive of the individual work at every stage of interpretation, in­ cluding the last. Therefore, we want a model such that the broad genre-concepts are reflexive and not merely descriptive. Such reflexive concepts would not be transcended in the course of interpretation, because the meaning of the reflexive con­ cept would not be completely filled out until the interpreta­ tion is completely explicit. To see broad genres as conven­ tions, as exhibiting the conventionality that every other phenomenon of language also exhibits, will not provide such a model. Both Wellek's and Hirsch's arguments, therefore, insist that broad genre-concepts break down in interpretation because genres are conventions and literary works are individuals. Strictly speaking, since we want to see what conclusions we reach by assuming that broad genre-concepts are valid in interpretation, we could have rejected both Wellek's and Hirsch's arguments ex hypothesi. But the model I am con-

30

THE THREE GENRES

structing is what it is primarily because the usual ways of looking at genre cannot provide answers to the questions raised by theoreticians like Wellek and Hirsch. Now, I want to discuss some of those traditional ways of looking at genre, to see where they fail and, therefore, what we must do that is different to preserve the concept of "genre" as interpretive concept.

Some Genre-Theories I shall talk about two kinds of broad genre-theory. One is the kind of theory based on the creation of a continuous log­ ical space, as it were, into which any particular work may be uniquely placed. One might visualize, for example, a kind of rectangular coordinate system (or even a coordinate sys­ tem with more than two dimensions) in which the axes rep­ resent opposing metaphysical principles. Then, theoretically, every literary work could be placed at some unique point in the field according to its observed participation in each meta­ physical principle. Then genres could be defined by drawing more or less arbitrary lines to delimit areas and set off group­ ings within the logical space. The essential feature of this kind of genre-theory is the continuity of the logical space. The experience that corresponds to that continuity is that many texts seem not clearly affiliated with any given genre— there are prose poems, novels with "lyrical" passages, short poems with dramatic situations and rudimentary plots, and so on. This kind of theory stresses the affinities between works of different genres. The example I shall analyze is Paul Hernadi's "polycentric" genre-theory (Beyond Genre: New Direc­ tions in Literary Classification, 1972). Hernadi's theory follows from an extensive survey of genre-theories, and his logical space seems to provide a fair example of the strengths and weaknesses of this sort of theory. The other kind of theory I wish to discuss is represented here by the genre-theories of Hegel and of Emil Staiger. This kind of theory stresses the differences between works of dif-

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

31

ferent genres, and instead of constructing a logical space, it begins from metaphysical principles considered mutually ex­ clusive Then each literary work is subsumed under one of the selected principles according to the dominant impression of the work Genre-theories in the German idealist tradition are usually of this sort, and the metaphysical categories in question usually depend on the concepts of "subject" and "object "To erect this kind of theory into a logical space with the metaphysical principles as its poles would be foreign to the spirit of such theories For this kind of theory seeks to delimit each genre-concept sharply by interpreting it in terms of some ultimate principle, whereas the theory of the logical space has no such ambitions Crane talks about two ways of deriving principles—one is to start from the empir­ ical fact and decide what causes are necessary and sufficient, the other is to start from some "abstract" principle and de­ rive other principles deductively 21 In spirit the theories of logical space incline to the former method, and the theories of metaphysical principles to the latter The one tries to ex­ plain only why the mind tends to group the given works in genres, the other tries to explain why the works are such that they invite grouping in the first place The theories of logical space tend to center on the interpreter, the theories of meta­ physical principles on the creator Hernadi's rather elaborate logical space is based on "the observation that imaginative literature relies on a more or less balanced interplay of verbal presentation and artistic rep­ resentation "22 The main poles of his logical space are there­ fore vision (the explicit thematization of experience) and ac­ tion (mimesis, the representation of experience) Setting up these primary poles already distinguishes the thematic modes of literature (such as adages and fables) from the dramatic modes But the primary poles also create the possibility that action can be envisioned, and so we get the narrative modes, and the 21

Crane, Languages of Criticism, pp 23-25

22

Beyond Genre

New Directions in Literary Classification (Ithaca, N Y

CorneJJ University Press, 1972), ρ 168

32

THE THREE GENRES

possibility that vision can be enacted, and so we get the lyric modes. I shall look most closely at what Hernadi says about the lyric modes, since lyric is my particular concern: lyric has a complex rather than a simple generic principle—the principle of integrating the "timeless" quality of thematic vision with the intersubjective temporal process of dramatic action into the private time and perspective of enacted vision. . . . While adages merely imply a mind that has arrived at clearly evoked insights, the lyric poet evokes the inner voice of a man now striving to verbalize. . . . (p. 163) Hernadi constructs from his principles a lozenge, a logical space with vision in the north, action in the south, envisioned action in the east, and enacted vision in the west. The lozenge contains literary works proper. Beyond its boundaries in the northerly region of vision, we have "assertive discourse"; beyond its boundaries in the southerly region of action, we have "wordless pantomime." With thematic modes in the north, dramatic modes in the south, narrative modes in the east, and lyric modes in the west, every literary work finds its unique spot in the lozenge. But Hernadi's genre-theory is "polycentric"—within each of the regions he erects a second axis, which he calls the "Compass of Perspectives." Any discourse exhibits one of four perspectives: (1) the authorial, where the emphasis is on an author, more or less clearly realized, who is speaking to the reader; (2) the interpersonal, where the discourse is repre­ sented as part of the objective world accessible at once to both author and reader; (3) the private, where the discourse is represented as overheard, as taking no thought about an audience; and (4) the dual, or "substitutionary narration," an interesting concept of Hernadi's that means a sort of speak­ ing in unison—either of the author and his character, or of the speaker and the reader. These four perspectives establish a kind of coordinate system, with the authorial perspective

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

33

defining the positive (upward) direction on the vertical axis, the interpersonal perspective defining the negative (down­ ward) direction on the vertical axis, the dual defining the pos­ itive direction (to the right) on the horizontal axis, and the private defining the negative direction (to the left) on the hor­ izontal axis. Placing this coordinate system in each of the four regions of his lozenge, Hernadi derives sixteen sub-regions for liter­ ary works to inhabit. In the northern (thematic) region there are the following genres: adage, or thematic discourse in which the authorial perspective dominates; expository dialogue and al­ legorical drama, or thematic discourse in which the interper­ sonal perspective dominates; fable, or thematic discourse in which the dual perspective dominates; and direct appeal to reader, or thematic discourse in which the private perspective dom­ inates. In the southern (dramatic) region, Hernadi locates the following: thematic statements in drama, where the authorial perspective dominates; conversational dialogue, dominated by the interpersonal perspective; chorus and chorus characters, dominated by the dual perspective; and soliloquy, dominated by the private perspective. In the eastern (narrative) region, we find survey (authorial perspective), directly quoted speech (interpersonal perspective), substitutionary narration (dual per­ spective), and interior monologue (private perspective). And fi­ nally, the western (lyric) region contains four kinds of lyrics: meditative poetry, from the authorial perspective; quasi-dramatic monologue, from the interpersonal perspective; objective correl­ ative (T. S. Eliot's notion), from the dual perspective; and songlike poems, from the private perspective. I am less interested in the details of Hernadi's classification than I am in exhibiting the nature of the logical space he creates. Hernadi summarizes the system in a chart on page 166 of his book, and the chart also appeared previously in Hernadi's article "Verbal Worlds Between Action and Vi­ sion: A Theory of the Modes of Discourse," College English, 33 (1971), 24. In the chart, Hernadi leaves gaps between the regions containing the modes, but strictly speaking the dia-

34

THE THREE GENRES

gram should be continuous. The clue is Hernadi's own ad­ mission that "the modes of discourse are not always clearly distinguishable" (p. 168). Hernadi's genre-theory has the necessary advantages and defects of any theory modeled on a logical space. The model is ultimately scientific in nature. It is ideally a scheme of clas­ sification that would permit the precise placing of any future literary work at its unique position in the continuous logical space. It thus "explains" genre by offering a hypothesis to account for the tendency of readers to see certain works as belonging together. But the apparent advantages of the model constitute its defects as far as our purposes are concerned. First, the model demands that explicit interpretation occur before genre-concepts can be brought into play. As with all scientific models, we must know what we have before we may attempt to classify or explain it. In order to classify a poem as lyric, for example, to see it as "enacted vision," one must already have explicitly thematized the content of the poem and the speaker's attitude toward it. The concept of "enacted vision" is descriptive, not interpretive, as Hernadi's model employs it. Hernadi does not show the understanding of the work to be mutually constitutive with the understand­ ing of "enacted vision"; instead, the work as explicitly understood is taken as exemplifying the previously grasped concept of "enacted vision." If we then insist on using "en­ acted vision" as a concept or rule for interpreting or evalu­ ating, Croce's arguments arise in full force. The motivation behind a logical-space model like Hernadi's in fact prevents one from employing the genre-concepts reflexively. A model based on a logical space attempts to "explain" genre in terms of something else, some conceptual principle. In such a model the genre-concepts are constituted not by an understanding of the work, but by a region in logical space. To "explain" genres scientifically is not to interpret them understandingly; but it is of the essence and purpose of the model of logical space to drive us away from interpretation and into expla­ nation. Using the poles of a logical space as interpretive models

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

35

is incompatible with a Heideggerian understanding of under­ standing and interpretation. Croce's and Hirsch's arguments seem conclusive on this point: genre-concepts conceived as Hernadi's theory conceives them might be used to classify works once the works are interpreted, but are not themselves proper interpretive concepts. I shall spend little time with Hegel's genre-theory. I want only to exhibit in its typical (or perhaps one should say "ar­ chetypal") form a non-spatial model based on metaphysical principles. To put it crudely: for Hegel, the epic is objective, the lyric subjective, and the dramatic a synthesis of the two principles. In epic the poet becomes self-effacing in order to present events in "free independence": To grasp . . . events in a consequential whole is the task of Epic poetry, inasmuch as its aim is just to declare poetically, and in the form of actual facts, either an essentially complete action, or the personalities, from which the same proceeds in its substantive worth or its eventful complexity amid the medley of external accidence. And by so doing it represents the objective fact itself in its objectivity.23 The concern of the lyric, by contrast, is "self-expression," which Hegel calls its "unique and indeed final end": "It is . . . the soul itself, subjective life simply, which is the true content. The emphasis is therefore throughout upon the animation of feeling ..." (pp. 103, 197). The dramatic, finally, is the highest type, uniting the "objective character of the Epos" with the "subjective principle of the Lyric": like the epic the drama presents "an essentially independent action as a defi­ nite fact," but the event "does not appear to proceed from external conditions, but rather from personal volition and character," and the individual "comes to his own through the peculiar nature of the conditions in which he is placed . . ." (pp. 248, 251). 23 G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of Fine Art, trans. F.P.B. Osmaston, 4 vols. (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1920), IV, 102.

36

THE THREE GENRES

Genre-theories such as Hegel's are different in spirit from theories modeled on a logical space. In the first place, Hegel is not especially concerned with the classification of individ­ ual works, as is indicated by his comment that lyric can ap­ pear in narrative forms such as romance or ballad, wherever the primary concern is with the narrator's attitude toward the event (pp. 199-201). Second, Hegel's principles do not look so much toward the patent form of the work as toward the causes of that form insofar as they are to be found in the creator's purpose. But Hegel presents the concepts of "sub­ ject" and "object" as ultimate metaphysical principles, valid in the same way for the creator and for the interpreter. Thus, as with Hernadi's theory, genres are explained in terms of something other than the works themselves. We borrow concepts made explicit in metaphysical interpretation and ap­ ply those concepts to literary works. Again, the genre-concepts thus derived are not interpretive in the sense of helping us to make explicit our understanding of the work. To apply genre-concepts based on the concepts of "subject" and "ob­ ject," we must first make explicit our understanding of the literary work. Then, we see whether and in what sense the work conforms to the concepts. Such comparisons are made conceptually; our understanding of the literary work must already be conceptual when we apply Hegel's genre-con­ cepts; therefore, the work must have been already explicitly interpreted. It makes no difference that our very experience, understanding, and interpretation of the work all presup­ pose, as Hegel would no doubt say, the differentiation be­ tween subject and object. If we understand that, we do not understand it specifically through our understanding of the work. Hegel's theory regards the work as something to be described first and then explained in terms of more inclusive concepts. In short, Hegel's theory does not treat genre-con­ cepts as reflexive. Particularly with Hegel's theory and those like it in the German idealist tradition, we see the full force of Wellek's objection that genre-theory tends to lack any necessary relation to literature. If, on the other hand, we erect

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

37

"subjectivity," say, into a heuristic concept, expecting to find subjectivity, we shall no doubt find it But we shall also quickly run against Croce's and Hirsch's arguments So in Hegel's model, either we must accept genre-concepts as ex­ planatory and not interpretive—and in that case the model of the logical space seems to have the advantage of allowing us, theoretically, at least, to classify any given work with rela­ tive ease—or we must accept a model of understanding as purely conceptual (as for Kant the understanding is the "fac­ ulty of concepts"), a model that is fundamentally incompat­ ible with our assumptions Emil Staiger's theory of genre (Grundbegrtffe der Poettk, 1946) impresses Wellek as one of the best modern attempts, but Staiger falls afoul of Wellek's criterion that genre-theory should have definite relations to actual works And in fact, Staiger is not concerned with the classification of works, but merely with defining what we mean by saying lyrical, epical, dra­ matic—the concepts seem clear, but the modes are in fact mixed in various works 24 So from the beginning Staiger makes clear that he wants to interpret genre-concepts, not works That turns out to be a move fruitful in insights Staiger's proce­ dure seems similar to Hegel's, in that he employs a set of metaphysical (presumably Staiger, following Heidegger, would prefer to say "existential") categories, but Staiger draws his categories from a philosophy that participated, with its phenomenological orientation, in the destruction of the sub­ ject-object dichotomy For Heidegger (Being and Time), an interpretation of man's temporality is the essential moment in an interpretation of being Heidegger says that the human Dasein is that being for whom its own being is an issue, who defines itself, as it were, in terms of its possibilities Dasein always "projects" itself into the future in terms of its possi­ bilities It therefore recognizes the present not merely as a collection of entities and events, but as a "situation" within which it can realize some possibilities and avoid or renounce others Its own past appears to it as the manifestation of what 24

Grundbegriffe der Poelik, 4th ed (Zurich Atlantis, 1959), pp 7-12

38

THE THREE GENRES

it has inescapably become and the necessary set of circum­ stances into which it has been "thrown," as a basis for all future possibilities. Thus, the three temporal modes are not as simple as a past, present, and future marked off on some time-line—human temporality is not, as Heidegger often says, just a series of "nows." Staiger's genre-theory associates each generic mode with one of the three temporal modes. Lyrical is associated with the past, epical with the present, and dra­ matic with the future. In accordance with Heidegger's anal­ ysis, Staiger associates the past with feeling Dasein encoun­ ters its past most clearly by "finding itself' in a state of mind, a feeling that is "given" and that shows what it has already become The epical present is a state of showing or presenting what is before one's eyes, the dramatic future is a makingmanifest or projecting in the Heideggenan sense. Thus, the characteristic mode of the lyric is recollection, that of the epic presentation, and that of the drama tension or projection . . . the lyrical Dasetn recollects, the epical represents, the dramatic projects . . . The lyrical poet can recollect the present and the past, indeed even the future. . . Lyrical recollection nevertheless is a return to the womb in the sense that all appears to it again in that state of pastness from which we have arisen. In itself there is in recollection of course no time at all yet. It is absorbed in the momentary. . . . What the lyrical poet recollects, the epical poet represents. That is, he holds life, however it may be dated, over against himself. . . . he places all before our eyes, as if he had seen it with his eyes. . . . What the epical poet represents, the dramatic poet projects He lives as little "in" the future as the epic poet "in" the present. But his Dasein is aimed, stretched toward that to which it wants to move.25 25

Staiger, Grundbegrtffe der Poetik, pp 217-19 The translations of Staiger are mine The original of this quotation follows das lynsche Dasein erinnert, das epische vergegenwartigt, das dramatische entwirft

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

39

There is also for Staiger a kind of progression in the lit­ erary kinds (not necessarily manifested in world history, as in Hegel's view). The progression corresponds to the growth from childhood to maturity and to the development of lan­ guages—on this last point, Staiger appeals to Cassirer. In the growth to maturity, as in the development of a language, there is an increasing distancing of subject from object, though the two are primordially one. As the child grows from emo­ tional expression into the creation of externality and finally into a conceptual grasping or building of a world, so lan­ guage in its development exhibits, according to Cassirer, three phases: "language in the phase of sensuous expression, lan­ guage in the phase of intuitive expression, language as expression of conceptual thought."26 Thus, the names of the genres are finally "names for fundamental possibilities of the human Dasein in general, and there are lyric, epic, and drama only because the spheres of the emotional, the representa­ tional, and the logical constitute the being of man, as a unity as well as a series in which childhood, youth, and maturity participate."27 . . . Der lyrische Dichter . . . kann Gegenwartiges und Vergangenes, ja sogar Kiinftiges ennnern. . . . Das lyrische Erinnern jedoch ist Ruckkehr in den Mutterschoss in dem Sinn, dass ihm alles wieder in jenem vergangenen Zustand erscheint, aus dem wir aufgestanden smd An sich ist im Ennnern freilieh iiberhaupt noch keme Zeit. Es geht im Momentanen auf. . . . Was der lyrische Dichter ennnert, vergegenwartigt der epische Das heisst, er halt sich das Leben, wie immer es auch datiert sei, gegenuber. . . . er stellt uns alles so vor Augen, als hatte er es mit Augen gesehen. . . . Was der epische Dichter vergegenwartigt, entwirft der dramatische. Er Iebt so wenig «im» Kiinftigen wie der Epiker «ιη» der Gegenwart. Aber sem Dasein ist genchtet, gespannt auf das, worauf es hinaus will. 26 Staiger, Grundbegriffe der Poetik, p. 208: "die Sprache in der Phase des sinnlichen Ausdrucks, die Sprache in der Phase des anschaulichen Ausdrucks, die Sprache als Ausdruck des begnfflichen Denkens." 27 Staiger, Grundbegrtffe der Poetik, p. 209: "Namen fur fundamentale Moglichkeiten des menschlichen Daseins iiberhaupt, und Lyrik, Epos, und Drama gibt es nur, well die Bereiche des Emotionalen, des Bildlichen und

40

THE THREE GENRES

Staiger presents many valuable insights, and I shall have occasion to return to his work. But the objections to Staiger's genre-concepts are of course just the same as were lev­ eled against Hegel's. Staiger regards his categories as meta­ physical explanations of the possibility of genre, not as interpretive concepts. Indeed, Staiger implies that he has no ambition to erect interpretive concepts, when he says that his problem is to define the genre-concepts themselves. We must not demand of Staiger's theory, or any theory, things it was not intended to do. I have spent a great deal of time with Hernadi, Hegel, and Staiger. I have not meant to show that the theories are in­ adequate for their authors' purposes. I have meant to show only that the authors' theoretical motivations prevent them from putting forward the kind of broad genre-concepts that would, when used interpretively, meet the objections of Wellek, Croce, and Hirsch. I hope I have shown why the traditional broad genres, as traditionally conceived, cannot properly serve as interpretive models. For we cannot con­ struct a satisfactory model that preserves the broad genres as interpretive concepts unless we know what arguments this model will have to meet. Where are we left, then? If genres are not nothing, if they are not conventions, if they are not regions in logical space, if they are not metaphysical categories, what are they? I think Staiger's theory offers a clue. For there is a significant differ­ ence between Staiger's and Hegel's metaphysical categories, even though Staiger ultimately employs his categories from a theoretical stance like Hegel's. For Hegel the general term "representing" covers the relation of the author to his sub­ ject-matter. It is true that in the different genres the author may appear more or less intimately involved with his sub­ ject-matter, but he is always representing it, and it is the subject-matter that is "subjective," "objective," or a synthe­ sis of the two. With Staiger, on the other hand, the author's des Logischen das Wesen des Menschen konstitutieren, als Einheit sowohl wie als Folge, wonn sich Kindheit, Jugend und Reife teilen."

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

41

relation to the subject-matter is different in each case. It fol­ lows that the understanding reader's relation will also be dif­ ferent. Not only is the lyrical author concerned with feel­ ing—he recollects his subject-matter (as does the understanding reader). The epical author presents; the dramatic author pro­ jects and experiences tension (Spannung). Staiger's crucial in­ sight for a theory of interpretive models is that genre-concepts can be treated as relational concepts constitutive of understanding. Staiger does not develop the insight. In his model, inter­ preting the lyric does not make explicit the concept of "rec­ ollection," for example—the concept is a "given" from Hei­ degger's philosophy. Nor does one necessarily interpret the lyric by applying the concept of "recollection." Of course, one might understand the lyric only because it is a funda­ mental possibility of one's existence to take up the relation of "recollection" toward things, but that does not mean that one's understanding of "recollection" is in any meaningful sense constituted by understanding the lyric. One's relation to the lyric is simply another example of the fundamental possibility of "recollection," just as for Hegel the subjectiv­ ity of the lyric is one more example of subjectivity. Staiger would ultimately have to argue that the advantage of his genretheory over Hegel's is just that Heidegger's categories are sounder.

Kant's Relational Categories Staiger shows us, then, that we might be able to distinguish the three traditional broad genres (lyric, epic, dramatic) from each other on the basis of relational concepts. But Staiger's relational concepts are not yet the sort we need. Paradoxi­ cally, his concepts are not "empty" enough—our interpre­ tation of them does not become explicit in the interpretation of the work, but beforehand. Kant, I think, might express this by saying that Staiger's relational concepts are empirical concepts, as opposed to a priori principles. That is, the re­ lation of "recollection," for example, is given as a relation in

42

THE THREE GENRES

experience; we have the relation itself in our experience of one of the possible mental stances that we can assume toward things. A priori concepts in Kant's philosophy, on the other hand, by nature are not furnished with an intuition in expe­ rience, but instead are the conditions for the possibility of experience. Thus, we do not directly intuit the relation be­ tween substance and accident, for example, though our con­ ceptual knowledge that the sugar-bowl is white (indeed, our experience itself of a white sugar-bowl) presupposes the re­ lation of substance and accident. Nor, although we may in­ tuit the movement of the gull's wing and the gull's forward flight, do we intuit the necessary connection of cause to ef­ fect that makes possible our synthesis of the two. As Kant puts it, . . . there certainly does remain in the pure concepts of understanding, even after elimination of every sensible condition, a meaning; but it is purely logical, signifying only the bare unity of the representations. The pure concepts can find no object, and so can acquire no meaning which might yield a concept of some object. Substance, for instance, . . . would mean simply a something which can be thought only as a subject, never as a predicate of something else. Such a representation I can put to no use, for it tells me nothing as to the nature of that which is thus to be viewed as a primary subject.28 The a priori concepts are what Kant, following Aristotle, calls the categories of thought. They seem to be the kind of concepts we are looking for. That is, these concepts are such that, although they initially have a purely logical meaning, they acquire genuine significance (for Kant, participate in genuine conceptual knowledge) only by their application to an object of experience: If knowledge is to have objective reality, that is, to relate to an object, and is to acquire meaning and significance 28 Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1968), pp 186-87.

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

43

in respect to it, the object must be capable of being in some manner given. Otherwise the concepts are empty; through them we have indeed thought, but in this thinking we have really known nothing; we have merely played with representations, (pp. 192-93) If our genre-concepts could be of the nature of the Kantian categories, then, they would necessarily be reflexive. Inter­ pretation of the concept would emerge only insofar as there is interpretation of the work, the given object, and only in the process of interpretation itself. Even though we can ap­ ply the category of causality, for example, elsewhere than in literary works—indeed, to any object conceived as a part of nature—still we never directly intuit the category, and we can give it meaning only in terms of the particular causal laws that we construct for the object we are studying. It seems, then, that it might be possible to find in the Kantian categories themselves the interpretive model we are seeking. It is only natural to pause here on the brink to ask our­ selves what we are about. If we adopt Kant's categories, does that mean that we must swallow his whole system? If we use the categories to talk about literary genre, does that mean that we must become orthodox Kantians whenever we want to write criticism? I think not. Again, we are not doing met­ aphysics, but constructing a model. And indeed, this is a model for literary works, where the question is not how things are, but how they are presented. Whatever is capable of being conceived is capable of serving as a model, provided only that (1) the model is internally consistent and (2) the model does what it is supposed to do. The other models we have looked at preserve their internal consistency only so long as the broad genre-concepts are not employed interpretively. Now, Kant's categories look very like the kind of concept that might allow us to preserve consistency and still employ the broad genres interpretively. So, even if one does not ac­ cept Kant's philosophy, it is still possible to ask how Kant's relational categories might serve as a model to deal with the question of literary genre. All we really must accept is that

44

THE THREE GENRES

it is possible to conceive the categories as Kant says we con­ ceive them. I shall now turn to an abbreviated exposition of Kant's doctrine of the categories of relation, as contained primarily in the "Transcendental Analytic" of the Critique of Pure Rea­ son, but with some reference also to material in the "Tran­ scendental Dialectic." Kant lists other categories than the cat­ egories of relation—namely, the categories of quantity, those of quality, and those of modality—but it will be clear later why the categories of relation alone seem suited to my pur­ poses. Since I am trying to conserve the three traditional broad genres, it is convenient that there are three categories of re­ lation. (A word of caution is in order. In reading Kant, we must remember that for him the "understanding" is just the "faculty of concepts"—it is not identical to what I have been calling "understanding.") Kant's method for isolating the "pure concepts of the understanding," or the categories, is to de­ termine the concepts presupposed by formal logic, a science he thought to have been virtually perfected by Aristotle and to have been assented to by all rational men ever since. Kant thus seeks his relational categories in the relations presup­ posed by the three forms of judgment allowed in Aristotelian logic: the categorical, the hypothetical, and the disjunctive. Logicians have quarreled with Kant's classification of judg­ ments, and have insisted on distinguishing more carefully the judgment from the statement that expresses it. But I shall ignore those controversies in the interest of getting on to Kant's relational categories. Kant himself, after all, brings in the formal logic for the sake of expounding the categories. The categorical judgment or proposition takes one of the following four forms, where S and P are subject-term and predicate-term, respectively: "All S is P," "Some S is P," "No S is P," "Some S is not P." Examples of actual cate­ gorical propositions are sentences like "This sugar-bowl is white" and "All men are mortal." Both of these examples are propositions of the first form, which may be taken as typical.

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

45

The hypothetical judgment or proposition is an "if-then" statement: "If x, then y," or "x implies γ," where χ and γ are themselves propositions. "If it is raining, then there are clouds"; "If this is a straight line-segment, then it is the shortest distance between its end-points." The disjunctive judgment or proposition proposes two or more mutually exclusive alternatives and asserts that one of them must be the case: "Either χ or y, but not both," where χ and y are again propositions. Kant's example and elucida­ tion of the disjunctive judgment are as follows: Take, for instance, the judgment, 'The world exists either through blind chance, or through inner necessity, or through an external cause'. Each of these propositions occupies a part of the sphere of the possible knowledge concerning the existence of a world in general; all of them together occupy the whole sphere. To take the knowledge out of one of the spheres means placing it in one of the other spheres, and to place it in one sphere means taking it out of the others. There is, therefore, in a disjunctive judgment a certain community of the known constituents, such that they mutually exclude each other, and yet thereby determine in their totality the true knowledge, (p. 109) Kant says that to every logical function of judgment there corresponds a pure a priori concept of the understanding— that is, a category. The three kinds of judgment reveal three relational functions of the understanding, for in each kind of judgment the understanding relates subject to predicate or proposition to proposition in a particular way. In order to relate subject to predicate in the categorical judgment, the understanding presupposes the relation of inherence and sub­ sistence (substance and accident). That is, in order to make the judgment "This sugar-bowl is white," I have to represent to myself a something, a substance (the sugar-bowl) that is somehow the bearer of all the properties (such as whiteness) that inhere in it and through which I know it. The sugar-

46

THE THREE GENRES

bowl remains identical to itself throughout all my changes of perspective—even if someone should enamel it blue, or if it should be broken. Then I would judge, "This sugar-bowl is broken." The relation of inherence and subsistence is never given in intuition, but it is posited in every categorical judg­ ment. It is thus a relational category of the understanding. The hypothetical judgment, on the other hand, presupposes the relation of causality and dependence (cause and effect) or, as Kant sometimes says, of ground and consequence. The "ground and consequence" formulation is more general, as more clearly including relations of implication. In the statement "If it is raining, then there are clouds," the connection between the two parts of the proposition is made possible only by pre­ supposing a necessary principle of causation—the clouds are a necessary cause of the rain. There is never anything given in experience that will permit us to say that clouds are a necessary cause of rain, no matter how many times we see that rain falls from clouds. Nor is there anything in the em­ pirical concept of "cloud" or the empirical concept of "rain" that will permit us to deduce a necessary connection between the two. The concept of causality is nevertheless posited in the hypothetical judgment and is therefore a relational cate­ gory. The relation that Kant assigns to the disjunctive judgment, that of community or reciprocity, is a bit more difficult to see. Kant himself says that the category "is not as evident as in the case of the others" (p. 117). One way of looking at the category is to regard it as arising from a combination of the other two relational categories: "community is the causality of substances reciprocally determining one another" (p. 116). In the disjunctive judgment, we divide a whole of knowl­ edge into parts in such a way that each part exists only be­ cause, insofar as, the others do. In Kant's own example, the notion of the existence of the world through blind chance gains significance only by contrast with the notion of the existence of the world through inner necessity and the notion of the existence of the world through an external cause. "Either

GENRES AS INTERPRETIVE MODELS

47

the butler was at the scene of the crime, or he was some­ where else." In the judgment the two possibilities "cause" each other reciprocally somewhat in the sense that in a halved pie one half causes the other to be a half. But reciprocal causation, or reciprocal determination as Kant sometimes calls it, is not the same as simple causation. Instead, the relation of community is thought of as the relation between parts in some whole that the parts taken together exhaust. Once again, the relation is not given in intuition. Even if there were only two objects in the universe, my experience of those two ob­ jects could never by itself give me the concept of the relation between them as that of parts in a whole. The category of community must be presupposed. Now in a whole which is made up of things . . . one thing is not subordinated, as effect, to another, as cause of its existence, but simultaneously and reciprocally, is coordinated with it, as cause of the determination of the other (as, for instance, in a body the parts of which reciprocally attract and repel each other). This is a quite different kind of connection from that which is found in the mere relation of cause to effect (of ground to consequence), for in the latter relation the consequence does not in its turn reciprocally determine the ground, and therefore does not constitute with it a whole—thus the world, for instance, does not with its Creator serve to constitute a whole, (p. 117) For Kant, as I have said, the concepts of substance, caus­ ality, and community are in themselves empty logical forms corresponding to the functions of the understanding. To at­ tain real significance (to produce conceptual knowledge), the concepts must be interpreted (that is, talked about) in terms of the very experience that presupposes them. Kant repeat­ edly says that the only valid application of the categories is to objects of possible experience. Indeed, in the "Transcen­ dental Dialectic" he tries to show that employing the con­ cepts to seek knowledge of a realm beyond any possible ex-

48

THE THREE GENRES

perience leads the reason into inevitable illusions and contradictions. The empty logical concepts first attain their application to experience, at the most general level, in the temporality of human consciousness. Thus, we do not think of substance merely as the empty logical concept of that which is always the subject and never the predicate (a concept that is intelligible but that conveys nothing). Instead, we think of it as that which is permanent in time. Instead of thinking caus­ ality as the mere logical relation of ground to consequence, we think it as the "real upon which, whenever posited, something else always follows" (p. 185). Therefore, causality is thought of as involving necessary succession in time. And community is thought of as coexistence in time. Thus, every relation has its corresponding determination according to time. To substance corresponds duration; to causality corresponds succession; and to community, simultaneity. But the cate­ gories can be interpreted and made meaningful only in their application to experience (which always occurs in time—in­ cluding the experience of literary works), even though in conceptual judgments our experience is continually being in­ terpreted in conformity with the categories. Interpreting the category, if it means anything, means talking about the cat­ egory in its application to particular experience. That circu­ larity or reflexivity is exactly what makes the categories suit­ able as interpretive models applicable to genre-theory.

Kant's Categories and the Three Genres In the remainder of this chapter, I shall tentatively propose that each of the traditional broad genres—epic, dramatic, lyric—be associated with one of the Kantian relational cate­ gories—substance, causality, and community, respectively. I shall maintain that an interpretation of a work is constituted by interpreting the relation between two certain entities said to be "in" the work, but actually arising only as a result of the interpretation itself. For the moment, I shall call those two entities by the open and problematic names of "mind"

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and "world." To interpret a work as epic, then, I shall argue, is to interpret the relation between mind and world in the work as one of substance and accident; to interpret a work as dramatic is to interpret the relation in terms of causality; to interpret a work as lyric is to interpret that relation as one of community. It should not seem odd to talk about the relation between mind and world in such terms. The relational categories, or versions of them current before Kant, have in fact been adapted by various philosophers in erecting their respective epistemologies. Descartes, for example, uses the substance-attribute vocabulary to talk about the mind, and the world as it appears in the mind (i.e., as thought): mind for Descartes is substance, and thoughts are accidents in that SubStance-29John Locke, on the other hand, as an empiricist at times seems to hold that world causes mind when sense-impressions cause thought.30 And especially in modern philosophy we find the 29 The following is from Rene Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, in Norman Kemp Smith, trans , Descartes Philosophical Writings (New York. Modern Library, cl958), ρ 173 The quotation represents part of Descartes' synopsis of the work. . . the human mind is not constituted of accidents of any kind whatever, but is a pure substance. For though all the accidents of the mind suffer change, though, for instance, it thinks of other things, wills others, and senses others, it is yet always the same mind. 30 Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford· Clarendon Press, 1975), ρ 104, argues that the mind is "white Paper, void of all Characters, without any Ideas" until it receives its furni­ ture from two sources—sensation and reflection. In reflection the mind per­ ceives its own operations, sensation is the impinging of world on mind, and the relation is clearly causal for Locke. First, Our Senses, conversant about particular sensible Objects, do convey into the Mind, several distinct Perceptions of things, according to these various ways, wherein those Objects do affect them: And thus we come by those Ideas, we have of Yellow, White, Heat, Cold, Soft, Hard, Bitter, Sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities. (p 105) And later in the same work. "That which produces any simple or complex Idea, we denote by the general Name Cause, and that which is produced, Effect" (p. 324). I do not wish to argue, of course, that Descartes never uses the vocabulary of causation when talking about mind and world, or that Locke never uses the vocabulary of substance

50

THE THREE GENRES

relation of community used to model the relation between mind and world. Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms is based on the premise that mind in a sense creates the world it lives in, by means of its symbolic or cultural forms Lan­ guage is only one example of these. The relation between mind and world in this philosophy is expressed as a recip­ rocal relation.31 Perhaps one can even see in Edmund Husserl's analysis of intentionality a kind of reciprocal relation between mind and world, a merging of subject and object into two poles of the same act.32 And Merleau-Ponty argues that sensation itself is a "transaction between the subject of sensation and the sensible," where "it cannot be held that one acts while the other suffers the action", instead, "The sensible gives back to me what I lent to it, but this is only what I took from it in the first place "33 So it is possible also 31 Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, trans Ralph Manheim, 3 vols (New Ha­ ven Yale University Press, 1953-7), I, 92-3 Wilhelm von Humboldt's view of language, Cassirer says, brings to light a factor which occurs in every type and form of symbolism In each one of its freely projected signs the human spirit apprehends the object and at the same time apprehends itself and its own formative law And this peculiar uiterpenetration prepares the way for the deeper determination both of subject and object For what language designates and expresses is neither exclusively subjective nor exclusively objective, it effects a new mediation, a particular reciprocal relation between the two factors language arises where the two ends are joined, so creating a new synthesis of "I" and "world " An analogous relation is created in every truly independent and original function and consciousness 32 See Edmund Husserl, "Second Meditation," in Cartesian Meditations An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans Donon Cairns (The Hague MarOnus Nijhoff, 1969), ρ 37 By adopting the phenomenological attitude (which is not, by definition, the "natural" attitude), Husserl says, I see that all the world exists for me only as accepted by me, with the sense it has for me at the time—that it exists for me only as cogitatum of my changing and, while changing, interconnected cogitationes, and I now accept it solely as that Consequently I, the transcendental Phenomenologist, have objects as a theme for my universal descriptions solely as the intentional correlates of modes of consciousness of

them 33 Merleau-Ponty,

Phenomenology of Perception, ρ 214

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to take up a reflective attitude that regards subject and object as reciprocally related. Finally, Dilthey's theory of the Weltanschauungen seems a particularly good illustration of how Kant's relational cate­ gories, even though not explicitly acknowledged here by Dilthey, can ground a model of the stances the human mind can assume toward its world. Each of Dilthey's three possi­ ble types of world-view results from stressing one of the three fundamental activities linked in every mind: (1) "com­ ing to know reality in terms of causal relations"; (2) "willing (containing within itself the purpose and the rule which binds it)"; and (3) "experiencing value, meaning and signifi­ cance."34 The three types of world-view are "Naturalism," "Idealism of Freedom," and "Objective idealism," respec­ tively.35 Naturalism is always based on "subordination of the will to the body's animal instincts and their relationship to the external world"; its theory of knowledge is "sensual­ ism," and its metaphysics is "materialism" (pp. 147-48). This world-view must adopt causality as its model of the relation between world and mind, since it postulates material caus­ ality as the principle of thought. The Idealism of Freedom, on the other hand, proceeds as if everything important is con­ tained in the mind itself: it "asserts the mind's sovereign in­ dependence from all given facts; the mind knows itself to be differentiated from all physical causality" (p. 149). This worldview must treat ideas in the mind as attributes in a sub­ stance—otherwise, the mind could not be said in any meaningfiil sense to be independent of given facts. Objective idealism, finally, is closely associated with the attitude of aesthetic con­ templation: "In this contemplative attitude our emotional life . . . expands into a kind of universal sympathy. Through this expansion . . . we fill and animate the whole of reality with the values which we feel. . . . We rediscover in reality the moods which it evokes in us" (pp. 151-52). In other 34

Dilthey, "The Nature of Philosophy," in Selected Writings, pp. 122-23. Dilthey, "The Types of World-view and their Development in the Metaphysical Systems," in Selected Writings, pp. 147-54. 35

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words, the attitude of Objective idealism has as its model the relation of reciprocity or community between the mind and the world. One is reminded of Santayana's dictum that beauty is pleasure perceived as a quality of the object. Dilthey con­ cludes that "metaphysics is impossible" just because, al­ though all three activities of the mind are ultimate facts, we can never see more than one at a time.36 Kant's contribution, as he saw it, was to explain the nature of his categories as pure concepts of the understanding. What makes Kant's "substance" more appropriate for my purposes than, say, Aristotle's, is precisely the peculiar reflexive nature of the Kantian category; and so with the other categories. Even though the concepts of causality, substance, and the whole (the one and the many) have been used by philoso­ phers in constructing epistemologies, these concepts have al­ ways been problematic in metaphysics. In the "Transcenden­ tal Dialectic" Kant shows how certain presuppositions underlie the three types of syllogism that are based on the three types of judgment, and how these presuppositions lead us into il­ lusion and contradiction whenever we try by means of rea­ son alone to gain knowledge beyond the realm of possible experience. For Kant, there are three fundamental topics of metaphysics: cosmology, psychology (the study of the soul), and theology. Each topic has its characteristic problem, and each problem springs from one of the relational categories. To cosmology corresponds the problem of freedom—if all effects follow necessarily from causes, what is the meaning of freedom? To psychology corresponds the problem of im­ mortality—is the soul a substance, and if so, can it perish? To theology corresponds the problem of God—can we prove the existence of God by showing the necessity of a Being of all beings, a Whole in terms of which all parts have their meaning? Strangely enough, it is just this problematic nature of Kant's categories that makes them the kind of interpretive model we need. Kant's reflections show us that we cannot interpret the categories in isolation, apart from the experi36

Dilthey, "The Nature of Philosophy," in Selected Writings, ρ 123.

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ences that presuppose them The principle holds also when we use the categories as models for literary interpretation. Every interpretation of a literary work, if the relation be­ tween mind and world in the work is interpreted in terms of one of the categories, must also be an interpretation of the category itself. It is of the nature of Kant's categories to be reflexive in the peculiar way we have seen If we can use these categories at all as interpretive concepts, then we might have a chance of escaping the objections leveled at genreconcepts as traditionally conceived It is time to define more precisely just what one might mean by saying "the mind of the work" and "the world of the work." The mind of the work is not necessarily the mind of the speaker or the postulated mind of the author, nor is the world of the work just that selected portion of the "real world" which the author has decided to talk about Our un­ derstanding of understanding forbids these simple equations. Instead, a curious thing happens when we read a text under­ standing^. Georges Poulet gives a particularly acute descrip­ tion of the phenomenon in reading that creates the under­ stood mind of the work: It all happens, then, as though reading were the act by which a thought managed to bestow itself within me with a subject not myself Whenever I read, I mentally pronounce an I, and yet the I which I pronounce is not myself. . . Reading is just that: a way of giving way not only to a host of alien words, images, ideas, but also to the very alien principle which utters them and shelters them.37 Understanding, then, involves a kind of merging of the text and the reader into a new subjectivity that constitutes what I am calling the "mind of the work." We might often equate 37 "Criticism and the Experience of Inferiority," in The Languages of Crit­ icism and the Sciences of Man The Structuralist Controversy, ed Richard Macksey and Eugenio Donato (Baltimore TheJohns Hopkins University Press,

c1970), ρ 60

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THE THREE GENRES

this mind with the mind of the author. But we must remem­ ber that we do this only because we sense that we are "with" the author when we are reading. We infer, more or less cor­ rectly, the author's mind from the fact of our understanding of the text, from the fact of our already having merged with the mind of the work. We habitually, and sometimes care­ lessly, refer to the mind of the work by locutions like "Shakespeare says . . . ," or "Faulkner thinks. . . ." It is true, as Poulet says, that reading "is the act in which the subjective principle which I call I, is modified in such a way that I no longer have the right, strictly speaking, to consider it as my I. I am on loan to another." But it is also true that the alien I is not the author: "Each of the works, while I am reading it, lives in me its own life. . . . the subject which presides over the work can exist only in the work" (pp. 6061). In reading, the work becomes a kind of "mind conscious of itself and constituting itself in me as the subject of its own objects," such that the reader becomes "a consciousness as­ tonished by an existence which is not mine, but which I ex­ perience as though it were mine" (pp. 62-63). Merleau-Ponty frequently suggests that language is a kind of gesture. One understands a gesture by feeling its signifi­ cance, as it were, in his own body. Gadamer often compares the interaction between a text and its interpreter to a conver­ sation. Because the interpreter is truly open to the text as one is open to an interlocutor in a genuine conversation, some­ thing results that is, strictly speaking, in common. The models of gesture and conversation share, among other things, the notion that there is a mind of the work that is neither simply the author's mind nor simply the reader's. It follows that there comes into being also a world that is not simply the reader's world. As Gadamer puts it, every word "breaks forth as from a centre and is related to a whole, through which alone it is a word. Every word causes the whole of the lan­ guage to which it belongs to resonate and the whole of the view of the world which lies behind it to appear. . . ."38 38

Gadamer, Truth and Method, pp. 415-16.

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Gadamer implicitly compares understanding a text to under­ standing a foreign language (pp. 404 ff.). In the process of learning the language we must adopt the view of the world implicit within it; and that world turns out to be a different world from our own, though we do not therefore give up our own world. Thus, quite clearly the mind and the world of the work, in the sense in which I want to use the terms, are mutually dependent. When we come in interpreting to make explicit conceptual statements about the mind and the world of the work, each statement about either entity will determine the statements we can make about the other. To say that Hamlet makes fun of Polonius is to imply that the world of the play is one in which the springs and forces of human action are dark and mysterious to men like Polonius. Conversely, to say that the world of Hamlet is dark and grim is to imply something about the inferred stance of the mind of the work toward human experience. Indeed, the great burden of the interpretive task is simply to state in concep­ tual terms what the mind of the work is and what the world of the work is. If I may for a moment be somewhat reduc­ tive: the great interpretive questions are, "What is the work (author) saying?" and "How does the work (author) say it?" The second question can be read, "By means of what fic­ tional world does the work (author) say it?" It is important to be clear here on one point. That is, the separation of "mind" and "world" is a function of the in­ terpretive act, not the creative act. The distinction arises in the first place only because an understanding has been made explicit, because an interpretation has been written. We can perfectly well laugh at Polonius and shudder at the grimness of Hamlet without ever thinking about "mind" and "world" as separate entities. But in the act of writing an interpretive statement, we are compelled by the nature of interpretation itself to presuppose those entities and their separateness. We cannot say, "Polonius is made fun of," without presupposing a mind, a consciousness, for whom Polonius is an entity of its world. We cannot say, "Hamlet's world is grim," without

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presupposing a consciousness that sets that world over against itself as something hostile and terrible. In short, though works themselves do not in any absolute sense "consist of' world and mind, it is impossible to write an interpretive statement without speaking of the works as if they were constituted thus. I shall have more to say on this point in Chapter III. But for now, I should emphasize once again what my model is intended to do. Precisely because my genres are meant to be interpretive categories, they give us conceptual knowledge not about works, but about interpretations. And since inter­ pretation is merely the making-explicit of understanding, we might say that this genre-theory gives us conceptual knowl­ edge not of the works themselves, but of our own under­ standing of the works. The theory extends no further than that. It does not help to classify works—though it does clas­ sify explicit interpretations of works. It does not explain how genres came to be, historically. It does not root genres, con­ sidered as historical categories, in any fundamental principle of being or consciousness. But I hope I have shown why a genre-theory should not aspire to do any of those things. That is, I have presented arguments that seem to me compelling against the interpretive use of genres considered as taxonomic categories, as conventions, or as metaphysical princi­ ples. If anyone complains because my theory will not classify works or explain how genres arise, I can reply only that those are not the questions I set out to answer. The question I set out to answer is, "How can the three traditional broad gen­ res be preserved as interpretive categories?" If someone says that gaining knowledge about our interpretations is not worth the elaborate apparatus I seem to be constructing, I would simply disagree. Knowledge of our interpretations, if we adopt a Heideggerian notion of understanding, is all the knowledge we are going to get. Our interpretations place the works in relation to us; and in critical discourse, that is ultimately all we can do with the works themselves. But if we want to talk to each other about our interpretations (and that, it seems to me, is the critical enterprise in a nutshell), we must know

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how those interpretations have placed the works in relation to us. That is what genre-theory is "good for," in my view, and indeed what all critical models of any sort are "good for." Now we are in a position to define more sharply what is meant by interpreting the genre-concepts in the process of interpreting the work. If the generic differences depend on the particular relation between mind and world, in terms of which we interpret the work, then the relation itself can con­ ceivably become fully explicit only as "mind" and "world" are separated and defined. The Kantian categories are rela­ tions that can have meaning only in terms of their relata, the objects of possible experience. I can really only interpret causality, for example, again and again in terms of particular causal laws derived from particular experience. In itself caus­ ality is a mere logical form, empty of significance. But when, and only when, I can call one particular entity a cause and another the effect of that cause, I interpret the category and lend it meaning that is not merely formal. So also in inter­ preting literary works—by means of interpreting "mind" and "world" I define the relata and so fill out the generic rela­ tions with their own proper meaning. It also follows that the broad genre-concepts permeate the interpretation at every level, for every interpretive statement necessarily involves some decision about the nature and relation of a mind and its world "in" the work. This last proposition follows, of course, from the Heideggerian model of understanding, where understanding is always the projection by some conscious­ ness of its possibilities in some world. Consciousness of the reader recognizes consciousness in the work; Dasein recog­ nizes the "There-being" of Dasein in the work, to adopt Hei­ degger's terminology. To the question, "What are the genres?" then, I shall reply that the genres are modes of relation between the mind of the work and the world of the work. These modes of relation are consti­ tutive of the understanding of the work. They arise and can

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themselves be interpreted only in the process of explicitly interpreting the work. It follows that any given work can, theoretically at least, be interpreted "as" lyrical, "as" epical, and "as" dramatic. Perhaps, indeed, all three kinds of interpretation will be mixed in any given reading of the work. My genre-theory does not provide a way of determining which way of reading the work is "correct." I shall argue in Chapter III, however, that the theory is not incompatible with the concept of correctness, and it might in fact happen that in particular cases to read a work "as" lyrical, or epical or dramatic, would inevitably give rise to interpretations that could be shown on other grounds to be incorrect. Again, if someone asks what is the use of a genre-theory that allows any work to be read as "belonging" to any genre, I would answer that its use is to clarify for us our particular interpretations, so that we can articulate them clearly and see whether they are self-consis­ tent and consistent with our own assumptions. Anyone who thinks that we do not need this kind of clarification is invited to read extensively in the critical journals. It remains to see how the three modes of relation might be shown to correspond to the three traditional genres. Let us begin with the drama and the relation of causality. Drama differs most strikingly from the other genres in the absence of the author from the text. (Note that I am adopting a man­ ner of speaking that might seem to imply that "drama" means plays, "lyric" means poems, and so on. But the genre-theory proposed here makes no statements like that. It is possible to understand prose as dramatic or lyrical, a play as lyrical or even epical, a poem as dramatic or epical. I shall continue to talk this way for the sake of brevity, however, since broadly speaking most people understand most plays dramatically, most fiction and narrative poetry epically, and most short poems lyrically. I shall have more to say on this point later.) On my analysis, then, Shakespeare is not "in" Hamlet as a character or as a speaker; he is "paring his fingernails," as James Joyce's alter ego Stephen Dedalus says of the play-

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wright. This absence of the playwright is enough to suggest that insofar as the mind of the work is given, it is given as the effect wrought by the world of the drama as it unfolds before us. It is as if the dramatist, by showing us the world he perceives much as one would show a rare bird or fruit to someone who has never seen it, wishes to cause in us the state of mind he experienced in perceiving that world. Inso­ far as we "have" (i.e., interpret) the mind of the work, we infer it from the world, which, impinging upon us (as it supposedly impinged on the dramatist), produces its effect. Needless to say, whether this is really what happens in the actual writing of a drama is beside the point. Certainly by most everyday notions of causality, the mind of the author is the cause of the work. But the dramatic world is presented in such a way that it must appear as the cause of the mind of the work. Furthermore, the world of the drama itself is pervaded by relations of cause and effect. Plot, that is, arises because there are events in a cause-and-efFect connection. We have seen that Hegel describes the dramatic as involving characters, with their attitudes, volitions, and emotions, in a causal nexus that they themselves help to create; Staiger's Spannung is the tension that arises in drama as the effects of present causes are projected and awaited. In the epical mode (or the narrative, to use a more com­ mon term for many instances), the mind of the work tells instead of showing. We are given the things and events of the world not as self-subsistent entities, as in drama, but as thoughts in the mind of the narrator. Again, it is important not to confuse "epic" with "novel." It is undoubtedly pos­ sible to interpret many novels as belonging to the epical mode; undoubtedly, too, it is difficult or impossible to understand other novels that way. These latter novels might better be analyzed as dramatic or lyrical utterances, or even as mixed forms. Nor do I mean to argue that all narrative is epical, though I think much narrative is. When I say "narrator," I do not necessarily mean "one who tells a story with an Ar­ istotelian plot-structure," but only "one who tells." The

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questions of novel as genre and of narrative as genre are very large and very vexed, and I do not wish to take up these matters here. To those who feel that genre-theory should deal with narrative rather than epic because narrative is more "important" or more "fundamental," I would say the fol­ lowing. Is narrative more "important" because there are more narratives than epics? Then we are back in the theory of genre as taxonomic category. Is narrative more "fundamental" be­ cause epic is a more sophisticated, derived form? Then we are back in the theory of genre as historical convention. Staiger suggests that epic differs from drama in that each dramatic scene must always take its meaning from the forth­ coming solution of the dramatic conflict. The dramatic scene must drive onward toward some end. The epic scene, on the other hand, is given for its own sake, and an epic can be built with the accumulation of such scenes: "Pure epic rep­ resentations mean nothing. They seek to be contemplated for themselves and appeal only to the eye."39 That is, epic scenes derive their meaning precisely from being thoughts in the mind of the work, changing accidents contemplated in a per­ manent substance that bears them as its determinations. In interpreted epic we never escape or have the sense of escap­ ing a "filter" through which the world of the work is given us; there is always a literary point of view. The world is always presented as thought in the mind of the narrator. The narrator's mind might correspond closely to the mind of the work, as often happens with the so-called "omniscient au­ thor." But that need not be the case. Sometimes there is a fictional narrator, perhaps himself a character in the story, upon whom judgments are made. Then the mind of the work is clearly elsewhere. Such works, indeed, as are interpreted to distinguish most sharply the mind of the narrator from the mind of the work might be interpreted as essentially dra­ matic instead of epic. But precisely when we interpret such 39 Staiger, Grundbegriffe der Poetik, pp. 166-67: "Rein epische Bilder bedeuten nichts. Sie wollen fur sich betrachtet werden und sprechen allein das Auge an."

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a fictional narrator not as a self-subsistent entity or an actor on the stage of the work, but instead as a fictional narrator, as a thought in the mind of the work, we understand the work as epical.40 In the interpretation of dramatic works we infer the mind of the work from the dramatic world as it appears "in itself." In interpreting epical works we con­ stantly think of ourselves as being given the mind of the work directly or indirectly through the voice of the speaker. From some attributes of the mind, the thoughts we are given, we can infer others, just as we come to know another's gen­ eral "style" from hearing a few of his remarks. We fre­ quently represent this inference to ourselves as an inference about "what the author thinks," but it would be better to be exact and say "what the mind of the work thinks." Furthermore, just as relations of cause and effect are crucial and pervasive in the world of the dramatic, so relations of substance and accident are pervasive in the epic. We have seen how Hegel uses the vocabulary of substance and acci­ dent in talking about the content of the epic. Novels often proceed by means of attributive predication: "Tom was a cheerful lad"; "Lydia was flighty"; "Emma was twenty-three." The characters of works in epical interpretation tend to be­ come "real" (or "substantial") by a process of acquiring a sufficient number of definite and consistent attributes, a sort of critical mass, to allow the reader to begin inferring attri­ butes that are not specifically given. In The Sound and the Fury, we know that Caddy is brave before Faulkner, or any­ one else, tells us so specifically. Jacques Maritain says, "The novelist is primarily concerned not with the action, but with the agents. This principle . . . stresses the essential difference between the novel and the drama. . . ."41 Maritain's principle suggests that in drama we find character in the service of 40 For an interesting related discussion of point of view in narrative, see Tzvetan Todorov, "Language and Literature," in The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, pp. 125-33. 41 Creative Intuition in Art and Poetry (New York. Pantheon Books, 1953), p. 397

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plot, and in epic (novel, for Maritain) we find plot in the service of character. Our genre-theory suggests that Maritain's formulation should be somewhat extended: if sub­ stance-accident relations pervade the interpreted epic, then the mind of the epical work is interested in substance in gen­ eral—be it of characters, of things, or even of societies. The epical mind is interested in the whatness of things as well as of people—one thinks of Homer's loving descriptions of physical objects—and action serves to convey that whatness in the epical interpretation. Of course, it is rarely easy to say whether action exists for the sake of the characters, or char­ acters exist for the sake of the action. In our experience of works, it seems that each exists for the sake of the other. But in the contingencies of explicit interpretation, decisions con­ sciously or unconsciously get made, and the general tenor of the interpretation will depend on whether the work is being understood as primarily epical or primarily dramatic. If one needs an illustration of how competing interpreta­ tions of a work can be analyzed and issues clarified in terms of this genre-theory, I can think of no better one than that provided by Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. A great deal of time and energy has been spent on the variations of one important critical question: "To what extent are the tales adapted to their tellers; and to what extent, on the other hand, are the tales to be taken as tales, on their own assumptions, really told by Chaucer himself through a series of convenient mouthpieces?" The implied alternatives are not exclusive, of course. It is possible that the tales are somewhat adapted to their tellers, and that some are more so than others. Unfor­ tunately, the work remains unfinished, and we do not even know how unfinished it is. We do not know what touching up or further adapting Chaucer might have done, so we do not have the falsely comforting sense that the text before us is the unequivocal historical evidence for Chaucer's final in­ tention. Nevertheless, the decision gets made. Explicit inter­ pretation of almost every tale involves, to a greater or lesser extent, some answer to the critical question for that tale. And

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I should like to argue that the question is ultimately whether to interpret the tales as epical or as dramatic utterances. There are numerous examples I might choose, but let us consider for a moment the Prioress's Tale. Are we to take the tale as it is given, on its own apparent assumptions, as a beautifully told miniature miracle of the Virgin: and are we therefore to a large extent to dismiss the violence and the polemics against the Jews, as standard machinery for such a story? The tale would then certainly be adapted to the Prioress in the sense that it is religious, sentimental, and so on, but it would tell us little about her, really, that we did not know from her portrait in the General Prologue. To take the tale this way would be to interpret the tale as essentially epical. The Pri­ oress then exists for us as a thought in the mind of the whole work—that is, essentially as she is portrayed in the General Prologue, where we are told about her instead of listening to her speak. The tale itself, its villainous Jews and its little "clergeoun," is the point, and not what new revelations it gives us about the character of the Prioress. This view is not inconsistent, notice, with the view that epic is concerned with character. The character of the Prioress is indeed a concern of The Canterbury Tales considered as a whole epical work. But if the Prioress's Tale itself is considered epically, the char­ acter of the Prioress is of little concern in the tale. The char­ acter of the young hero, of the Jews, and of the Virgin is the concern. The Prioress as teller becomes in this interpretation merely the mouthpiece for Chaucer, a device for getting the epical tale before the audience. But perhaps we are, on the other hand, to take the tale as an extended portrayal of the Prioress herself, an utterance that as a primary function reveals something about the utterer. In that case, we might begin to talk about her re­ pressed maternal instincts, her frustrations that issue in the venom she spits out at the Jews, or perhaps her racial prej­ udice, since she cannot possibly know much about Jews. Then we would say that the mind of the work (loosely, Chaucer's mind) is sympathetic to the Jews and harshly satirical toward

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the Prioress. We would not have said that in the first inter­ pretation, where we regarded the Prioress merely as a mouthpiece. To interpret this tale the second way is to take it as dramatic utterance, as having no important meaning apart from what it reveals about the self-subsistent character who speaks it. The tale, as event in the world, is interpreted as the cause of inferences about a character presented as selfsubsistent. Far from being a mouthpiece for Chaucer, the Prioress becomes almost an anti-Chaucer in her bigotry. Nor is it contradictory to say that the tale is understood dramat­ ically when we take its function to be portrayal of character. For the point of portraying the character in this way is that the Prioress can then come to represent a kind of dialectical position, one way of going wrong, in the "drama" of The Canterbury Tales. The tale does not exist for its own sake, but for some end in the overall "plot" of the work that Chaucer presumably did not complete. Obviously the two kinds of interpretations are not mu­ tually exclusive in any absolute sense. I have deliberately stated the alternatives dialectically, and the dialectic could be re­ solved in several ways. But the interpretations are mutually exclusive in the sense that any reading of the tale will have to stress one approach more than the other. Florence H. Rid­ ley has written a whole book about this interpretive prob­ lem.42 She argues, "it is only from a point of view impossible to the Middle Ages that 'The Prioress's Tale' appears cruel and fanatical. Only by assigning twentieth-century attitudes to this fourteenth-century poem can critics interpret it as a satire on religious or racial prejudice . . ." (p. 1). Ridley summarizes the arguments of critics who see the Prioress's "bigotry" as the point, and she offers historical evidence in support of her reading. Ridley admits that Chaucer intended to satirize the Prioress's "simplicity, emotionalism, and frus­ trated femininity with an air of mild amusement—but not her religious prejudice" (p. 35). The key point for Ridley is 42 The Prtoress and the Critics, University of California English Studies, no. 30 (Berkeley and Los Angeles· University of California Press, 1965).

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that this interpretation is consistent with the General Pro­ logue—or, as I would put it, that we should regard the Pri­ oress as a thought in the mind of the work, a mouthpiece for a traditional tale. Without attempting to solve the in­ terpretive problem, a task that would involve complex ar­ guments not necessarily related to genre-theory, I think we can see in Ridley's book how vital the question of genre be­ comes in critical debate, when genre is conceived as I have said here. The point is that to make the interpretive decision means precisely that the work is being understood primarily as epical or primarily as dramatic. The debate arises because the different explicit interpretations define the work either as epical or as dramatic. If we rest in the tale itself, take it ac­ cording to its own apparent assumptions, we take the Pri­ oress as a thought "in Chaucer's mind," and we treat the world of the tale as a thought in the mind of the work. The tale is then a tale "told for its own sake," through the mouthpiece of the Prioress. If, on the other hand, we regard the tale as a dramatic utterance, we locate the mind of the work elsewhere—outside the tale and outside the Prioress herself, where the tale is taken as an object in the world that defines its teller as a dialectical position. And then we tend to think of the mind of the work as being somewhat more cynical and ironic than we did in the former interpretation; furthermore, we tend to have less sympathy for the Prioress. We might look briefly at another issue. Critics ask whether the Franklin's Tale represents "Chaucer's solution" to the problems of the Marriage Group. On the one hand, the mu­ tual trust and the mutual surrender of maistrie make Dorigen and Arveragus' marriage very happy. On the other hand, how can anyone possibly think after reading the other tales in the group that the bliss of this pair is anything but an impossible dream, given the general lecherousness, perver­ sity, scurrilousness, and bloated self-conceit of human na­ ture? If Dorigen and Arveragus (and Aurelius, for that mat­ ter) are almost as unlikely to be met with in the real world

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as Griselda is, how can the Franklin's Tale represent any kind of "solution" to anything? The kinds of evidence that we would adduce in debating this question depend upon whether we interpret the tale as epical or dramatic. If epical, we first take the work on its own terms, rest in it as a tale told for its own sake. It poses and solves its own problems beautifully, and the world of the tale taken as thought in the mind of the work is sufficient excuse for its own being. If we then want to decide whether the tale represents Chaucer's own solution, the debate will center on the idealistic content of the tale. Those who argue that it is a solution will show how the principles of happy marriage enunciated there are violated in the other tales of the group, and how the unhappiness in the other marriages is a direct result of those violations. Their opponents, on the other hand, will argue that the characters in the Merchant's Tale are much more like "real people," and that Chaucer recognizes the impossible though charming idealism of the Franklin's Tale. Suppose, on the contrary, that we take the tale as a dra­ matic utterance. The Franklin ceases to appear as a thought in the mind of The Canterbury Tales. Instead, he is a character on a stage, answering the other characters who have spoken before him on a subject dear to his heart. The tale is then an object in the world of the work, and the mind of the work withdraws behind the scenes. How are we to know whether the tale represents "Chaucer's solution"? The question of structure, of the ordering of the tales, suddenly becomes of great importance. Those who believe that the tale is Chau­ cer's solution will rely strongly on the argument that it is the last tale in the group, that the Franklin gets the last word. Those who deny that the tale represents a solution will argue that the tale is merely one of four "panels," or perhaps one part of one side of a diptych, in which Chaucer presents four imperfect views. But as long as we attribute the views of the tale entirely to the Franklin as dramatic character, and not at all to the mind of the work, we cannot argue from its con-

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tent to the conclusion that it represents "Chaucer's solu­ tion." We must argue, if at all, from its position. Of course, we would first have to agree that there is a Marriage Group, a premise that already depends to a certain extent on our taking the whole work dramatically. Examples could be multiplied. I think, then, it could be demonstrated that a great many interpretive debates about The Canterbury Tales reduce to or involve the question of whether the work is understood dramatically or epically. Of course, there is not necessarily anything to prevent our un­ derstanding part of the work one way and part another. But the point here is not to solve that very vexed question. It is only to show how the interpretive concepts of dramatic and epic might have application to actual critical debates. Nor do I mean to imply that these concepts, carried further, would necessarily furnish a key to solve the debates. I mean to say only that the issues can be rigorously articulated in the vo­ cabulary of this genre-theory. I think that is worth doing. Even if the genre-theory cannot tell us how to understand the work, it is worth something to know how we have in fact interpreted it. A glance at the journals will persuade most people that many of the actual arguments in these disputes about Chaucer have not really understood what the dispute is about. Again, the point of this book is not to produce knowledge about literature, but to try to bring some order and consistency to the practice of critical debate itself. We are left with lyric. The relational concept associated with the lyric mode in this scheme is community or rec­ iprocity.43 The interpreted mind of the work, that is, finds 43 It is interesting that E. D. Hirsch, Jr., discusses Romanticism in terms of reciprocity, in his book Wordsworth and Schelling. A Typological Study of Romanticism, Yale Studies in English, vol. 145 (New Haven: Yale Univer­ sity Press, 1960). Hirsch argues that "Enthusiasm," or a reciprocity between subject and object, is a way of confronting reality that is characteristic of Romanticism. The genre-theory I am developing here uses the category of reciprocity in a different way, but 1 think it likely that the theory will find Romantic lyrics particularly congenial examples for analysis. One could ex­ plain this either by saying that the theory is infected from the root by the

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itself in a relationship with its world such that it seems that either is determining the other. The most obvious illustra­ tion of a reciprocal relation between mind and world is, as Dilthey suggests, the relation of aesthetic contemplation, where the mind actually finds as an "objective" quality of the world the emotion, value, or pleasure it has put there.44 When we regard something aesthetically, we see in the thing the objectification of our own inner state, while at the same time being aware that the thing is, by entering in through our senses, somehow the determiner of our state. But that is not the only kind of experience that illustrates a reciprocal rela­ tion. Empathy with another person, insofar as his mind is conceived initially as a constituent of my world, is another such relation. When I experience empathy with another per­ son, I remain aware of his mind as an other, yet he ceases to be merely an object. For I know what he is feeling, by means of knowing what I am feeling. I know the object, as it were, by consulting myself. The reciprocity of mind and world in the interpreted lyr­ ical work has an interesting implication, namely that it is impossible for the lyrical mind to present itself as detached from the lyrical world in the way that it is possible in drama or epic. In interpreted drama, the mind is not given in the world, but by means of it, and so complete detachment is the rule. No matter how involved the spectator might be­ come, the world of the drama is presented as something that would go on whether the spectator (or the author) were present or not. In epic, the world is given through the mind, as thought, and this implies a different kind of detachment. That is, the mind has only limited possibilities with respect to the world it tells about, for that world is only thought in philosophical assumptions that gave rise to Romanticism itself; or one could say, as I would prefer, that the lyrical mode of interpretation, when it writes its history of English poetry, will place the time of greatest achievement during the Romantic period. I am not sure that such a conclusion would be so very far from traditional literary histories. 44 Dilthey, "The Types of World-view and their Development in the Metaphysical Systems," in Selected Writings, pp. 151-52.

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a mind. The mind can think about the world, and it can tell about it, and that exhausts its possibilities. It is interesting that epical works are frequently in the past tense, and their events are therefore placed in the realm of the unalterable. Joyce cannot live in the Dublin of his works, for the place is only something he tells about, only a thought in his mind. But it is impossible for the lyrical mind to represent its world this way. The relation between mind and world is reciprocal, and the lyrical mind as interpreted always has possibilities in the world it talks about. I see this as an alternative formula­ tion of Kate Hamburger's insight into the difference between her two genres, "fiction" and "poetry."45 In fiction, the speaking subject (Aussagesubjekt) is fictional for Hamburger, whereas in lyric the speaking subject is real. 1 think we can also give a more satisfactory account of lyrical "subjectivity" or "self-expression" (Hegel) in terms of the reciprocal rela­ tion. Staiger criticizes Hegel's classification, in fact, because the distinction between "subjective" and "objective" breaks down in the case of lyric poetry: "But because there is nei­ ther any subject-matter, nor any object, there is also here not any subject, either. . . . If the lyrical poem is not objective, then certainly therefore it may not be called subjective."46 To interpret a work as lyrical, then, is to interpret it as constituting a relation between mind and world such that each determines the other. Corresponding to epical works in which the narrator is a fictional character, there are of course lyrics in which the speaker is not the poet, and the mind of the speaker is not the mind of the work. It is always possible to take such poems as dramatic utterances, just as we can take the corresponding epical works that way. Indeed, some of the American New Critics, notably Cleanth Brooks (The Well Wrought Urn) and John Crowe Ransom (The New Crit45

Die Logik der Dichtung, 2nd ed. (Stuttgart: E. Klett, 1968). Staiger, Grundbegriffe der Poetik, p. 60: "Weil es aber noch keine Gegenstande, noch keine Objekt gibt, gibt es hier auch noch kein Subjekt .. Wenn lyrische Dichtung nicht objektive ist, so darf sie darum doch mcht subjektiv heissen." 46

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icism) understand many poems precisely that way. But as

we have seen, we can consider a fictional narrator a thought in the mind of the work, and thus interpret these narratives as epical. So, also, we can consider the mind of the fictional lyrical speaker as being in a kind of reciprocal relation with the mind of the work, and so interpret these poems as lyri­ cal. But this is a complex matter that requires further discus­ sion (see Chapter II). In the two short lyrics I have chosen for brief analysis here, I see no strong separation between the mind of the speaker and the mind of the work. An anonymous Middle English religious poem offers a particularly good illustration of how interpreting a poem as Iync depends on setting up a reciprocal relation between mind and world. The lyric is the highly praised "Nou goth sonne vnder wod."47 Nou goth sonne vnder wod,— me reweth, marie, thi faire Rode. Nou goth sonne vnder tre,— me reweth, mane, thi sone and the. [Now goes the sun under wood— I sorrow, Mary, for your fair face. Now goes the sun under tree— I sorrow, Mary, for your son and you.] The lyric does not state the connections between the natural world and the emotion; but if the poem is to work at all, those connections must be made. The mental state, the sor­ rowing, is somehow triggered by the sight of the natural objects—sun and trees; but the natural objects themselves take on an objective coloring of sorrow because of the mental state with which they are associated. The understanding of the poem hinges on the reader's ability to see the mental state and the natural objects as different in their oneness. It is not that the two entities merge completely; rather, they are held apart forcibly by the syntax and the verse form so that their 47 English Lyrics of the XIIlth Century, ed Carleton Brown (Oxford Clar­ endon Press, 1932), no 1 I have normalized the Middle English thorn to th

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reciprocity may be apprehended. The sun does not become the Son, nor the tree the Tree, once and for all in a com­ pleted synthesis of mind and world. The mind of the work moves back and forth between the two poles of its own state and the natural world: the sorrow of the imagined Crucifix­ ion, and the presence of the perceived sunset.48 The second line derives its power primarily from this rec­ iprocity. Mary's face (Rode) is an emblem both of physical beauty and of human sorrow. The pun on "rood" reminds us that physical beauty must perish, and that sorrow for the sin that makes it perish is salvation. In the face, the most expressive part of the body, the gesture is not fully distin­ guished from meaning, world from mind. We do not see a pattern of surfaces when we look at a sorrowing face—we see sorrow. The poem forces us to recognize that we stand in this reciprocal relation to the world. It speaks of Mary's face in terms that in Middle English verse recall the poetic diction reserved to talk about purely physical form. It thus calls at­ tention again to the physicality of Mary's face, her "worldliness," which gets lost in the speaker's sorrowing. The poem in this line restores, as it were, the pole of the world so that it may stand in a reciprocal relation with the mind. We are shocked out of regarding Mary merely as something thought. 48 I cannot agree with Stephen Manning, Wisdom and Number Toward a Critical Appraisal of the Middle English Religious Lyric (Lincoln. University of Nebraska Press, 1962), pp. 80-81, that the poem portrays the speaker such that "the speaker seems actually to be a spectator at the scene," and the poem presents two different Crucifixion scenes: one in lines 1-2, from close to the Cross, and one in lines 3-4, from a distance. Manning is perhaps influenced in his reading by Brown's titling of the poem as "Sunset on Calvary." But the whole point of the poem, it seems to me, is the speaker's imagining of the Crucifixion, an imagining triggered by an actual sunset. Manning does treat the lyric as an example of poems that "concentrate only on the speaker's emotional involvement in the scene" (p. 80), and he has some interesting observations about the possible backgrounds of the lyric in the exegetical tradition. Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 242, discusses the prove­ nance of the lyric and speculates that it might have formed part of a longer poem on the Hours of the Cross or on the Passion.

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Her face, though imagined, suddenly takes on something of the "worldhood" of the trees and the sun. The poem thus frees the figure of Mary to become less of a theological con­ struct and more of a person. Her suffering means more be­ cause she shares physical being with the speaker and with Christ. As David L. Jeffrey says of this lyric, "Mary be­ comes the dramatic representative of the contrite sinner . . . and her psychological function in effecting contrition is charged with the doctrine explained most clearly by Bonaventure, that she feels in her own body the pain of Christ's suffer­ ing."49 And simultaneously, we are shocked into the right way of apprehending the sun and the trees: not just as empty figures for the spiritual truth, but as existing solidly in their own way, too, as worldly entities lent their fullest signifi­ cance by their emblematic powers, which depend on their worldliness. A short modern poem by Ezra Pound, the well-known and much-discussed "In a Station of the Metro," illustrates the same fundamental kind of relation between the mind and the world of the work.50 Instead of a juxtaposition of world and mind, we have a juxtaposition of two bits of the world, which are apparently compared to each other. But the poem of course would be meaningless if the mind of the work were not there in the act of comparison or juxtaposition it­ self. In the essay in which he discusses the composition of this poem, Pound says, "The 'one image poem' is a form of super-position, that is to say it is one idea set on top of an­ other. I found it useful for getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion."51 Hugh Kenner ar49 The Early English Lyric and Franciscan Spirituality (Lincoln· University of Nebraska Press, ¢1975), p. 61. 50 Hugh Kenner presents a rather full discussion of the poem, its reso­ nances and its theoretical importance for Pound's development, m The Pound Era (Berkeley and Los Angeles. University of California Press, 1971), pp 184-87. The poem may be found in Lustra of Ezra Pound (New York: Has­ kell House Publishers, 1973), p. 45 31 "Vorticism," in 1 September 1914 issue of The Fortnightly Review, as quoted in Earl Miner, "Pound, Haiku, and the Image," Ezra Pound A CoI-

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gues that the poem "indicates the means of delivering postSymbolist poetry from its pictorialist impasse" because The mind that found "petals on a wet, black bough" had been active (and for more than a year on that poem, off and on). The "plot" of the poem is that mind's activity, fetching some new thing into the field of consciousness. The action passing through any Imagist poem is a mind's invisible action discovering what will come next that may sustain the presentation. . . .52 And it is in exploring this act of mind that we begin to discover and elucidate the reciprocal relation between mind and world. Every time we assign a predicate (such as "fra­ gility," "paleness," "ephemerality," or "doomedness") to the faces because of their juxtaposition with petals, we have in­ vented the mind of the work, and a mind, moreover, in a reciprocal relation to the given bits of the world. For in order to "see" the resemblance between faces and petals, the mind must have let the faces become for it an objectification of its interior state, and must have found another such objectifi­ cation in the petals, to form the other term of the juxtapo­ sition. Otherwise, the juxtaposition would either result in nonsense, or would result in mere analogy, where the resem­ blances are merely logical ones and are to be sought only in the realm of concepts. Here the resemblances are sought in the realm of the totality of inner life, including concepts, emotions, values, desires. So understanding the poem pre­ supposes apprehending it in terms of a reciprocal relation. The poem depends on our ability to see two parts of the world simultaneously as different and as alike. Conversely, we "fill in" our concept of the reciprocal relation precisely by interpreting the poem, by defining in the predicates we assign to the faces and the petals the inner state that made lection ojCritical Essays, ed Walter Sutton (Englewood Cliffs, N J.: PrenticeHall, cl963), p. 119. Miner's essay is reprinted from The Hudson Review, 9 (Winter, 1956-57), 570-84. 52 Kenner, The Pound Era, p. 186.

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possible the terms of the juxtaposition. As we assign those predicates, we define what the faces and petals are (what the world is) at the same time as we define what the mind of the work is. Thus, we are interpreting the reciprocal relation by defining the relata—and that is what the interpretation of the poem is. It is especially noticeable in interpreting Pound's poem that the parts of the world tend to be conceived also in terms of reciprocal relations, just as in interpreting drama the world is conceived in terms of causality and in interpreting epic in terms of substance. The relation of reciprocity seems perva­ sive in interpreted lyric. The nature of the petals determines the nature of the faces for the mind—the faces are conceived in part by means of the petals. But the reverse is also true. The petals are what they are in the poem only because the faces are there for them to be compared to. The images work in both directions, and it is to that extent misleading to speak of only the petals as "vehicle." The faces are equally a vehicle of meaning with respect to the petals. This conclusion is ex­ actly what Pound's own notion of the "super-position" of ideas would suggest. The conclusion also suggests some­ thing very important about the genre-theory—namely, that it might be used to ground critical distinctions such as the distinction between "tenor" and "vehicle," or to determine when those critical distinctions are not helpful. I shall have more to say on this point in Chapter IV.

Summary

In this chapter, I began with the motive of preserving, if possible, the three traditional broad genres as meaningful terms in critical discourse. I then attempted to show why genres as traditionally conceived cannot be consistently preserved as interpretive categories. Genre-concepts as traditionally con­ ceived lack reflexivity, and yet genre-concepts are necessarily themselves involved in the hermeneutic circle. Then, by means of associating each of the three traditional genres with one

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of Kant's relational categories, I argued that these genres can be reflexive interpretive categories because of the peculiar "emptiness" of the Kantian categories. In doing so, I gave up the traditional expectations of genre-theory—namely, that it should help to classify actual works or to explain the gen­ esis of actual works. Instead, genre-theory appears to be no more, and no less, than a theory about interpretation, a kind of "metacriticism." The function of genre-concepts is to help in articulating, clarifying, and even classifying interpretations. From genre-theory we get, not knowledge of works, but knowledge of interpretations. Like the mind of the work and the world of the work on which they depend, genres them­ selves spring into being along with the explicit interpretation of works, and they are themselves interpretable only in terms of the specific interpretations in which they are involved. I would argue—though not here—that something similar holds of all the terms of critical discourse, that they come into being only through the explicit interpretation of works, and have meaning only in terms of the interpretations they seem to ground. These conclusions could lend themselves readily to over­ simplification for exposition, or to hardening into dogma. That is because of the nature of the relational categories. If someone's primary motivation were to "explain" what gen­ res "are" in terms of other categories, it would be easy enough to erect the categories of causality, substance, and commu­ nity into ultimate metaphysical principles, derived philo­ sophically from experience or from abstract thought, to be used for "defining" things. Then a lyric would be "defined" as "any poem in which the relation between mind and world is presented as a reciprocal relation." Were someone to do this—that is, to adopt a Kantian philosophy thoroughly—he would really have done no more than Kant has done in ar­ guing that the categories apply to all kinds of experiences (including, of course, experiences of poems). This hypothet­ ical theorist would still be left with the problems of defining "reciprocal relation" in terms other than the poem does it,

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and of interpreting the poem to see whether it fits the defi­ nition. Similarly, if someone's primary motivation were to classify literary works in terms of genre, he could easily enough use the categories of causality, substance, and com­ munity as the poles of logical space, placing each work into the space according to the proportion of each relation he found operative in the work. But he, too, would find that he had to interpret the work first. Perhaps the relational model of genres, used in the ways I have just mentioned, would not be significantly worse (or better) than the other genre-theories springing from similar motivations. But the genre-the­ ory would then no longer be a satisfactory interpretive model, though it would get used as an interpretive model and gen­ erate the interpretive fallacies we have seen. Only insofar as we are prepared to allow our genre-concepts themselves to remain problematic, to be fully interpretable only in terms of each individual work, can we say that we have genreconcepts compatible with a satisfactory interpretive model. But I think I have shown that we can conserve the three tradi­ tional broad genre-concepts, and conserve them in such a way that the broad genre-concept, while problematic, is nevertheless relevant at every stage of explicit interpretation.

CHAPTER II

The Anomalous Voice and the Impersonal Lyric

In the preceding chapter, I argued that we can retain the broad genre-concepts as interpretive models, provided that we re­ gard those concepts as reflexive. The concepts themselves are fully interpreted only in the act of interpreting particular works. It follows from the reflexivity of the genre-concepts that the concepts by themselves are insufficient to "prove" that some particular work is a lyric, an epic, or a drama. We can show, given some particular explicit interpretation, that the interpretation understands the work as lyric, as epic, or as drama. In an important sense, the genre-concepts do not re­ fer to something that is inherent in the experience of the work—-just as one does not think, "Aha! A metaphor!" or "Aha! A simile!" when one reads Shakespeare's sonnets. The author's experience of the work, and the reader's pre-explicit understanding of it, do not necessarily involve the conscious­ ness of a split between the mind of the work and the world of the work. But any explicit interpretation of the work in­ volves that split. We should say, then, that the genre-concept is inherently involved in the explicit interpretation of the work. Nevertheless, it is still reasonable to ask what the differ­ ence is between reading a work as a lyric and reading it as drama or as epic. Even if our genre-theory does not permit the unequivocal classification of every work under one of the three broad genres, still it must show how the genre-concept makes a difference in interpretation. Certainly it is the "same" work that one critic interprets as lyric, another as epic, and a third, perhaps, as drama. But if interpreting a work as lyric is no different from interpreting it as epic or as drama, the

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genre-concepts are of no use in articulating explicit interpre­ tations. I am primarily concerned with lyric poetry. The American New Critics have already produced interesting results by reading as dramatic utterances many of the short poems that we intuitively group together under the vague heading of "lyrics." These critics have perhaps once and for all driven a wedge between "the author" and "the speaker of the poem." The distinction is certainly embedded in critical practice, and it is theoretically desirable for many reasons to retain it. But it is quite clear that the distance between the historical author and the speaker is not always equally wide.1 Poems fall on a spectrum. At one end we have poems like "Tintern Abbey," where Wordsworth takes pains in the long title to connect the poem to a particular event in his life and to identify the speaker with the real person William Wordsworth. On the other end of the spectrum we have poems where the speaker cannot possibly be the author, as when a male poet speaks with the voice of a woman, or when the speaker is presented as speaking from beyond the grave. These latter poems 1 shall call poems of "anomalous voice." Certainly it might seem obvious that one could approach these poems as dra­ matic utterances. Or perhaps they are better approached as an extreme case of lyric, although the reason for our intuitive grouping of the poems with other lyrics is not entirely clear. If I may revert to the vocabulary of our genre-theory: it is not immediately clear in these anomalous-voice poems how the mind of the work arises differently than in drama. The mind of the work (perhaps identified with the author's mind) is given as an effect of, an inference from, a dramatic speech, just as Shakespeare's mind is given, if at all, by inference 1 It might be helpful here, and later in the discussion of "voice" in literary works, to compare modern discussions of point of view in narrative—for example, Seymour Chatman's detailed discussion of the various degrees of "narrator-presence," in Story and Discourse Narrative Structure m Fiction and Film (Ithaca, N.Y : Cornell University Press, cl978), chaps. 4 and 5

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from the events on stage. How, then, can we interpret the poems in terms of reciprocity between mind and world? How can the poems be read as lyrics, and how would that be dif­ ferent from reading them as dramatic utterances? A parallel problem arises with another kind of poem that is also sometimes intuitively grouped with the lyrics. I refer to the short "impersonal poem," a poem in which there is no "I." On the surface these poems are statements about the world. They have a narrator, in the sense of "one who tells," and the world is apparently given as thought in the mind of the one who tells. How do we read these poems differently from the works that we read epically? Again, how can we have reciprocity, if the mind of the work is absorbed in rep­ resenting the world and is therefore apparently unaware of itself? The impersonal poem is another extreme case of lyric, if indeed the poems can be read as lyrics at all. In the anom­ alous-voice poem, the mind of the work is apparently hidden "behind the scenes." In the impersonal poem, it is apparently everywhere and everywhere transparent, since the world of the poem is apparently being given as thoughts in that mind. Neither with the anomalous-voice poem nor with the im­ personal poem does the mind of the work at first seem avail­ able for a reciprocal relation with its world. The problem of this chapter is nevertheless to show how these poems can be read as lyrics—and thus in a way to "account for" our intu­ itive grouping of these poems—without attempting to prove that any particular poem is "a lyric." I shall not solve any particular problems of classification. Instead, by examining these extreme cases I want to delineate more precisely the difference between reading a work as lyric and reading it as anything else. Thus, I hope to clarify the genre-concepts fur­ ther, and at the same time to begin to suggest how they might be useful in articulating interpretations. In passing, too, I shall try to show how the genre-concepts can provide a perspective on actual critical dialogue, or even enable the clear definition of some confused issues in critical debate.

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Poems of Anomalous Voice First, we should note that the concept of the anomalous voice in lyric is itself a problem. Even after one admits the con­ cept, the question of the function of anomalous voice easily slides over into related, but distinctly different, questions. On the one hand, the question of the anomalous voice is not just the question of how the poem should be interpreted. Certainly any complete interpretation would give some ac­ count of the anomalous voice, but one could not always be sure of picking from the many effects of the particular poem those effects that are distinctive of anomalous voice as such. On the other hand, the question of the anomalous voice is not just the question of who the speaker is. Like the New Critics, one might get valuable results by asking who the speaker is and what he is like; but as long as one confines oneself to that method, one is treating the poem simply as a dramatic utterance that sustains itself independently of the reader's knowing whether the voice is "anomalous." So we need to be careful of procedure if we are to be sure of addressing the question of the anomalous voice, and not some other question. It is perfectly in accord with the spirit of our theory, and I think the best tactic here, to assume that the concept of anomalous voice is operative—assume it, that is, just as we have already assumed that other crucial con­ cepts such as "genre" and even "understanding" itself, are operative. That is, we can assume at the start that our vague concepts are capable of greater explicitness and greater determinacy, that the concept is meaningfully employed in talk­ ing about lyrics; and then see what consequences follow. It then immediately becomes clear how we must go about dis­ tinguishing lyrics with anomalous voices from dramatic ut­ terances. In drama all voices are anomalous, in that the au­ thor does not speak in propria persona in the play. Hamlet's voice is not Shakespeare's; Hamlet's consciousness is not the mind of the work. But, as I have argued, in drama the mind of the work arises as an effect of the characters' speeches and

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actions. The anomalousness of the dramatic character's voice, in other words, serves to set up a relation of causality be­ tween the world of the work and the mind of the work. Now, if the concept of the anomalous voice is operative for lyric, it must be that the anomalousness of the voice itself is crucial in understanding the lyric. To differentiate inter­ preted lyric from interpreted drama, then, we must show that the anomalousness of the voice somehow serves to set up in our understanding not a cause-effect relation, but a reciprocity between world and mind. The anomalous voice must be a technique for achieving this reciprocity—if the concept is to be operative in our theory. Thus, the essential difference between lyrics of anomalous voice and other lyrics is that our interpretations of the former call particular atten­ tion to the "doubleness" of voice. In interpreting a poem like "Tintern Abbey" we say that there is no difference, or al­ most none, between author and speaker. The speaker of Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" is probably not intended as the historical Marvell, but the voice is not really anoma­ lous, either. With lyrics of anomalous voice, however, the "doubleness" of author and speaker, potentially part of every poem, is made the point of the poem as interpreted. We might pause to remind ourselves of the relationship between the author's voice and mind of the work. Though in actual speech we normally think of a voice as a symbol of consciousness, I shall be speaking as though the author's voice is his consciousness in the literary work. I think that we must regard "voice" this way in talking about literary works if the concept is to have any meaning. For in literary works, the author's chosen voice (tone, intonation) must be inferred from our sense of the author's consciousness, and not the other way around. In reading, our sense of voice is not prior to our sense of consciousness, but is necessarily bound up with it. And we infer the author's consciousness in the first place from our participation in the mind of the work. Thus, al­ though the author's voice, the author's mind, and the mind

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of the work are theoretically separable,2 in fact any actual interpretation might conflate them. That is especially ob­ vious in the case of anomalous-voice poems (which we might also call "anomalous-consciousness" poems). There we "hear" the author's voice only because we identify the author's mind with the mind of the work. By sharing as readers in the mind of the work, we feel the "otherness" of the speaker's voice as a difference not only from the author, but from ourselves. Now it makes sense to ask what the relationship is be­ tween the speaker's voice and the author's voice in inter­ preted anomalous-voice lyrics. There are several possibilities. One might say, for example, that the anomalous voice speaks for or represents the author or part of the author's mind, perhaps his better self, or perhaps a Mr. Hyde whom he disowns in his higher moods. In other words, the anomalous voice might be a "mouthpiece." Some things seem to rec­ ommend this view, and the "mouthpiece" theory might even be sufficient to account fully on historical grounds for a par­ ticular author's assumption of an anomalous voice—an au­ thor, say, who has reason to fear the personal consequences of espousing certain views in propria persona. But ultimately this view of the anomalous voice is trivial, and conceals more than it reveals. For there is no doubt that an author can rep­ resent part of his mind, even a part he is hostile toward or afraid of, without recourse to an anomalous voice. There is irony, there is allegory, there is occupatio. Certainly, the au­ thor cannot represent his mind "in just the same way" as the anomalous mouthpiece would represent it, but the issue here is precisely the mode of representation. What is essential to the mode of representation that chooses an anomalous voice? One thing that an author cannot do in his own voice is to reject or deny his own voice. That is logically impossible. He can reject or deny things he has said, or past incarnations 2 Compare Chatman's discussion of the distinctions (ultimately derived from Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction) between "real author" and "im­ plied author" and "real reader" and "implied reader" (Story and Discourse, pp. 147-51).

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of his voice, but in the very act of rejecting or denying he uses his voice and thus affirms it in its presence. The ironic voice, for example, rejects or denies the statement it osten­ sibly makes, but it cannot reject or deny its own irony. In lyrics of anomalous voice, then, might the author employ another voice in order to reject or deny his own? This cannot be the case if, as I have argued, the author's voice is always "there" in the lyric as the doubleness by which the speaker's voice is known to be anomalous. Another way to put this is to say that in the lyric of anomalous voice the author never "imagines a person who says. ..." Rather, the author al­ ways "imagines himself to be a person who says. . . . " The difference is crucial, and I think it is an important clue. For whenever an author speaks in his own voice, that voice is coming to be or is being created as the act of speak­ ing occurs. Another thing, then, that it is logically impossi­ ble for an author to do in his own voice is to symbolize the presence of that voice. A symbol must be different from the thing symbolized; so the presence of an author's voice, the coming-to-consciousness that occurs whenever he speaks, cannot symbolize itself. The act of speech is an act of becom­ ing a voice, and thus verbal symbolizing can only be of a former voice, past and completed. Voice in a literary work is not a symbol of the author's consciousness at the moment of utterance—it is the author's consciousness, inferred from the mind of the work, in the constantly renewed present mo­ ment of reading. The words on the page might be conceived as symbols of consciousness. But the voice is not the words— it is the consciousness "behind" them. I do not mean to say in any absolute sense that an author cannot symbolize his own mind in his own voice. Shelley does it sublimely in Mont Blanc, and Wordsworth does it sublimely in the "Mount Snowdon" section of The Prelude. But in each case the au­ thor's voice presents a landscape as symbol of a conceptually grasped entity—the mind as it has already been grasped by the mind. We get, in other words, a symbol of a completed thought, and not a symbol of the thinking or particular act

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of consciousness by which that symbolizing thought itself comes to be. An author can indeed symbolize his own voice in his own voice, but only if he considers his own voice as a completed, conceptually grasped entity. The voice that comes to be in the symbolizing will not itself be symbolized, any more than the voice that ostensibly denies the author's voice will itself be denied. All I wish to establish by this argument is the possibility that the anomalous voice functions as something like a sym­ bol of the author's voice—that is, that the anomalous voice "represents" the author's voice in the way a symbol repre­ sents the thing symbolized. In symbolizing, we think the thing symbolized by means of thinking the symbol. Usually, but not always, we think an abstract by means of thinking a concrete. We thus experience a kind of pre-discursive think­ ing of the thing symbolized—it need not enter conceptually into consciousness if we in fact think it only by means of the symbol. Thus, we perform a pre-discursive thinking of Christianity, for example, when we think it by thinking the Cross as a physical object. What can this mean for lyrics interpreted as poems of anomalous voice? In what sense can one "voice" or "personality" in its presence symbolize an­ other? I think we should take our clue here from the phenomenon of empathy. To experience empathy, I must be made aware of someone else's feelings by becoming aware that I am al­ ready feeling the same thing. The experience of empathy thus demands a pre-discursive encounter with oneself. I do not feel elated because I know you feel elated; rather, I know you are elated because I become aware that I am feeling the way you do. Only subsequent conceptualization informs me that it is "elated" we are feeling. It is constitutive of the experience of empathy, then, that in encountering another it becomes possible for one to encounter oneself, "surprise" oneself, as it were, in the instant of moving from the prediscursive level to the discursive level where there is concep­ tual knowledge. To shift back into the literary language: the

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encounter with the other person is like, even symbolic of, the encounter with oneself; and the experience of empathy seems much like the experience of encountering oneself in the instant when one becomes a "voice." The phenomenon of empathy is of course not identical to the phenomenon of literary symbolism that I am talking about. The concept of "empathy" offers only a way of suggesting how the anomalous voice might become a symbol of the author's voice. The "empathy" between author and speaker is a literary device, a fiction, just like everything else in the poem. But with that caution in mind, I think we can fruit­ fully employ the concept of empathy in interpreting lyrics of anomalous voice. The relation of empathy is, of course, one kind of reciprocal relation, and it is not the only fictive rela­ tion that might obtain between the anomalous voice and the authorial voice. But I am arguing precisely that to presup­ pose another kind of relation is to constitute a reading of the poem as drama or even as epic. The upshot of this discussion so far is therefore as follows. The concept of the anomalous voice in interpreted lyric es­ sentially suggests that the function of the voice is to permit the author to encounter himself on the pre-discursive level, and to symbolize himself, his presence, in the moment of becoming a "voice"; the anomalous voice accomplishes this by providing an "other" with whom the author stands in a fictive relation like empathy. In lyrics where the author "re­ produces" or "represents" his feelings, or where he provides symbols for states of mind, the feelings or states of mind unfold as accessible, discovered territory that is now being rhetorically claimed. In lyrics of anomalous voice, on the other hand, the author's feeling or state of mind is presented as undiscovered country, something to be encountered in the very instant of its coming to presence, as the author's mind (the mind of the work) alters into empathy with the speak­ er's mind. There might of course be many ways for an interpretation to locate that altering into empathy which constitutes the

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lyricism of an anomalous-voice poem One way is through change in diction Yeats's poems often work this way, and I shall take "An Irish Airman Foresees his Death" as paradig­ matic of the anomalous-voice lyric as I am approaching it here The poet imagines himself to be Major Robert Greg­ ory, who, killed in action, becomes an ideal aristocratic fig­ ure for Yeats (see Yeats's other elegies for Gregory, espe­ cially "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory" and "Shepherd and Goatherd") The diction of the poem is dignified, but ostentatiously restrained and colloquial I know that I shall meet my fate Somewhere among the clouds above, Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love (lines 1-4)3 The cliches reinforce the colloquial tone "clouds above," "meet my fate," "waste of breath" (line 14) One hears an aristocratic speaker who deliberately or habitually confines himself to simple statements in ordinary diction Thomas Parkinson calls the speaker an "austere dramatis persona "4 The speaker's austerity constitutes his eloquence, for the overused words such as fate, hate, love, country, law, and duty are rehabditated and made to carry great weight The speaker believes in these things, not as abstractions, but as real ex­ periences that he expects his listeners to understand Though the poem asserts that the speaker is not moved by these con­ siderations, he is capable of being moved by them Indeed, the point of the poem is in one sense the speaker's mild sur­ prise that these considerations do not move him The most obvious verbal device in the poem (and it is pervasive) is the syntactic balancing 3 The Variorum Edition of the Poems of W B Yeats, ed Peter Allt and Russell K Alspach, 3rd printing (New York The Macmillan Company, 1966), ρ 328 t W B Yeats, Self-Critic A S t u d y o fh i s E a r l y Verse, a n d T h e L a t e rPoetry, 2 vols in one (Berkeley and Los Angeles University of California Press, 1971), Later Poetry, ρ 18

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Those that I fight I do not hate, Those that I guard I do not love; My country is Kiltartan Cross, My countrymen Kiltartan's poor. . . . (3-6) Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, Nor public men, nor cheering crowds. . . . (9-10) In the last lines of the poem, the speaker explicitly recognizes his own balancing turn of mind, and reinforces the idea with a chiasmus: I balanced all, brought all to mind, The years to come seemed waste of breath, A waste of breath the years behind In balance with this life, this death. (13-16) The diction and verbal devices here give us a sense of the speaker's character that at first seems directly contradicted by the lines that most interest me: "A lonely impulse of de­ light / Drove to this tumult in the clouds ..." (11-12). The diction does not quite resemble anything else in the poem.5 The words impulse and tumult clearly do not belong with the tone of public statement that characterizes the rest of the poem. Delight is perhaps as abstract as duty or law, but delight is a private matter, not a public one, and it is crucial that the impulse of delight is "lonely." The patriotic emotions men­ tioned in the poem take value precisely from being shared. Lines 11-12 talk about an altering of the mental balance that characterizes the rest of the poem, a poised movement, per­ haps, but a movement into "tumult." The point, I think, is not that Yeats means that Major Robert Gregory was normally incapable of delight. Rather, 5 Professor Alan Feldman pointed out to me the altered diction in these lines.

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Yeats is suggesting, this is the emotion that enables the poet to understand the hero's self-sacrifice. The poem is about the "lonely impulse of delight," which the poet and the reader should share with the speaker. The speaker abandons the mode of public utterance for a moment, to express what is never­ theless genuine feeling, and the mind of the work discovers itself in its sharing of the speaker's impulse. But Yeats has not portrayed himself in the poem—the mind of the work has not conceptualized itself. Suddenly to find itself in its sharing of the impulse of delight is a kind of surprise, almost a shock of elation. The work recognizes the speaker's sim­ plicity, his balance, his eloquence, his aristocratic matter-offactness. But the experience of this recognition differs sharply from the experience of the lonely impulse of delight. If Yeats's poem works, the reader is swept up in these lines in a way that does not admit of detachment. Joseph Hone has an in­ teresting account of Yeats's part in the rehearsals for the BBC broadcasts of his poetry: . . . it was Yeats' way of saying lines that made these broadcasts memorable. In "An Irish Airman" he made Clinton [actor Clinton-Baddeley] speak the lines "A lonely impulse of delight Drove to this tumult in the clouds" as though he was experiencing the physical sensation of flight. "Ecstasy, Baddeley!" he would cry, and repeat the lines lovingly to himself.6 Yeats's attention to the lines emphasizes their importance; the lines manage the "ecstasy," the alteration into empathy, by a change in diction. Something similar happens in certain of Yeats's "Crazy Jane" poems. There Yeats seems concerned not to reconcile opposites, but rather to return himself and the reader to a pre-discursive state of mind where opposites momentarily do not exist. Opposites come into being only as functions of discourse—there are no contradictions in nature. Jane is "crazy" 6

W. B. Yeats, 1865-1939 (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1943),

p. 489.

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because she ostensibly operates on the discursive level and yet refuses to accept opposites as opposites. Of course, she is always saner than her interlocutors. To the extent that the author as voice and we as readers experience empathy with Jane, we encounter ourselves in the moment when we be­ come voices and begin to construct opposites out of the pri­ mordial contents of consciousness. Denis Donoghue, iden­ tifying CrazyJane with "the urges of the body," can thus argue that "The great advantage of the biological imperative as a source of verbal communication is that it is prior to all conflicts of thought or belief; it undercuts the more conten­ tious levels of experience."7 The process is perhaps clearest in "Crazy Jane Talks With The Bishop." Here, as often in the "Crazy Jane" poems, Yeats attempts through altering into empathy with his speaker to return to a primordial experience of love. The "Crazy Jane" poems are usually love-poems, after all, and they want to present love as the universal synthesis of human experi­ ence. Jane apparently feels no disgust at the gross physicality of bodily love, but the Bishop does: 'Those breasts are flat and fallen now, Those veins must soon be dry; Live in a heavenly mansion, Not in some foul sty.' The antithesis between corruptible physical being and "true" spiritual being is familiar, but Jane asserts the equivalence of "fair" and "foul": " 'Fair and foul are near of kin, / And fair needs foul,' I cried" (7-8). So far, we can follow Jane on the discursive level and even present logical arguments for her assertions. The figure requires the ground; being fallen, like Adam and Eve in Paradise Lost, we know the fair only by knowing the foul. But that does not really answer the Bish­ op's and the reader's awakened disgust at the human physical grossness for which the old woman's body is only a synec7 "The Vigour of its Blood: Yeats's 'Words for Music Perhaps,' " Kenyan Review, 21 (1959), 378, 384.

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doche. The answer to that disgust comes in these climactic lines: "But Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement" (15-16). These lines have of course attracted a great deal of com­ mentary. As Harold Bloom says, ". . . Crazy Jane is never more impressive poetically than she is here, for her authentic extravagance would be difficult to match. She attracts Yeats, and his readers, because of the sublime and grotesque fury of what we might call, wryly, her 'anthropological dispro­ portion'. . . ."8 The lines are especially remarkable for their density, their wealth of associations. Again, the difference between these lines and the other lines in the poem can be analyzed as a matter of diction. Yeats becomes punning and allusive—perhaps also the emphatic word excrement seems uncharacteristically fastidious for Jane, and the voice of Yeats himself seems for an instant to break through. In any case, critics have remarked that the lines in question allude to Blake's Jerusalem: "For I will make their places of love and joy excrementitious."9 Bloom even suggests that Yeats is engaging in a kind of dialectic with Blake, since Blake "would not believe rending in itself is the path to wholeness. . . ."10 Nicholas Brooke finds the whole third stanza of the poem to be thick with puns. For Brooke the point is partly that the "abstract, conceptual statement" of stanza 2 (i.e., "Fair and foul are near of kin," etc.) becomes in the lines about Love's mansion a restatement in "decidedly physical terms"; the third stanza also puns on sole/whole versus soul/hole, and " 'proud' and 'stiff" mean roughly the same thing applied to grand la­ dies, but 'proud' is also used of a bitch on heat, and 'stiff is a common word for tumescence."'1 Against the background 8

Yeats (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 403-4 A. NormanJeffares points out the allusion, in WB Yeats' Man and Poet (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1949), p. 272. Bloom also mentions Blake, and he finds the immediate context of Jerusalem 88.37-43 relevant to Yeats's poem. 10 Bloom, Yeats, p. 403. 11 "Crazy Jane and 'Byzantium,' " Essays and Studies, 27 n.s. (1974), 8081. 9

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of these crude puns, lines 15-16 stand out for Brooke as "an­ other line of verbal play with a rather different dimension": Love is at once the pagan and the Christian god of love; man­ sion and pitched seem biblical, where pitch is the normal word for erecting a tent, thus reminding one of God's tabernacle; thus "The place of excrement is Cupid's heavenly mansion, and that is one answer to the Bishop; another is that Christ was born in a stable. . . . the stanza doubles all its references to both gods of Love, trafficking between the two as both opposite and identical . . ." (p. 81). Thus a large part of the striking effect of lines 15-16 de­ pends on their altering the diction. It is important to notice here that if there is any disgust in the lines, it is not Jane's. I think there is probably even more to say about the word pitched than Brooke recognizes. In one sense, pitched also re­ tains connotations from the world of the romance—Love is some sort of king or feudal lord who pitches the tents of his pavilion. Love as feudal lord is a traditional image in medi­ eval works, an image that often usurps the place of love as classical god. On the other hand, there are the connotations associated with the substance pitch, and in this case we would read the line as meaning that Love has fouled his mansion. To establish love physically is already to foul it. But the whole ambiguity seems not to be in Jane's mind. Indeed, these lines seem to be the moment in the poem where the author's voice alters into empathy with the speaker's. It is precisely not the case that the author and the reader, after listening to Jane, somehow surmount or repress the feelings of disgust asso­ ciated with physical love, in the interest of allowing the physical expression of spiritual love. It is rather that author and reader recognize that their disgust has been separated out from the primordial experience of physical love and has be­ come disgust only in the process of that separating. By im­ posing the demands of discourse on the physical expression of love, the mind makes its own punishment, which is the disgust the Bishop experiences. To pitch is to foul only when we become aware of the poem as discourse, as words that

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attempt to fix pre-discursive realities. Disgust arises in the moment of becoming a voice. The Tightness of the physical act of love, the making "sole" or "whole" of the body and mind, in discourse becomes also the physical "rending" that occurs when Jane loses her virginity. Thus, the paradox in the last lines is strictly verbal: "For nothing can be sole or whole / That has not been rent." If the Bishop is right even in positing love as the universal principle, then rending is making sole and whole in physical love, and "bodily lowliness" and "the heart's pride" turn out to be the same thing. Jane affirms the love the Bishop thinks he is preaching, but for her the love does not exclude the bodily. Love's earthly "mansion" is in an important sense already a "heavenly mansion." We could see much of this in the poem, of course, without ever talking about the fact that the voice is anomalous. But we would miss explaining, I think, the startling effect of the climactic lines where Yeats and the reader, altering into empathy with Jane, suddenly see that genuine disgust at physical love unavoidably comes into being as a category at the instant of discursive analysis. We surprise ourselves in the act of becoming a voice.12 12 Other "Crazy Jane" poems might yield something to this sort of anal­ ysis. Yeats's point in "Crazy Jane and Jack the Journeyman" (Yeats Var­ iorum, p. 511) is again to destroy discursive opposites by positing love as universal synthesis. The first stanza, except for the stronger "I tremble to the bone," is a pretty little romantic ballad of the abandoned woman. The second stanza seems to offer religious consolation for the loss of Jack—the "lonely ghost" will "leap into the light" of God The third stanza recants the religious consolation, simultaneously affirming the power of human love to extend beyond death. The opposites are, on the one hand, divine love, which is "lonely," permanent, non-physical, and associated with light, and, on the other hand, human love, which takes two, is transient and physical, and is associated with darkness (lines 6 and 17). The opposites are not ob­ viously reconciled or dissolved for Jane herself—her craziness in this poem consists in her apparent valuing of Jack's love on a level with God's. The poem seems to me, however, to turn on the last lines of the second stanza: 1—love's skein upon the ground, My body in the tomb— Shall leap into the light lost In my mother's womb.

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We might note here how the genre-concept can throw light on actual critical practice. In the case of this poem, it is not a trivial problem to explain why the lines we have been talk­ ing about (15-16) have attracted the most critical commen­ tary, have in fact appeared to critics to be the key lines of the poem. Just to say that the lines are obviously the "best" or the most "striking" is merely to shift the locus of the original question. Why do the lines seem best, most striking? Critics do not necessarily argue that the lines give the clearest insight into Jane's character, as they might argue if they were interpreting the poem as dramatic monologue. Rather, as Bloom says, Jane "attracts" Yeats and the readers. "At­ tracts," I would add, in the stronger sense, too, of "assimi­ lates"—as a magnet imparts some of its force to the metal rings that hang from it. And whether Brooke would say as much or not, the puns upon which his reading depends do their work in the poem not because Jane conceives of Cupid and Christ as opposites, but because the mind of the work does. The efficacy of the climactic stanza depends on a "trafThere is a note of triumph The image of the "light lost / In my mother's womb" is interesting Primarily the line seems to mean that Jane, like every infant, loses the light of God by being shut in a dark earthly womb But the line also could refer to a mental state of freedom from the clash of discursive opposites. We get this mental "light" in the world only in the womb. The womb is already ambiguous, in that it is difficult to tell whether it is associated with the light or with the dark. As Nicholas Brooke points out ("Crazy Jane and 'Byzantium,' " ρ 74), "It is not possible to determine whether Jane's leap will be towards the light, or more characteristically away from it back into the womb for a constant flux of re-birth (which is equally a Platonic idea) " But the womb is ambiguous in another sense, too As sexual organ, it belongs to the physical world that Jane and Jack inhabit On the other hand, the womb is the means by which heavenly love delivers men to the life from which they shall leap into the light Every womb, like the Virgin's, is an instrument of Providence At this moment, I would say, the author's voice alters into empathy with Jane's In the face of the apparent contradiction between divine love and earthly love, a contradiction so strong on the discursive level that one seems to exclude the other, the mind of the work affirms with Jane that both are the same. The triumph is valid (For Yeats's own account of the circumstances of composition, and for another discussion of this poem, see Parkinson, Later Poetry, ρ 77 and pp. 212 ff)

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ficking" between the two gods of love as "both opposite and identical." Brooke is describing a reciprocal relation between the gods, and that reciprocal relation enters the reader's awareness precisely as a result of the empathy between Jane's mind and the mind of the work. There is no reason to sup­ pose that either Bloom or Brooke deliberately sought a rec­ iprocity in the poem, but their interpretations nevertheless depend upon an implicit awareness that a reciprocity is con­ structed in the climactic lines. This is as much as to say that both read the poem as lyrical, in spite of the anomalousness of voice. Nor do we simply have Jane speaking lyrically— we have the mind of the work speaking lyrically by its em­ pathy with Jane. The genre-theory would account for critics' concentration on the lines in question, by observing that the lines are crucial in the way we have said to an interpretation of the poem as lyric. A change in diction is not the only way of signaling alter­ ation into empathy with the anomalous voice. Two other anomalous-voice poems, one by Blake and one by Emily Dickinson, illustrate how an alteration into empathy can come about by a change in what might be called "perspective." Some of the poems in Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Ex­ perience do not obviously employ an anomalous voice. Per­ haps the speaker is not Blake himself in his garb of prophetic genius, but in some cases we might reasonably identify the speaker as "Blake speaking from his own remembered in­ nocence" or "Blake speaking from his memory of his own sojourn in Experience." Such poems are, perhaps, "The Di­ vine Image," "The Human Abstract," "London," and so on. There can be no argument, however, about the two "Nurse's Songs." They are certainly anomalous-voice poems, as I have defined the term, and I should like to turn to the "Nurse's Song" of Experience: When the voices of children, are heard on the green And whisprings are in the dale: The days of my youth rise fresh in my mind, My face turns green and pale.

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Then come home my children, the sun is gone down And the dews of night arise Your spring & your day, are wasted in play And your winter and night in disguise.13 One way to approach this poem is to contrast it with its counterpart in Innocence E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in fact sees the "Nurse's Song" as "the most thoroughly parodic poem of Experience," in which the openness of the innocent Nurse gives way to suspicion and "Unzenic disguise—that is, . . hypocritical pieties that mask secret sexual longings."14 But I shall not pursue the comparative approach. Instead, I want to point to an interesting shift m perspective in the Experience poem. In the first stanza, the first three lines report what the Nurse hears, and the memories that arise in her mind We are clearly inside her head. But a strange thing happens in the last line of the stanza. The Nurse is not represented in Blake's etching as holding a mirror—she is instead combing the long hair of a youth. There is nothing yet to make us think that she is meditating on her external appearance. But unless one is looking in a mirror, to say "My face turns green and pale" seems rather strange. It would be more nor­ mal to say, "I felt my face turn pale," or something of the sort This line has struck several of Blake's commentators as odd enough to require explanation of one sort or another.15 ,5 The Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed David V Erdman, commen­ tary by Harold Bloom, 4th printing (Garden City, N Y Doubleday & Company, 1970), ρ 23 14 Innocence and Experience An Introduction to Blake (New Haven Yale University Press, 1964), pp 232-33 15 S Foster Damon, William Blake Hts Philosophy and Symbols (Glouces­ ter, Mass Peter Smith, 1958, first published 1924), ρ 275, remarks that the usage of the word green is uncommon for Blake, a usage that is " 'futuris­ tic'—emotional, and not factual " Robert F Gleckner, The Piper and the Bard (Detroit Wayne State University Press, 1959), ρ 266, explains that green connotes envy, and Hazard Adams, William Blake A Reading of the Shorter Poems (Seattle University of Washington Press, ¢1963), ρ 253, defends Blake's line against G K Chesterton's charge of inaccuracy by arguing that the Nurse is "meant to be bitter and histrionic, and thus sentimental," so that the "strange exaggeration" of the line is in character

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But I think the line seems strange primarily because it does report the external appearance of the Nurse in a situation where we would have expected a direct report of her inner state that causes her face to pale. The Nurse, after all, unlike everyone else in the world, presumably has direct access to that inner state. In short, the perspective seems momentarily to shift to a center of consciousness outside the Nurse—perhaps, indeed, to the reader as interlocutor. Blake's tactic compels a rather peculiar response. The reader wants to understand the Nurse's state of mind; but now, instead of being told about it di­ rectly, he must feel his way into it from exterior clues. He must deduce emotion from gesture, imagine his own face as green and pale and then feel in imagination the mental state associated with that condition of his sympathetic nervous system. In other words, the line demands a different kind of understanding—instead of discursive, conceptual under­ standing, it demands of the reader an empathetic response. And when the reader is thinking of his own face as green and pale, he must also be thinking of his own mental state as it appears to a consciousness external to him. Both the speaker and the mind of the work, then, "see" their own inner state through the eyes of another consciousness. The thematic importance of the shifting perspective be­ comes clear in the last line of the poem. The usual thing in commonplace poetry would be to find "decay," or some­ thing of the sort, as the last word. But Blake writes "dis­ guise." To disguise oneself, one must be aware of how one looks to other people. One must, that is, constantly find oneself (and define oneself) through an external point of view. That is part of the terror of Experience, of the state of adult­ hood in general. One may hide oneself and ultimately lose oneself by coming to think of oneself as an object for other consciousnesses. This interpretation' is one way to answer John Holloway's criticism of the poem: he finds "some un­ certainty, or at least a lack of clarity, in the meaning of the

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closing lines."16 The loss of the self does not have to happen, perhaps, though it has happened to the Nurse. As Gleckner says in The Piper and the Bard, the Nurse "wastes her energy through repression" (pp. 268-69). In the last line of the poem, the mind of the work judges the Nurse; the mind of the work no longer identifies itself with the Nurse's mind, seeing, instead, what is wrong with the Nurse's perspective. But in the crucial line at the end of the first stanza, the mind of the work has found in itself the potential for "disguise" and the surrender to the contradictions of Experience. To define one­ self even for an instant in terms of another consciousness is to invite the serpent of repression and hypocrisy into the garden of innocence.17 Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death" is another poem about self-deception where the speaker can­ not be the poet, because the speaker in this case is dead. But in this poem, too, there comes a moment when the mind of the work resonates with the mind of the speaker and sur­ prises itself in an experience of empathy. I think that mo­ ment causes the final eeriness of a poem that seems to want to be cheerful about death. Here, again, the major tactic is a Blake The Lyrtc Poetry (London Edward Arnold, 1968), ρ 60 To discuss the significance of Blake's etching for the "Nurse's Song" in Experience is to plunge into a small theoretical quagmire Damon de­ scribes the etching this way "The nurse combs the hair of a boy with folded hands In the majority of copies, the boy looks very unhappy and indignant In the grape-wreathed cottage door behind sits a little girl" (William Blake His Philosophy and Symbols, ρ 285) That the copies are different is not the least of the problems. Gleckner criticizes Damon's description, he says that the expressions on the Nurse's face and the child's face are merely "enig­ matic" (The Piper and the Bard, ρ 315) And Hirsch sees the Nurse as "buxom but jealous looking about forty," the boy and the girl as "adolescent" "The picture supports the idea that the 'children' of the poem are nubile and that Blake's primary notion of'wasted day' is repressed sexuality" (Innocence and Experience, ρ 233) I therefore hesitate to say anything about the etch­ ing, except to note that the hair-combing fits the theme of disguise that seems so important The Nurse makes the youth "presentable," thereby either forcing on him or teaching him conformity to the expectations of others, regardless of his natural inclinations One thmks of the "flourishing hair" of Summer m Blake's "To Summer" as a strong contrast 16

17

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subtle shift in perspective, but Dickinson also emphasizes that shift with certain obvious alterations in form. The first three stanzas of the poem try to deal with the problem of death by romanticizing the traditional figure of Death. The poem tries to make him a dark suitor who takes one out for an afternoon's ride—which turns out to be the ride to the cemetery. Because I could not stop for Death— He kindly stopped for me— The Carriage held but just Ourselves— And Immortality. We slowly drove—He knew no haste And I had put away My labor and my leisure too, For His Civility— We passed the School, where Children strove At Recess—in the Ring— We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain— We passed the Setting Sun. . . .18 So far, so good. The ride progresses like an afternoon out­ ing, in spite of the allegorical chaperone Immortality, in spite of the strange idea of "putting away" both labor and leisure, in spite of the archetypal overtones of the third stanza's jour­ ney. But the third stanza lacks the sweetness of rime. It pre­ pares formally for the crucial moment in the poem, and the last line of the stanza is very strange, indeed. One cannot "pass" the setting sun on a carriage-ride. The sun will appear to move with the carriage, even though one passes every­ thing between oneself and the sun. To pass the sun means literally to leave the earth. If, on the other hand, we take "passed" in its temporal sense, the line would mean some18 The Poems of Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson, vol. II (Cam­ bridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1955), 546 (no. 712). John Q. Anderson, "The Funeral Procession in Dickinson's Po­ etry," Emerson Society Quarterly, no. 44 (1966), 8-12, offers a summary of criticism of the poem.

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thing like "we passed the time the sun took to set," or "we experienced the sunset." But then, the temporal sense of "passed" in line 12 would immediately rebound onto the "passed" in line 11 and the "passed" in line 9. To say "we passed the time of school" and "we passed the time of ma­ turing grain" can refer only to the passing through a lifetime; and if we apply that pattern to the stanza, the "passing" of the sunset is again the final "passing away" into death. How­ ever we take the sense of passed in line 12, we come to the same conclusion. The experience described is certainly not just an afternoon ride. Line 12, appearing as it does casually in a list of things that really can be passed both spatially and temporally, should come as a nasty delayed shock. At any rate, that is how it seems to strike the speaker. For she hastens in the next line to "correct" herself, to maintain the fiction of the carriage-ride: Or rather—He passed Us— The Dews drew quivering and chill. . . . (13-14) The poem turns on these lines as on a hinge. The tone changes, and the rest is about shivering, graves ("a House that seemed / A SwelHng of the Ground"), and dresses made of material named for spider-web ("For only Gossamer, my Gown").19 The momentary halt in the meter is immediately striking. Everywhere we have the standard dipodic "hymn measure": four beats, three beats, pause; four beats, three beats, pause. Everywhere, that is, but here. In stanza 4 the pattern reverses in the first two lines: three beats, pause, four 19 Clark Griffith, The Long Shadow: Emily Dickinson's Tragic Poetry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964), says, "Commencing with line thirteen, . . . a change occurs. Here darkness . . . , cold .... and stasis . . . become evident" (p. 131). Griffith reads the poem as presenting two views of dying that should be yoked in reading: (1) Death is a suitor, Immortality is a chaperone, and the ending will be "proper" and "ortho­ dox"; (2) Death is a "cunning seducer," and Immortality is "party to a wicked fraud" (p. 130). Dickinson "pauses indecisively" between alterna­ tives (p. 132).

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beats; four beats, three beats, pause. The speaker misses a beat, and then compensates, while she forcibly wrenches herself back into the perspective of someone on earth, whom the setting sun could in fact be said to "pass" in its apparent sinking. The lines are the crucial point where the mind of the work realizes its own inability to face death, its own struggle to maintain the fictions meant to conceal the blank terror of that encounter. Death is "warm" in the first part of the poem, "cold" in the latter part; romanticized in the first part, at best ambiguous (but probably terrible and certainly inscrutable) in the last stanza: Since then—'tis Centuries—and yet Feels shorter than the Day I first surmised the Horses Heads Were toward Eternity— At the hinge of the poem, however, the mind of the work alters into empathy with the mind of the dead speaker, sur­ prising itself in the act of what it is doing—namely, coop­ erating with the speaker in constructing her fiction about death—and seeing the terrible significance of that act. The "naive" mind of the speaker becomes a symbol of the mind of the work that, like any other mind, must be naive and must construct fictions when it is talking about the one ex­ perience that a living consciousness cannot know. Yvor Winters criticized Dickinson's poem because it "ends unconvincingly though gracefully, with a formulary gesture. . . ." Because no living poet can have experienced death, Winters says that "in so far as it attempts to experience the death to come, it is fraudulent, however exquisitely."20 Clark Griffith takes Winters to task, maintaining that the poem is not about the experience of death, but about "Emily Dick­ inson's legitimate attempt to imagine the death which she knows must come to her and to spell out her responses to this 20 Maule's Curse: Seven Studies in the History of American Obscurantism (Nor­ folk, Conn.: New Directions, 1938), p. 155.

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inevitable experience."21 Griffith argues that the irresolution in the poem comes about "because, when Emily Dickinson thinks about her own death—when she seeks to judge it morally—she cannot honestly make up her mind about what her feelings and attitudes are" (p. 133). Griffith is closer to the mark than Winters. That is, the point of the poem is the mind of the work in its encounter with death, and not the mind of the speaker. When I agree thus far with Griffith, however, it should be pointed out that I am electing to read the poem as lyric, instead of dramatically. The genre-theory in this case offers a clear and simple way of articulating the issue between Winters and Griffith. Quite simply, Winters reads the poem as drama. He treats the poem as an attempt to present the experience of death by means of the dramatic speech of a fictional dead person. Griffith, on the other hand, reads the poem as lyric—as an authentic attempt by Dickin­ son to define her attitude toward her coming death through altering into empathy with her imaginary speaker, through imagining herself to be someone who has died. It so happens in this case that to read the poem as lyric is to find it to be a better poem, for Winters is quite correct when he suggests that a poem whose point is to portray the "other side" must in some sense be fraudulent. I believe I would go even fur­ ther than Griffith, and would find an even better poem. Rather than treating the poem as an attempt by Emily Dickinson to come to some kind of discursive knowledge of her attitude toward death, some balanced view, I would argue that the poem attempts to bring about a shocking encounter of the mind of the work with itself while it is in the very process of constructing its protective sentimental fictions. But the immediate point is that the genre-theory provides a precise articulation of the issues at stake in the debate about the poem. Many poems of anomalous voice might not yield them­ selves so readily to this kind of analysis. Indeed, the features I have pointed to in the poems I have discussed would be seen as having an entirely different significance (or no signif21

G r i f f i t h , The Long Shadow, p . 13 3 .

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icance at all) in a different interpretive model. But I have tried to show that it is possible to treat anomalous-voice poems as something other than dramatic utterances. That does not mean that we may not regard such poems as dramatic utter­ ances, or that we may never take the mind of the speaker as equivalent to the mind of the work. These can be very com­ plex questions, and there might be much to be gained from doing either of those things. The point here, however, is to explain how the concept of the anomalous voice can be em­ ployed and how the anomalous voice itself might work to set up the reciprocal relationship that our interpretive model associates with interpreted lyric. Notice that in this model, my interpretive statements are statements about reciprocity between mind and world. The model does not necessarily help me to locate the relevant features of the poem, but it does give me a structure and a vocabulary for articulating what I already understand in my experience of reading the poem. It tells me what to "make of' what I have already noticed.

The Impersonal Lyric A theoretical discussion of the "impersonal lyric" might well take its cue from the discussion of the anomalous voice. In a poem with anomalous voice, the "I" of the poem is not the mind of the work. But in an impersonal poem, there is no explicit "I" at all. The poem purports to be a statement about the world and not the speaker. But in the impersonal poem read as lyric (as distinct from epic), the mind of the work is always there, nonetheless; indeed, just as with the anoma­ lous-voice poem, the mind of the work is the center of con­ cern. The task in the case of anomalous-voice poems seems to be to distinguish those poems, as interpreted, from merely dramatic utterances. We ask how we take the poems when we read them as lyrics, and we answer by saying that in these poems there is a doubleness of voice—the voice of the speaker

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comes to symbolize the mind of the work. The symbolizing occurs through a process much like empathy. If we look at the problem of the impersonal poem in somewhat the same light, I think several analogies immediately suggest them­ selves. First, the problem of the impersonal poem is to dis­ tinguish it as interpreted lyric, not from dramatic utterance, but from epic utterance. If the author does not mention him­ self, if there is no "I," what keeps the impersonal poem from seeming to be a picture of the world as contained in some relatively detached mind—that is, the world as attributes in a substance, where the point is to express the nature of the world itself? How can there be lyrical reciprocity between mind and world? So the problem of the "impersonal lyric" is at base a problem of distinguishing broad genres, just as the problem of the anomalous voice is. Second, I think we would instinctively agree that in im­ personal poems we somehow "hear" the "I," even if it is not given, just as in anomalous-voice poems we "hear" the voice of the author. Thus, some impersonal poems and some anomalous-voice poems share the strange characteristic of being sustained by something that is, strictly speaking, "not there." We can perhaps most easily see the point by looking at poems such as Hopkins' "God's Grandeur" or "Spring." The former poem is remarkable for its imagery; the grandeur of God will "flame out, like shining from shook foil"; it will gather like "the ooze of oil / Crushed." To call the poem "impersonal" seems almost a misnomer. It is, indeed, im­ personal only in the technical sense of lacking an explicit "I." But we sense that the "I" is nevertheless at the center of the poem. The images, beautiful but extraordinarily quirky, tell us less about the world than about the speaker. Note, how­ ever, that the world here is presented as the world, not a fictional world created for the purposes of the poem. The dominant impression in the first lines of "Spring" is, simi­ larly, not so much that of natural beauty as that of excite­ ment in the speaker himself. The images and syntax are strained with excitement ("weeds, in wheels, shoot"), and

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the poem concentrates on the effects of the spring on the observer ("eggs look little low heavens," "rinse and wring / The ear, it strikes like lightnings"). So whatever else we might say of Hopkins' poems, they are unlikely to be taken as epical, precisely because they call particular attention to the "I" that is not explicitly given—-just as the anomalousvoice poem calls particular attention to the "doubleness" of voice. Finally, our use of empathy as a model in the case of the anomalous-voice poem suggests an interesting possibility for the impersonal poem. Empathy is closely related to aesthetic contemplation. Both are reciprocal relations. In both states one "feels" oneself "in" something that is not oneself. In the state of empathy, the object is another consciousness. In the state of aesthetic contemplation, the object is some physical thing or some abstract idea conceived as "objective"—per­ haps, indeed, an art-work, or another person's body, or even the Pythagorean theorem. In short, in aesthetic contempla­ tion the mind "finds itself' in some particular part of its world, a part noticeably colored by the mind's apprehension of it. If we follow the line of our earlier discussion, then, we should look to the model of aesthetic contemplation for a solution to the problem of the impersonal poem. We would argue that the impersonal poem, interpreted as lyric, is dis­ tinguished from epic precisely by the relation between the mind and world of the work. In interpreted epic, the mind reproduces or tells about the world. In interpreted lyric, the mind finds itself in the world it tells about. Thus the world in impersonal lyric is taken as a symbol of the non-explicit "I," in much the same way as the anomalous voice becomes a symbol for the voice of the author (= the mind of the work). With these analogies in mind, let us approach the problem of the impersonal lyric much as we did the problem of the anomalous voice. To be certain that we are addressing the question of the impersonal lyric as such, and not some other question, we must ask what the impersonal poem does that

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is impossible to do in any other way. The essential feature of the impersonal poem is that it lacks the explicit "I." Now, an author cannot utter an explicit "I" without having already conceptualized himself as an entity to whom that "I" refers. Mutatis mutandis, the mind of the work cannot utter that explicit "I" without having explicitly conceptualized itself. The attaching of the word is equivalent to conceptualizing, however vague the concept of the "I" might then be. Thus, any poem with an "I" (except an anomalous-voice poem, of course) must represent a conceptualization of the mind of the work. The "I" conceptually grasped is objectified as the sum of past states of consciousness. That is what happens in the Mount Snowdon episode of The Prelude, or in "Tintern Ab­ bey." It is true that a new state of consciousness does come to be in the course of these poems—it is the mind of the work—but it is a state of consciousness with discursive knowledge of past objectifications of itself. To articulate the new state of consciousness that comes to presence in the poem is the task of interpretation, considered as the discursive un­ derstanding of the mind of the work. An entirely different situation obtains with anomalous-voice poems, as we have seen, and with some impersonal poems. Here the mind of the work does not talk about itself. It does not present its past states as objectified. An interpretation of the poem must articulate how the mind of the work comes to presence, must bridge the gap between speaker and author (in the case of anomalous-voice poems) or between world and mind of the work (in impersonal lyrics), in order to make any statements at all about the mind of the work in its pres­ ent and past conditions. Thus, the impersonal lyric at base seems to work much like the anomalous-voice poem. It is impossible to symbolize by means of an "I" the mind in the instant of its coming to presence. The "I" always symbolizes some past state or states, already discursively grasped. The mind in the instant of its presence can be symbolized by an­ other mind, and that is what happens in anomalous-voice lyrics. But the mind can also be surprised in the instant of

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its presence by means of aesthetic contemplation, by means of suddenly "finding itself' in the world. That, I would ar­ gue, is what happens in impersonal lyric. Impersonal lyric differs from lyric with an "I" in that the impersonal lyric is primarily concerned with the instant in which consciousness becomes aware of itself—it is an attempt to capture that in­ stant by finding consciousness in something outside of con­ sciousness. All of these remarks hold only to the extent that we read an impersonal poem as lyric. Just as it is possible to read anomalous-voice poems as dramatic utterances, so one can read impersonal poems as epical. Our model of the broad genre-concepts does not by itself determine which reading is "better" or "more correct." The model only helps to make intelligible and explicit what we in fact are doing when we interpret a poem one way or the other. But the model does clearly distinguish between the different ways of interpret­ ing; it does give us a way of articulating the difference be­ tween interpreted lyric and interpreted epic. We have seen before that in epic the mind of the work has in the world of the work only those possibilities connected with knowing about and telling about that world. The world of the inter­ preted epic exists as thought in the mind of the work. Nick the narrator does inhabit the world of The Great Gatsby, but Nick's mind is not perfectly congruent with the mind of the work—as we argue whenever we say that the work makes judgments on Nick's behavior. If the mind of a characternarrator were ever perfectly congruent with the mind of the work, we would not have "fiction" in Kate Hamburger's sense, but instead something very like, perhaps indistin­ guishable from, autobiography. So in "fiction," there is al­ ways a mind that does not belong to the world of the work in the sense of being a fully participating part of that world. Such is not the case with lyric. I said earlier that the world of Hopkins' poems is not a fictional world as presented, but the world that both Hopkins and the reader inhabit. If inter­ preted lyric depends upon a reciprocal relation between mind

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and world, then the world of the work must be real in an important sense for the mind of the work. The mind of the work must have its possibilities in that world. Thus, the world of the impersonal lyric, unlike the world of interpreted epical utterance, is the world. Consider, for example, even this im­ personal poem, which seems to tell about a purely fictional world inhabited by characters that never existed: A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast. How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop? The poem is Yeats's "Leda and the Swan," from the Yeats Variorum, page 441. We might argue that the swan never raped Leda; that Leda never existed, nor did Zeus; that the historical Troy and Agamemnon, if any, were certainly not as presented here. The world of the work seems fictional. Yet critics usually find that the interest comes from two main sources: (1) the kinesthetic imagery of the first part, by which Yeats takes such great pains to make the scene seem "real"; and (2) the meditative question at the end, one that would scarcely come up in, say, Ovid. When we say that the poem is interesting for these reasons, we imply something about the world of the work. We imply that the world is not the fictional (mythic) world in which Leda is raped, but instead the real world of which the Leda-myth, as cultural object, is

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a part. That is, the first part of the sonnet interests us because we know the Leda-myth without having thought of it in detailed kinesthetic terms. The poem shows us how we may by an exercise of the imagination inhabit the myth more fully than is possible if we read it only in a compendium. The end of the lyric asks the significance of the myth: Is it a parable of the gods' indifferent love and indifferent cruelty, or is it a parable of purposeful divine intervention (however tragic) and inspiration (however torturing)? The lyric interests us because it represents the exercise of imaginative power on a "given" of the real world, namely the myth as cultural object. Giorgio Melchiori has shown the personal significance to Yeats of the Leda-myth in its various literary and artistic manifestations, in what is probably the fullest influence-study having directly to do with this poem. He concludes that Yeats attributed a "universal value to his personal feelings and sen­ sations and experiences. . . . He projected his personal microcosmos into a macrocosmos, or, in other words, uncon­ sciously made a universe out of his own personality."22 Melchion suggests, in other words, that an understanding of "Leda and the Swan" requires an understanding of how Yeats (or, as 1 would say, the mind of the work) projects himself into the myth and inhabits it as cultural object Richard Ellmann pays close attention to the kinesthetic imagery, and argues that "The generating theme of the poem is a feeling he had from childhood, of the tantalizing imperfection of human life; his own experience told him that power and knowledge could never exist together. . . . All Yeats's poetry embodies this theme. Leda and the swan are only one of many embodiments of it in his verse."23 Both of these critics, then, without benefit of genre-the­ ory, already approach the poem as lyric, as presenting a world 22

The Whole Mystery of Art Pattern into Poetry in the Work of W B Yeats (London Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960), pp 111-12 For a discussion of the genesis of the poem, see Jeffares, W B Yeals Man and Poet, ρ 223, and Parkinson, Later Poetry, pp 139 fF 23 The Identity of Yeats (New York Oxford University Press, cl964), ρ χ

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containing the myth as cultural object which the mind of the poet inhabits. For these critics, the poem is interesting partly for its non-fictional value as datum in a history of Yeats's mental development. Of course, Yeats's mind is inferred, more or less accurately, from the mind of the work. But in the mind of the work, also, the myth is not merely some­ thing told. It is instead a stimulus for aesthetic contemplation and intellectual effort. We need not even seek beyond the lyric and equate Leda with the "Ledaean" Maud Gonne in order to find some specific resonance with Yeats's life—though that might be interesting for a study of Yeats's psychology. My thesis here is only that the poem works because the mind of the work projects itself into a particular cultural object that is part of the real world inhabited by author and reader. The genre-theory allows us to account for the fact that critics such as Melchiori and Ellmann see, in a poem that seems so obviously to be "about" Leda, a poem that is "really" about Yeats. They see the poem this way because they see it as essentially lyrical. In their interpretations, the lyricism of the poem is constituted by the "presence" of Yeats (the mind of the work) in the cultural object he re-creates. I should like to look now in some detail at two impersonal poems, very different from each other, to illustrate more clearly how the poems set up a relation between mind and world similar to aesthetic contemplation. I have chosen Marveil's "On a Drop of Dew" and Williams' "Spring and All" (actually, Williams' poem is untitled—it appears first in the collection Spring and All, and is generally referred to by that title). The explicit conceit of Marvell's "On a Drop of Dew" compares a dewdrop to the human soul, linking the two contraries into an ingenious array of common predicates in a way that Dr. Johnson would no doubt have considered typ­ ically violent and metaphysical. So in one sense, the whole poem is about how the consciousness finds itself in the ex­ ternal world. As Pierre Legouis says, Marvell here "hesitates between comparison, which distinguishes, and symbol, which

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fuses. . . ."24 But so far we remain at the thematic level, and merely articulating the tenors of the conceit illustrates little about the working of the impersonal poem. The fundamen­ tal tactic in the poem is obviously to oppose tangible to in­ tangible and to use one family of terms to express things about the other side of the opposition. In the first half of the poem (to Hne 18), in general, Marvell expresses tangible qualities of the dewdrop in terms of intangible emotions. In the next part of the poem (lines 19-36), Marvell turns the tables and, in general, expresses intangible qualities of the soul in terms of the sensible qualities of the dewdrop. Al­ ready, then, the poem suggests that the mind is reflected in the world. We should first notice that the dewdrop is already made the symbol of the soul before Marvell mentions the soul explicitly. The drop is "careless of its Mansion new" (line 4);25 also, "it the purple flow'r does slight" (9). And the drop, . . . gazing back upon the Skies Shines with a mournful Light; Like its own Tear. . . . (11-13) The trope is personification. The dewdrop has human qual­ ities.26 In the terms careless, slight, and mournfitl, Marvell's 24 Andrew Marvell Poet, Puritan, Patriot, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), p. 69. 25 The Poems and Letters of Andrew Marvell, ed. H M. Margohouth, 2 vols , 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), I 12. 26 Donald M. Friedman, Marvell's Pastoral Art (Berkeley and Los Angeles. University of California Press, 1970), pp 60-61, remarks how Marvell "converts the poise and shimmering motion of the dewdrop into psycho­ logical states . . . ," where "in almost every case the imputation of human feelings to the dewdrop is rationalized in the next line by a reference to its physical state." Ann E. Berthoff, The Resolved Soul: A Study of Marvell's Major Poems (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp 28-29, discusses the "equivalence of the dewdrop and the embodied soul" "This equivalence . . . , explicitly announced only at one point (line 19), is devel­ oped in terms which we discover to be reciprocal The ground of reciprocity shifts continually (proleptically) from the physical to the meta-

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apparent purpose is to express tangible by means of intan­ gible. The drop is "careless" and "slights" the rose because it hugs itself in itself. It touches the flower only at the point where the petal is tangent to its sphere; it does not spread to cover the petal as a more affectionate drop might have done. The "mournful Light" apparently refers to the dark reflec­ tion of the leaf on the underside of the shining sphere.27 But to compare the dewdrop to a tear expresses a concrete thing by means of another concrete thing, while the sugges­ tion that a dewdrop can have a tear extends the personifica­ tion. Line 13 is thus particularly interesting because it breaks one pattern—the expression of tangible by means of intan­ gible—and reinforces another pattern—the attribution of hu­ man qualities to the dewdrop. The effect is quite startling. Marvell's original tactic has been to impose qualities of the soul on the dewdrop Not that he is now mournful, neces­ sarily; but he must know what mournfulness is if he is to physical and back again " For Berthoff1 "In lines 27-36, the interpenetration is complete 'World' [line 29], for instance, belongs to both dewdrop and the soul and is both literal and abstract, the physical balancing the meta­ physical in an allegorical valence" (p 29) BerthofFs terms physical and meta­ physical correspond roughly to my terms tangible and intangible, she is ar­ guing, essentially, what I shall argue later—that the distinction breaks down in the poem, and that the breaking-down is Marvell's point Note, of course, that both Friedman and Berthoff find reciprocity between mind and world to be at the center of the poem That is to say, in the vocabulary of the genre-theory, they both read the poem as lyrical and not epical The differ­ ence between their readings and mine, it will appear, is simply the location of the reciprocity They point out reciprocity between portrayed world and portrayed soul, whereas I shall argue that the reciprocity between the mind of the work and the world of the work itself creates and sustains the recip­ rocal relations that obtain between elements portrayed in the poem The power of the genre-theory is not that it can decide among these readings, but instead that it can articulate precisely the similarities and differences between the various readings 27J E Saveson, "Marvell's On a Drop of Dew,' " Notes and Queries, 5 (1958), 289, suggests that the mam conceit depends on "a double exploita­ tion of the idea of circularity, or, more accurately, of sphericity, familiar figures in this period for the perfect and the eternal, hence for the soul, at least in its potentiality "

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describe the light on the dewdrop as "mournful." As long as Marvell employs this tactic, the concrete dewdrop itself is the pole of his poetic activity—the wit of the poem is in choosing mental states to express physical conditions. Now, however, Marvell with a wrench brings in a comparison based not on abstract or verbal resemblances, but on physical sim­ ilarity. A dewdrop looks like a tear. But what is a tear, and why is it appropriate here, especially? J. B. Leishman argues that Marvell "almost certainly" gets the line from Crashaw's Wishes. To his (supposed) Mistresse, lines 52-54: Each Ruby there, Or Pearle that dare appeare, Bee its owne blush, bee its owne Teare.28 In Crashaw the jewels that his mistress wears in her hair are put to shame by the splendor of the tresses they adorn. The tear, in other words, is itself a metonymy for sorrow or sad­ ness. That is of course exactly what the tear is in Marvell: it expresses the dewdrop's sadness at being "divided from the Sphear" (14). As Donald Friedman says, the image reinforces the "cardinal metaphor of the entire poem—that of lesser entities that identify themselves with greater ones by con­ taining the larger bodies within themselves, if only by reflec­ tion or analogy."29 Thus, the tear at first seems to come into the poem as physical object, because of its physical resemblance to the dewdrop. The tear shines, is spherical, and so on. But the tear remains in the poem as symbol of a mental state, ac­ cording to its traditional association with sadness. The tan­ gible dewdrop suddenly ceases to be the only pole of poetic activity: the dewdrop itself has passed into the status of a symbol, for the poet is no longer getting at what the dewdrop looks like, so much as what it can represent. When we think of the dewdrop as tear, we think of it as representing 28

The Art of Marvell's Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Funk & Wagnalls,

1968), p. 202." s

Friedman, Marvell's Pastoral Art, p. 61.

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all of the sadness traditionally associated with tears. The given is no longer a physical appearance to be expressed in the vocabulary of emotions. Now, the given is the emotion of the dewdrop, which is to be expressed by means of a tangi­ ble tear. Marvell's reason for insisting in the first place on the opposition between tangible and intangible was that the opposition enabled him to express the former in terms of the latter, the dewdrop in terms of mental states. But the dis­ tinction collapses when we find ourselves thinking the tan­ gible dewdrop through thinking a tangible tear, which also becomes an appropriate image of the dewdrop because of its intangible associations. Marvell is not only using emotions wittily to talk about physical things. He also sets up a recip­ rocal relation such that internal and external, mind and world, reflect each other—as the dewdrop reflects its own "native Element" (8). Is the tear in the poem presented as tangible or intangible, world or mind, object or symbol? The tear is all of these things at once. The startle with which we read the line is Marvell's proof of the impossibility of maintaining the opposition between tangible and intangible. The tear, and through it the dewdrop, have both kinds of qualities. Marvell surprises the mind, as it were, in the act of becoming conscious of the dewdrop as tear—an act that in retrospect seems to precede a discursive separation of the world into tangible and intangible qualities. Marvell continues the brilliant mixing of intangible and concrete in the second part of the poem. In general, lines 1936 are ostensibly devoted to expressing the intangible—the soul—by means of the tangible dewdrop. But lines 21 and following break the pattern: Could it within the humane flow'r be seen, Remembring still its former height, Shuns the sweat leaves and blossoms green. . . . Here the tangible flower—reminiscent of the "purple flow'r" of line 9—expresses the tangible human body. One pattern, the expression of the human by means of the non-human, is

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reinforced; another pattern, the expression of the intangible by means of the tangible, is broken. The effect is similar to that of the tear-image. Flowers and leaves symbolize the hu­ man body, and to compare the body with flowers and leaves is traditionally to suggest its beauty and ephemerahty. Har­ old E. Toliver proposes that we can account for the effec­ tiveness of Marvell's poem by recognizing that its strategy is in a sense to invert the carpe diem tradition while borrowing its customary feelings and even its customary structure. Linguistically it is a matter of applying the rhetorical flavor of one kind of motive to a totally different kind. From previous experience with literary flowers and dewdrops, we expect them to be symbols of ephemeral life, about which the elegiac poet moralizes. . . . Marvell simply distills the elegy's mode of consolation, freeing it from its implication in nature and making it seem the logical product of a contemptus mundi motive.30 In other words, the vocabulary usually used in poetry to make us wish to enjoy fleeting life is here made to serve Marvell's purpose of making us wish to put earthly life aside Note also that the flowers in lines 21 and following, unlike the "purple" rose earlier, are "green"—perhaps suggesting the unripeness of the beautiful body for death The flowers and leaves work in the poem, then, because of their accumulated emotional associations. They are, like the tear, simultane­ ously tangible and intangible things—the body and its beauty, the body and its ephemerahty. The second part of the poem opposes tangible to intangible in order to express the soul by means of concrete qualities. But in the middle of that process a concrete flower enters into the poem to express both tan­ gible and intangible qualities of the human body The dis­ tinction between tangible and intangible breaks down in the vehicle of the metaphor. Because Marvell's patterned conceit 30

Marvell's Ironic Vision (New Haven

Yale University Press, 1965), ρ

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has generally equated tangible things with the world and in­ tangible things with the mind (soul), the collapsing of the opposition brings about a flash of illumination, a surprising moment of reciprocity between mind and world. The last four lines of the poem are also interesting. In these lines Marvell connects the dew with the manna that fed the Israelites in the wilderness: Such did the Manna's sacred Dew destil; White, and intire, though congeal'd and chill. Congeal'd on Earth: but does, dissolving, run Into the Glories of th' Almighty Sun. The poem arrives at the manna by a simple, though ingen­ ious, extension of the dew-image.31 But something new has been added. The manna, most unlike the dew in the early part of the poem, is "congeal'd and chill." If the dew was cool before, Marvell did not say so, and certainly he did not suggest that the dewdrop was in any way sluggish, as the manna apparently is before it dissolves. The point is that the poem gets to the manna through a development of the dewimage, not through a meditation on the soul. Yet having gotten to the manna, the poet discovers himself there. He feels the chill and sluggishness of his own soul precisely be­ cause he thinks his soul by means of thinking the manna. As Friedman says, these lines "glance at the recurrent theme of distillation, and the adjectives 'White' and 'intire' reiterate in different symbolic terms the values of perfection, spherical31 Cntical opinion about these lines is divided Legouis dislikes the lines because they introduce a new image "and the coalescing of the two images defies analysis," and because the Sun/Son pun is an "abuse" (Andrew Marveil Poet, Puritan, Patriot, ρ 70). Saveson reads the "Manna" as referring to Christ (a traditional exegesis of the biblical passage), so that the lines mean both "the plight of the human soul did distil or draw down Christ to an earthly existence," and "Christ distils or refines the human soul by grace to that point at which it is able to escape in a spiritual sense the limitations of the body"; the Manna also refers to the wafer of the Eucharist ("Marvell's On a Drop of Dew,' " ρ 290) For Toliver, the last four lines "synthesize the two aspects of the descent and return, the chaste fear and the power of the soul" (Marvell's Ironic Vision, ρ 75)

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ness, and purity that have governed the entire poem Now congealing cold is added to the opposed values of darkness and impurity."32 Marvell then extends the image into a con­ ceit, punning on "dissolving" ( = evaporation or death) and "Almighty Sun" ( = the natural sun, or the Son of God). But as the poem presents it, the chill and sluggishness of the soul are a sudden discovery, unexpected in the light of the earlier part of the poem, brought about by meditating on the dew. Thus, the implicit "I" of the poem finds itself in the moment of its coming to presence, and it finds itself, as chill and sluggish, in the tangible world. William Carlos Williams also employs personification in "Spring and All," though only in the technical sense of that term. His use of the device is quite different from Marvell's. Indeed, Williams' tactic seems specifically designed to avoid having the device apprehended as personification Instead of expressing the physical world in terms of human qualities, the second part of Williams' poem seems rather to illustrate how abstract human thoughts depend on concrete things, how the mind achieves its own internal differentiation by means of engaging itself with the particulars of the external world. As Neil Myers argues, in the context of Williams' whole book Spring and All the coming of spring in the poem "implies a power that anyone interested in unity and grace must both follow and resist. 'Spring and All' is a carefully chosen title; it means energy that demands an equivalent hu­ man response."33 From line 2 through line 13, the poem is overwhelmingly and aggressively concrete: "blue / mottled clouds,"34 "broad, muddy fields / brown with dried weeds," "leafless vines," and so on. The most memorable lines in this section are no doubt the ones containing the list of concrete adjectives. 32 33

Friedman, Marvell's Pastoral Art, ρ 66 "William Carlos Williams' Spring and All," Modem Language Quarterly,

26 (1965), 288-89 34

The Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams (New York New Direc­

tions, 1968), ρ 24

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All along the road the reddish purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy stuff of bushes and small trees. . . . The lines are self-conscious. They call attention to their own program of rendering concrete experience as directly as pos­ sible and without comment. The lines themselves are "twiggy," a pile of adjectives, each branching in a different direction. They epitomize the pattern Williams constructs in the first part of the poem. Suddenly, in line 14 the tactic changes, and the echo by "Lifeless" of "leafless" in the preceding line is symptomatic of the change. A different sort of word enters the poem, to be mingled with the vocabulary of concreteness: "Lifeless," "appearance," "uncertain," "familiar," "objects," "de­ fined," "quickens," "clarity," "outline," "dignity," "en­ trance," "profound," "change." Not all of the words in the list involve technical personifications, though several do. All of them do involve, however, the kind of abstraction that is conspicuously absent from the first part of the poem. But I think we must pay particular attention to how these abstrac­ tions enter the poem. They enter by means of grammatical patterns exactly like the patterns in the first section. The pat­ tern of doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling adjectives conspicuous in lines like "waste of broad, muddy fields" (5) or "purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy / stuff' is repeated in the pattern of "naked / cold, uncertain of all" (16-17) and "the cold, familiar wind" (19). That is, the abstractions "un­ certain" and "familiar" take their place as elements in a list, where the previous lists in the poem have been composed of items all on the same level of concreteness. The abstractions are paired, matched, with concrete words—in line 16 "na­ ked" is thus marvelously balanced between two realms. We can see the nakedness of a branch, but the line also evokes a kind of abstract nakedness of mental emptiness, something like Stevens's "mind of winter," perhaps. The repetition of grammatical patterns enables Williams to accomplish some­ thing quite remarkable—namely, to shift from concrete die-

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tion to abstract diction without a corresponding shift in tone. The first part of the poem prepares us by means of such a thorough submersion of the mind in the concrete that ab­ stractions, when they begin to appear, are actually appre­ hended as belonging to the concreteness of things. To place "clarity, outline of leaf' in the context of "patches of stand­ ing water," "scattering of tall trees," "stuff of bushes and small trees," is to erase the abstractness of "clarity" and "outline." Finally the second part of the poem does not per­ sonify so much as express the abstractions concretely. The "familiar" is that which is to the mind what cold wind is to spring shoots; "clarity" is that which a new leaf adds to a budded branch. The most abstract line in the poem offers the best clue: "One by one objects are defined" (22). "De­ fined" is a pun: objects take on a shape, and objects come to be what they are for the mind—become, that is, their defi­ nition. Or, more accurately, the object creates its definition, because the mind achieves its differentiation only by means of finding itself in the particulars of the external world. That is why we feel, as we must, I think, that the "rooting" and the "gripping," the "awakening" in the last lines of the poem, are not only the plants' but also the poet's and our own. The concrete particulars become congruent with the ideas of the mind, and the mind surprises itself in the act of understand­ ing ideas like nakedness, uncertainty, clarity, familiarity, starkness, dignity, entrance, and change. In one sense, the poem is about a diversification of thought brought about by the touch of concrete particulars on the mind. Nothing 1 have said about Williams' poem is new or star­ tling. J. Hillis Miller, for example, has an interesting discus­ sion of this poem in the context of Williams' poetic theory,35 a discussion which I believe has its homologous articulation in the genre-theory. For Williams, Miller argues, the imagi­ nation is a "natural force making possible the re-creation of physical objects in a different form—that is, in their names"; 35 "Williams' Spring and All and the Progress of Poetry," Daedalus, 99 (1970), 405-34.

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the object and its name are both "real, existing" things that "echo one another at a distance" (p. 423). Meaning results from resemblances that occur "by accident" among objects, and in the poem (a new object created by the poet) words interact as "nodes of linguistic energy" such that "Each word has the power to combine with other words in that jostle which produces meaning" (pp. 424 ff.). Thus, poetry is rev­ elatory for Williams: Though value, life, and truth are already in nature, they are hidden, coming into existence only when the poet names natural objects. This naming brings them into that domain of the imagination where they may in their jostling, transcend themselves in the creation of meaning. Such an art is at once mimesis . . . , and aletheia. . . . In poetic naming Williams at last takes possession of the presence of the present, "that eternal moment in which we alone live." (p. 428) In the vocabulary of the genre-theory: names, by being at once things (parts of the world) and the stuff of the mind, allow the mind to enter into a reciprocal relation with the natural world, thus finding itself there. Of course, I would argue that "taking possession of the presence of the present" is not a new thing with Williams, though Williams might have his own technique and his own conscious program for doing so. If we should not condemn a poet because he fails to carry out his announced program or to adhere to the prin­ ciples of some manifesto, neither should we be surprised to find that a poet does sometimes do what he says he is doing. Williams' "Spring and All" follows his own advice as enun­ ciated (among other places) in "A Sort of a Song":36 —through metaphor to reconcile the people and the stones. Compose. (No ideas but in things) Invent! 36

W i l l i a m s , Selected Poems, p . 1 0 8 .

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In "Spring and All" Williams attempts a poetic "proof' that ideas are in things, that the mind discovers itself in its en­ gagement with the world. Marvell might not have sub­ scribed to theories Hke Williams', but he, too, illustrates how the mind in aesthetic contemplation symbolizes its own pres­ ence by means of things in the world which it contemplates. In Marvell, as in Williams, the mind in a certain sense takes possession of the presence of the present. So, too, in any impersonal poem that we read as a lyric—our interpretive model suggests that we take the relation between mind and world as the particular kind of reciprocal relation most often characterized as "aesthetic contemplation," where the mind in some sense finds itself in the object.

CHAPTER III

Standards of Interpretation and Evaluation

Adopting any model of literary interpretation plunges one at once into enormously involved philosophical problems. I have provisionally put forward a model on Heideggerian lines. But the model is Heideggerian only in that it accepts Heideg­ ger's crucial notion that interpretation is a making-explicit of what is already grasped ("understood"), but not fully artic­ ulated, in our encounters with literary works. What concerns me here is something I have previously mentioned in pass­ ing—namely, the fact that a Heideggerian model might seem to lead inevitably to a strict relativism, and, therefore, to the conclusion that knowledge in the human studies is impossi­ ble. If by "knowledge" we mean predictive knowledge of objects and their behavior in terms of a causal explanation on the model of the natural sciences, then we forfeit any claim to such knowledge when we adopt a Heideggerian model—except insofar as we get bits of "scientific" knowl­ edge in the subsidiary disciplines of the human studies, such as paleography, linguistics, and so on. We have, not knowl­ edge, but "understanding." The problem of relativism re­ mains, however, even if we insist that the value of making explicit what is already "understood" justifies the human studies. By the nature of understanding, one already "has" the historical event or the literary text as part of one's world. Is it not true, then, that ultimately the historical event or the text can mean only what it means "to me," or at best what it means "to us"—because we share a world that is no longer the world that lent significance to the event or the text in the first place? Can a Heideggerian model of interpretation es­ cape vicious subjectivity?

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Anyone who argues that his interpretation is "better" or "stronger" than someone else's, anyone who has told a stu­ dent that the student's interpretation is "wrong," must face these questions. But let me say at the outset that my aim is not to present a general theory of interpretation. Far from it. Instead, I wish only to examine what I think is the crucial issue for any Heideggerian model. The issue is that of the "correctness" of interpretation. I prefer the term "correct­ ness" to the more usual term "validity," because "validity" has two equally important significations, one of which does not immediately concern me. First, a "valid" interpretation is in some sense "correct," and that is the sort of validity I wish to consider. But a "valid" interpretation is also valuable. It seems possible that for two rival interpretations, perhaps equally "correct," one could be thought less valid because it is less valuable in some way.1 That is the signification of valid that does not concern me now. Conect, as the etymology of the word implies, suggests essentially that there exists some standard with which to align or compare the thing whose correctness is to be judged. A correct interpretation, then, is an interpretation that has been found to conform in some way to some standard. The question becomes, "Does a model on Heideggerian lines admit of an objective standard, and if so, what is it?" So instead of attempting to answer the more general (and perhaps infinitely ramified) question of how one arrives at a correct interpretation, I wish only to see whether it is possible for a Heideggerian model to escape vicious subjec­ tivity, by setting up some objective standard to which inter­ pretations are to be referred. Two observations are in order here. First, there is the question of the problematic terms "subjective" and "objec­ tive," which mean different things to different people, and 1 E. D. Hirsch, Jr., The Aims of Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, cl976), chap. 3, p. 45, argues that for Heideggenans the "authenticity" or value of the interpretation for one's own time becomes the standard of interpretation. I shall suggest later that this need not be the case.

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which for some philosophers do not even represent an op­ position. But those who accuse Heideggerian models of "vi­ cious subjectivity" are clearly using "subjectivity" as a valueterm, and they clearly mean at a minimum that Heideggerian models provide no way of arguing that any self-consistent interpretation is incorrect. So when I speak of an "objective" standard of interpretation, I shall mean a standard that allows someone to demonstrate logically that someone else's selfconsistent interpretation is incorrect. That, I think, must be the minimum meaning of "objective" in any debate over standards of interpretation. The second observation has to do with the purpose of this chapter. Even though it appears in a book that pretends to be about lyric, this chapter will admittedly have very little to do with lyric as such. Instead, its purpose is essentially to argue that the genre-theory developed in Chapter I and ap­ plied in Chapters II and IV is logically compatible with the concept of "correctness." Since the theory does not even tell us whether we "should" read any particular work as drama, as epic, or as lyric, it might seem that the theory opens the door to vicious subjectivity. It might seem that the theory allows or even requires us to think that reading is "free play," that any interpretation is just as valuable and just as correct as any other. I do not believe that all interpretations are equally valuable and correct, and I think that most people who teach literature must feel the same way. The question then be­ comes whether in preserving the broad genres as I have said we necessarily sacrifice our right to talk about correctness in interpretation. The question cannot go begging. If our "choice" of genre is more or less arbitrary—or, more accu­ rately, occurs at the level of pre-explicit understanding and is revealed only in the interpretation—is the genre-theory it­ self not open to charges of "vicious subjectivity"? If the genretheory makes statements not about the works, but only about our explicit interpretations, how can the theory be related to the concept of "correctness," which is after all the funda­ mental issue in hermeneutic theory? The genre-theory does

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not provide a hermeneutic program, certainly. But it is nevertheless a theory of interpretation. It would be irrespon­ sible, then, to ignore the fundamental issue of hermeneutic theory in a book about the interpretation of lyric.

Hirsch and the Heideggerians: A Dialectic in Hermeneutic Theory A good way to approach the problem of correctness is to consider a modern dialectic in hermeneutic theory. The di­ alectic is between the writers in the Heideggerian tradition (not all of them always in perfect agreement with Heidegger, of course), on the one hand; and on the other, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., who in this country is certainly the most outspoken and best-known critic of the Heideggerian model. Hirsch's books Validity in Interpretation (1967) and The Aims of Interpretation (1976) have as their professed goal to restore the human stud­ ies (in particular, literary interpretation) to the status of knowledge-producing disciplines, by demonstrating that the meaning of a text is a determinate entity that can be known objectively. Hirsch's arguments are often telling. He has found sympathetic ears among critics and teachers sick of rampant subjectivity in the journals and in the classrooms, which his­ torically resulted from, but was certainly not warranted by, the American New Criticism. The dialectic between Hirsch and the Heideggerians is, I think, genuine. That is, as long as each side makes absolute claims for its own account of cognition, the issues cannot be resolved. But I am interested only in asking how a Heideggerian model might allow for an interpretive standard, and how Hirsch's insights can be incorporated into a Heideggerian model. For as with most dialectical disputes, each side says something valuable. Heidegger himself, as we have seen before, insists on the necessity of the "hermeneutic circle," in accordance with which An interpretation is never a presuppositionless apprehending of something presented to us. If, when one is engaged in a particular concrete kind of interpretation,

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in the sense of exact textual Interpretation, one likes to appeal [beruft] to what 'stands there', then one finds that what 'stands there' in the first instance is nothing other than the obvious undiscussed assumption [Vormeinung] of the person who does the interpreting.2 Passages like this certainly seem to imply a necessary subjec­ tivity in interpretation, even though, as we shall see, Hei­ degger denies that this is the case. Since cultural objects (in­ cluding texts) always by their nature require a leap if one is to go beyond their spatial and temporal relations to approach their "meaning," it would be hard to dispute that critics must make that leap from the basis of the world as they under­ stand it. That is essentially what Heidegger is saying here. If that is so, we can easily explain why it is so difficult to arrive at and maintain a consensus about the meaning of cultural objects. Wilhelm Dilthey (not a disciple of Heidegger, but a scholar whom Heidegger cites with approval3) in treating the hermeneutic circle sometimes states unequivocally that un­ derstanding is a product of the text and the interpreter's mind: ". . . expressions may contain more than the poet or artist is conscious of and, therefore, may recall more. If, therefore, understanding requires the presence of one's own mental ex­ perience this can be described as a projection of the self into some given expression."4 Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that the "expressive" power of literary works of art consists pre­ cisely in their escape from "empirical language," the existing language where each word is fixed in reference to some en­ tity that has become an entity because it has been thus fixed in language. In "expressive language," words "carry the speaker and the hearer into a common universe by drawing both toward a new signification through their power to des2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, cl962), pp. 191-92. 3 Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 449. * "Drafts for a critique of historical reason," in W. Dilthey: Selected Writ­ ings, trans. H. P. Rickman (Cambridge: At the University Press, ¢1976), p.

226.

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ignate in excess of their accepted definition, through the muffled life they have led and continue to lead in us. . . ."5 Thus, expressive language continues to produce new mean­ ings for new readers. That would not be possible if meaning were a unique determinable entity. But in fact the work of art contains "symbols whose meaning we never stop devel­ oping,"6 just as the historical event considered as meaningful is only that which produces meanings: "The true Waterloo resides neither in what Fabrice, nor the Emperor, nor the historian sees, it is not a determinable object, it is what occurs on the fringes of all perspectives, and from which they are all derived."7 From here it is a short step to Paul Ricoeur's conclusion that, since meaning is "irreducibly nonunivocal," all inter­ pretations are "equally valid within the limits of the theory which founds the given rules of reading."8 But Ricoeur's statements seem either trivial, or destructive of the human studies as disciplines. If Ricoeur means only that any logi­ cally consistent set of interpretive rules can be followed, the statement is trivial. If, on the other hand, he is taken to mean that logical consistency is the only requirement for interpre­ tive theory, then there is no way in his scheme to discrimi­ nate between theories that correspond to our experience of texts and theories that are self-consistent but nonsensical. Ricoeur attempts to avoid the dilemma, as we have seen (Chapter I), by proposing that only those theories are valid which ground the interpretation in a particular existential func­ tion—namely, the psychoanalytic interpretation, the phe­ nomenology of reading, and the religious interpretation. But there is no particular reason why these approaches should 5 "Indirect Languages and the Voices of Silence," in Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, 111.. Northwestern University Press, 1964), ρ 75. 6 "Indirect Languages," in Signs, p. 77. 7 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Cohn Smith (Lon­ don: Routledge & Kegan Paul, cl962), p. 363. 8 The Conflict of Interpretations Essays in Hermeneutics, ed. Don Ihde (Ev­ anston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), "Existence and Hermeneu­ tics," pp. 15, 23.

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produce interpretations more correct than the others. The interpretations produced might be more valuable, because they are rooted in existential functions. But there is apparently no line of argument to explore in attempting to determine which of the three theories is most likely to produce a correct or valuable interpretation in a particular case. Not that we should demand that Ricoeur settle such controversies once and for all. No one, until we know what language is, should be ex­ pected to do that. But failing to settle a controversy, and failing to identify the issues and thus to point out the line of argument along which discussion should advance, are two different things. If one feels strongly that one's interpretation is better than someone else's, it is only reasonable to expect that one's model suggest ways to defend that interpretation. Thus, Ricoeur's remarks bring into focus the problem of the Heideggerian model that is decisive in Hirsch's rejection of that model. Hans-Georg Gadamer accepts multiplicity of meaning, at the same time arguing that the concepts of "truth" and "cor­ rectness" nevertheless have some employment in the human studies. I shall later look more closely at Gadamer's ideas of truth and correctness. But for the moment I should like to emphasize his statements about the relativity and multiplicity of meaning, in order to place him more clearly among the Heideggerians and to draw more sharply the dialectical con­ trast between this group and Hirsch. In Truth and Method Gadamer denies that the goal of interpretation is to repro­ duce or restore a past life. Such a thing is impossible, for To think historically means, in fact, to perform the transposition that the concepts of the past undergo when we try to think in them. To think historically always involves establishing a connection between those ideas and one's own thinking. . . . To interpret means precisely to use one's own preconceptions so that the meaning of the text can really be made to speak for us.9 9

Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, cl975), p. 358.

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The result of the "finite nature of our historical existence" is that "there is, it would seem, something absurd about the whole idea of a uniquely correct interpretation . . ." (p. 108). Texts are "inexhaustible," and "Every actualisation in understanding can be regarded as an historical potentiality of what is understood" (p. 336). We can rarely, if ever, apply the rule that nothing should be interpreted as being "in" the text but what the author or a contemporary reader might have found there, for "What is fixed in writing has detached itself from the contingency of its origin and its author and made itself free for new relationships" (p. 357). Although certainly not all of the authors cited would agree with all Heidegger says, the interpretive theories of Heideg­ ger's followers are deeply influenced by Heidegger's own re­ marks on interpretation and by his analysis of the historicality of Dasein. Hirsch interprets Heidegger's work as a fateful departure from Husserl, and he sees Heidegger as a "dog­ matic relativist."10 The explicit purpose of Hirsch's recent book The Aims of Interpretation is to defend the "possibility of knowledge in interpretation" (p. 1), a possibility that he thinks a Heideggerian model precludes. Hirsch's own posi­ tion depends on a fundamental distinction between meaning and significance, terms that he defines this way in his earlier book Validity in Interpretation: Meaning is that which is represented by a text; it is what the author meant by his use of a particular sign sequence; it is what the signs represent. Significance, on the other hand, names a relationship between that meaning and a person, or a conception, or a situation, or indeed anything imaginable.11

Thus, meaning is fixed and unitary, significance relative and multiple. Hirsch suggests in Aims that his idea of meaning is equivalent to Husserl's: the term "refers to the whole verbal 10 Hirsch

1 The Aims of Interpretation, pp. 4-5. Hereafter cited as Aims. Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 8. Hereafter cited as Validity. 11

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meaning of a text," whereas significance refers to "textual meaning in relation to a larger context, i.e., another mind, another era, a wider subject matter, an alien system of val­ ues, and so on" (pp. 2-3). In Aims Hirsch clarifies and ex­ pands in Husserlian terminology the earlier definition of meaning:

"Meaning" is not restricted to conceptual meaning. It is not even restricted to mental "content". . . . Defined in Husserl's terms, "meaning" embraces not only intentional objects but also the species of intentional acts which sponsor those intentional objects. . . . One cannot have a meaning without having its necessarily correlative affect or value, (p. 8) The "cognitive atheists" who adopt a Heideggerian model of interpretation deny that one can distinguish meaning from significance, according to Hirsch (p. 3), and that is the bone of contention. Hirsch argues, then, that the goal of interpretation is the knowledge of meaning, as opposed to the making-explicit of what is understood. Hirsch takes knowledge to be some­ thing different from the thematizing of understanding—he in fact associates his model of knowing with the process of cog­ nition in the natural sciences—and so he requires that the validity of knowledge be independent of the historical exist­ ence of the knower. The meaning, then, as the thing to be known, must be something "determinate" and "reproduci­ ble" (i.e., sharable). As Hirsch says in Validity, "Verbal meaning is whatever someone has willed to convey by a par­ ticular sequence of linguistic signs and which can be con­ veyed (shared) by means of those linguistic signs" (p. 31). "Determinacy" for Hirsch does not necessarily imply univocality, for a meaning may be ambiguous and yet be deter­ minate (pp. 44-46). But to be determinate a meaning must be changeless: "Verbal meaning, then, is what it is and not something else, and it is always the same. That is what I mean by determinacy" (p. 46).

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In Validity Hirsch introduces the concept, crucial for his theory, of the type. A type is an entity with two decisive characteristics. First, it is an entity that has a boundary by virtue of which something belongs to it or does not. In this respect it is like a class, though . . . a type can be entirely represented in a single instance, while a class is usually thought of as an array of instances. The second decisive characteristic of a type is that it can always be represented by more than one instance. When we say that two instances are of the same type, we perceive common (identical) traits in the instances and allot these common traits to the type. Thus a type is an entity . . . which can be represented by different instances or different contents of consciousness. It follows that a verbal meaning is always a type since otherwise it could not be sharable. . . . In order that a meaning be determinate for another it must be a type, (pp. 49-50) Ultimately, Hirsch's theory depends on his definition of ver­ bal meaning as a "willed type" (p. 51). Later in Validity, while he is discussing implication, Hirsch shifts emphasis from verbal meaning as a willed type to argue that verbal meaning is also a shared type: If verbal meaning is a willed type that can be conveyed through linguistic signs, it follows that the possibility of conveying the willed type depends on the interpreter's prior experience of the willed type. Otherwise, the interpreter could not generate implications. . . . the willed type has to fall within known conventions in order to be shared—an exigency that was implicit from the start in the concept of sharability. (pp. 66-67) Hirsch's definitions allow him to maintain what he wants to maintain against the Heideggerian model—namely, that ver­ bal meaning is determinate, knowable, and reproducible. The popular (and inexact) way of stating Hirsch's conclusions is

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to say that an author's intention is the standard of interpre­ tation. In Validity Hirsch argues that this is the only practical standard, in the first place, since when we use "public con­ sensus" as a standard, we immediately notice that "the con­ sensus does not exist, and it is a logical error to erect a stable normative concept (i.e., the public meaning) out of an unsta­ ble descriptive one" (p. 13).12 To choose the willed type as the standard of interpretation also constitutes the ethical choice, Hirsch argues in Aims. Since the "nature of a text is to mean whatever we construe it to mean" (p. 75—Hirsch is surely speaking aphoristically here, for otherwise the sentence would hardly accord with his general position), the ethical maxim is the following: "Unless there is a powerfiil oveniding value in disregarding an author's intention (i.e., original meaning), we who interpret as a vocation should not disregard it" (p. 90). Of course, we argue only to probability—knowledge of verbal meaning is attainable only in principle, Hirsch admits in Validity (pp. 163 ff.). But that fact does not vitiate Hirsch's model. Ifhis argument shows that knowledge is in principle attainable, he has shown that our errors, our ignorance, and our disagree­ ments are attributable to the same human limitations that hinder us in any sort of cognitive endeavor at all. Clearly, the fundamental difference between the dialectical positions of Hirsch and the Heideggerians lies in the different notions of meaning—as Hirsch himself points out. For Hirsch, meaning is a determinate entity of a particular kind. For the Heideggerians in general (though this is not necessarily the case every time the English word meaning is used to translate 12 Note that Hirsch's objection to the impracticality of public consensus as a standard is not telling, for the problem of getting public consensus plagues every theory at one level or another Even if everyone agreed to accept Hirsch's standard of interpretation, the business of interpreters would be to attain "public consensus" about just what the willed type was—a con­ sensus which, I venture to say, would not ever in practice be attained any more than a consensus about the "public meaning" of the text would Since the content of the author's consciousness is never intuitively present to us, Hirsch's "willed type" might turn out in the last analysis to be as much of an "unstable descriptive" concept as the concept of "public consensus "

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something in their works), meaning is a relation. It is the relation between an entity—the work—and the interpreter, where the work becomes an entity, becomes "something," only in the process of being understood (i.e., placed in rela­ tion with its interpreter). This point might be made to emerge from the obscurities of Heidegger's own terminology in Being and Time: When entities within-the-world are discovered along with the Being of Dasein—that is, when they have come to be understood—we say that they have meaning [Sinn]. But that which is understood, taken strictly, is not the meaning but the entity, or alternatively, Being. Meaning is that wherein the intelligibility [Verstandlichkeit] of something maintains itself. That which can be Articulated in a disclosure by which we understand, we call "meaning." The concept of meaning embraces the formal existential framework of what necessarily belongs to that which an understanding interpretation Articulates. Meaning is the "upon-which" of a projection in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something; it gets its structure from a fore-having, a fore-sight, and a fore-conception. (pp. 192-93) Heidegger argues, in short, that meaning is not the entity understood in interpretation, but is instead the "articulation" itself by means of which the entity (the work, in this case) is understood. We "articulate" the entity to ourselves, and that articulation is the meaning. But then the meaning depends upon the world that forms the basis of the articulation; the meaning is ultimately the possibilities of the understood en­ tity as projected in the world of the interpreter—the " 'uponwhich' of a projection in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something." The "fore-having," "fore-sight," and "fore-conception" are those of the interpreter. They give rise to the hermeneutic circle that "belongs to the structure of meaning" (p. 195). Thus, meaning "belongs" to Dasein, and is not a property of entities (p. 193). "That which has

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been articulated as such in interpretation and sketched out beforehand in the understanding in general as something ar­ ticulable, is the meaning" (p. 195). If one were to speak im­ precisely, one might say that Heidegger identifies meaning not with an entity, but instead with the articulation of "something about" an entity that makes the entity intelligi­ ble to the interpreter. The entity, for Heidegger, can be an entity (i.e., be understood) only insofar as there can be an articulation of it in terms of the world in which it achieves intelligibility. For Heidegger the object of understanding is the entity; for Hirsch the object of knowledge is the mean­ ing. But for Heidegger the entity is not the meaning. In­ stead, the meaning is the articulation through which the en­ tity is understood. Dilthey says simply that meaning is the "comprehensive category through which life can be understood"; it "desig­ nates the relationship, inherent in life, of parts of a life to the whole."13 Dilthey's formulation helps to clarify Heidegger's. Heidegger suggests that interpretation articulates the connec­ tion of the understood entity with the whole world of the interpreter—the "there" of his "There-being." The meaning of what is understood, then, consists in its relationship to the whole of which it is a part. Thus, we arrive at conclusions such as Gadamer's formulae in Truth and Method: The understanding of something written is not a reproduction of something that is past, but the sharing of a present meaning, (p. 354) . . . the discovery of the true meaning of a text . . . is never finished; it is in fact an infinite process. . . . (p. 265) Not only is an immanent unity of meaning guiding the reader assumed, but his understanding is likewise guided by the constant transcendent expectations of meaning 13

Dilthey, "Drafts for a critique of historical reason," in Selected Writings,

p. 235.

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which proceed from the relation to the truth of what is being said (pp 261-62) The dialectic springing from Hirsch's and the Heideggerians' different notions of meaning ramifies into disagreement on numerous important issues But the most important issue for my purpose concerns the function of literary interpreta­ tion For Hirsch, at the simplest level, interpretation offers a way of gaining genuine conceptual knowledge about mean­ ing The process of valid interpretation is a program by means of which we gain knowledge of the meaning of works We assemble evidence bearing on the willed type that caused the text, and when we know that willed type, we know the meaning Valid interpretations remain valid, so in this sense knowledge accumulates without the necessity of revision For the Heideggenans, on the other hand, the interpretation is merely a making-explicit of what is already understood (what already "has" a meaning insofar as it can appear in an "artic­ ulation") There is no program of interpretation The only way to comprehend "expressive" language is to "dwell in it and use it," as Merleau-Ponty says, he agrees with Valery that the essence of literary language is that "a work cannot be summed up but must be re-read to be regained "14 The interpretation must "vanish away" so that the work may stand forth in its "pure existence," as Heidegger puts it in one of his essays on poetry " whatever an explanation can or cannot do, this always applies in order that what has been purely written of in the poem may stand forth a little clearer, the explanatory speech must break up each time both itself and what it has attempted "15 Thus, interpretations are cu­ mulative in a different sense from Hirsch's "We accept the fact that the subject presents itself historically under different aspects We accept that these aspects do not simply can­ cel one another out as research proceeds, but are like mu14 "Man

and Adversity," in Signs, pp 232-34 Prefatory remarks to "Remembrance of the Poet," trans Douglas Scott, in Existence and Being, ed Werner Brock (Chicago Henry Regnery Com­ pany, 1949), ρ 234 15

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tually exclusive conditions that exist each by themselves and combine only in us."16 Interpretations are frequently said to "explain" or to "ac­ count for" texts as a primary function. Hirsch and the Heideggerians differ on what is being explained and on what sort of explanation is being carried out. I would argue that Hirsch's model of knowing is essentially the model of "sci­ entific" cognition. Only conceptual knowledge is cumulative in the sense in which Hirsch implies that the genuine knowl­ edge of the human studies is cumulative. Furthermore, for Hirsch any interpretation of verbal meaning appears essen­ tially as a hypothesis to be validated on the principles of prob­ ability. The statement of the willed type (or the "author's intention") is a hypothesis to account for the author's writing what he did, and the parts of the text are to be explained (that is, their existence is to be accounted for) through this hypothesis. In fact, Hirsch himself argues in Aims, chapter 9, that even though the humanities deal with values as well as knowledge, their knowledge is not essentially different from knowledge in the natural sciences, because in both cases at­ taining knowledge is a matter of forming hypotheses and testing probabilities. The Heideggerians, on the other hand, do not necessarily aim in interpretation to "explain" the genesis of the text, but instead to explain the relation of the poem to the world of which it is a part. In the model of interpretation that we have adopted, as one would expect of a model along Heideggerian lines, what the interpreter "explains" is not the "work itself' considered as an entity temporally separated from his world. What he explains is rather the fitting of the historical entity into his own world. By implication the interpreter explains the relation of the work to himself insofar as he can objec­ tively understand himself. The end of the human studies is not primarily that human beings should understand the other, but that they should understand themselves through under­ standing the other. 16

Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 252.

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The dialectic between Hirsch and the Heideggerians throws into sharp relief the problem of correctness and the ramifi­ cations of that problem for anyone whose interpretive model is constructed along Heideggerian lines. I shall pause here to explain briefly why Hirsch's model seems to me generally less satisfactory than the alternative. But my main purpose is not to argue for any particular hermeneutic theory. Rather, I want only to show that the genre-theory developed here is compatible with the concept of correctness. I believe that there are certain internal difficulties in Hirsch's theory, arising most clearly where Hirsch shifts from defin­ ing verbal meaning as a willed type to defining it as a shared type. For a reader to determine a work's implications cor­ rectly, he must, according to Hirsch, have "prior experi­ ence" of the willed type. But the issue of whether the willed type can be shared is precisely the issue between Hirsch and the Heideggerians. The difficulty is to determine whether the type transcends consciousness. In Hirsch's initial definition in Validity (pp. 49-50), the type seems to transcend con­ sciousness, for it can be "represented by different instances or different contents of consciousness" (emphasis mine). The nature of this "representing" is not clarified, but the type itself seems not to be immanent in consciousness. But later in Validity, Hirsch argues that verbal meanings are different from physical things in that physical things have "complete explicitness," whereas verbal meanings have not: "meanings, being themselves types, are capable of being fully known. Someone else's conception or type, because it is a conception and not in the ordinary sense a thing, can be identical with my own conception or type" (p. 273—emphasis mine). In connecting type with "conception" ( = Kantian "con­ cept"?), Hirsch's line of argument seems to commit him to the conclusion that the difference between meaning and physical things is that things transcend consciousness, whereas meanings do not. If a type can be "fully known," that can mean only that it can be represented with perfect adequacy by some particular content of consciousness, which can be

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repeated identically, Hirsch argues, in another consciousness. Physical things transcend consciousness, Hirsch seems to be saying, precisely because the contents of consciousness that represent them are never perfectly adequate to them. But if that does not hold of types, in what sense, if any, do types transcend consciousness? Hirsch's definition of meaning in Aims also involves a problematic notion of "type." Hirsch identifies meaning with the "content" of consciousness plus the correlative affects and values: "Defined in Husserl's terms, 'meaning' embraces not only intentional objects but also the species of intentional acts which sponsor those intentional objects ..." (p. 8). Now, for Husserl, immanent perceptions ("acts immanently di­ rected") are acts whose "intentional objects . . . belong to the same stream of experience as themselves."17 If the author's mean­ ing embraces the "content" of his consciousness and the cor­ relative intentional acts, then that meaning is immanent with respect to the author's consciousness. Transcendently di­ rected experiences, on the other hand, for Husserl are those that are not immanently directed—for example, "all acts di­ rected towards essences, or towards the intentional experi­ ences of other Egos with other experience-streams." Thus, the author's meaning is transcendent with respect to the reader's consciousness. But meaning is a type, in Hirsch's system, and now the type appears immanent with respect to the author's consciousness and transcendent with respect to the reader's consciousness—if we accept Hirsch's definition of meaning in Husserlian terms. The question of the tran­ scendence of the type is of course inseparably bound up with the question of its determinacy and sharability. If the type transcends the reader's consciousness, can the content of the reader's consciousness ever be perfectly adequate to it? And if the content of his consciousness cannot be perfectly ade­ quate to the type, is the type "knowable" in Hirsch's sense of "knowable"? 17 Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (New York: Collier Books, 1962), section 38, p. 112.

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There seem to be, then, difficulties with the concept of the "type" in Hirsch's system. The difficulties are not necessarily unresolvable, but I suspect that their resolution would be at the expense of Hirsch's claim to produce genuine knowledge in the terms of his theory. We have knowledge in that theory partly because we assume from the beginning that things (meanings) are what they are, independent of the perceiving consciousness. Whether we can assume this of the type is precisely the question in Hirsch's system. Does the Heideggerians' position, on the other hand, inev­ itably involve "cognitive atheism," vicious subjectivity, and the destruction of the human studies as disciplines? Hirsch would say yes; obviously, the Heideggerians would say no. In Being and Time Heidegger argues that the act of under­ standing, involving as it does the hermeneutic circle, con­ tains "a positive possibility of the most primordial kind of knowing" (p. 195), which grounds even the scientific knowledge that seems to itself so independent and presuppositionless. We cannot escape the circle, and to try indicates a mistaken idea of the nature of understanding: "What is de­ cisive is not to get out of the circle but to come into it in the right way" (p. 195). We achieve this only if we rigorously pursue our "constant task," namely, "never to allow our forehaving, fore-sight, and fore-conception to be presented to us by fancies and popular conceptions, but rather to make the scientific [in the broad sense] theme secure by working out these fore-structures in terms of the things themselves" (p. 195). Gadamer's Truth and Method takes as one of its main tasks the clarification of this approach, which leads him to the problem of "subjectivity" and "objectivity" in literary inter­ pretation. If art is not the variety of changing experiences whose object is each time filled subjectively with meaning like an empty mould, representation must be recognised as the mode of being of the work of art. This was prepared for by the idea of representation being derived from the

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idea of play, in that self-representation is the true nature of play—and hence of the work of art also. The playing of the play is what speaks to the spectator, through its representation, and this in such a way that the spectator, despite the difference between it and himself, still belongs to it. (p. 104) Play for Gadamer is "structure—this means that despite its dependence on being played it is a meaningful whole which can be repeatedly represented as such and the significance of which can be understood" (p. 105). The reproduction of a work of art, as in the staging of a drama or the reading of a text, is another representation of what the artist himself rep­ resented in creating the work: "the writer represents and the actor represents. . . . it is the same thing that comes to ex­ istence in each case" (p. 105). Thus, a written text achieves an ideality, an apartness from its author, and encounters the reader as an interlocutor in a conversation. The reader's task is to remain "open" to the text, to allow it to achieve "con­ temporaneity" (pp. 112 ff.): "The general structure of un­ derstanding acquires its concrete form in historical under­ standing, in that the commitments of custom and tradition and the corresponding potentialities of one's own future be­ come effective in understanding itself' (p. 234). Interpreta­ tion is not fundamentally different from any other mode of reproducing the work. The work is effectively reproduced when it achieves contemporaneity, when it "speaks" to us, out of a tradition, to be sure, but in such a way that it has relevance to us in terms of our own potentialities. Thus, no interpretation is uniquely correct, but an interpretation can nevertheless be said to be correct when, paradoxically, it "disappears": "Total communication means that the com­ municating element cancels itself out" (p. 108). But the the­ ory does not require that we admit vicious subjectivity: . . . to understand a text always means to apply it to ourselves and to know that, even if it must always be understood in different ways, it is still the same text

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presenting itself to us in these different ways. That the claim to truth of every interpretation is not in the least relativised is seen from the fact that all interpretation is essentially linguistic. The linguistic explicitness that the process of understanding gains through interpretation does not create a second sense apart from that which is understood and interpreted. The interpretive concepts are not, as such, thematic in understanding. Rather, it is their nature to disappear behind what they bring, in interpretation, into speech. Paradoxically, an interpretation is right when it is capable of disappearing in this way. (p. 359) In one sense, Gadamer seems to be describing the essential characteristic of our genre-concepts. They "disappear" in the sense that we cannot, because of their reflexivity, feel that they have been imposed on the work from without or that the work has been stretched or trimmed to fit a Procrustean interpretive concept. But I have quoted Gadamer at length mainly to show an advantage that I think Hirsch has in the dispute about correctness. Gadamer offers a principle for de­ termining the correctness of an interpretation—namely, its ability to disappear. That principle allows for a multiplicity of meaning (as I think we must, in a Heideggerian model) while attempting to avoid vicious subjectivity. Nevertheless, Gadamer does not point to a clear standard of correctness. Hirsch is right to demand such a standard, because the con­ cept of correctness itself implies a standard. If we cannot point to a definite standard, we shall be hard pressed to warrant our calling any particular interpretation correct or incorrect, and we would do better to abandon the concept of correct­ ness altogether. The standard Hirsch adopts (willed type) is perhaps unsatisfactory in the ways I have suggested. But Gadamer's principle does not provide a standard at all. That is, not only is the principle insufficient to settle controversy; it does not even point out the line of argument we might follow. The line of argument would apparently be different in different cases, and Hirsch might be justified in querying

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by what standard one is to determine whether an interpre­ tation in fact "disappears." Gadamer himself admits, "Per­ haps the criterion that determines here whether something is 'a correct representation' is a highly mobile and relative one. But the compelling quality of the representation is not less­ ened by the fact that it cannot have any fixed criterion" (p. 107). Hirsch might well respond, "No fixed criterion, no standard; no standard, no correctness." The validity of inter­ pretation here seems to reduce to value, in the last analysis. Certainly the representation of any interpreter is compelling for that interpreter, but that is not the issue. It does not suf­ fice for Gadamer to instruct the interpreter to "keep some­ thing at a distance, namely everything that suggests itself, on the basis of his own prejudices, as the meaning expected, as soon as it is rejected by the sense of the text itself ..." (p. 422). The sense of the text itself is at issue.

Text, Subject-Matter, and Correctness This, at last, is the crux of the matter: Can a model on Heideggerian lines provide a standard of interpretation, while al­ lowing for a multiplicity of meaning? In answering this ques­ tion, I think it is helpful to hold rigorously to a distinction that is not always clearly preserved. The distinction is that between the poem as such, and the linguistic entity that we call the text. When we admit that we do not have genuine conceptual knowledge about the nature and possibility of language, we admit that we do not know the exact relation­ ship between these two entities. Some theorists, defining text rather more broadly than I shall, might assert that the poem is identical with the text. Others might assert that the text merely represents the poem in some way. Be that as it may, it is certain that we gain access to the poem only through the text, and an interpretation of the poem necessarily involves in one way or another an interpretation of the text. But the inseparability of the two in practice does not mean that we cannot separate them in analyzing the interpretive act. I wish

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to preserve this distinction because it is important to keep in mind that any text always has spatial and temporal relations. It is what comes to be in the recitation or the printing of a poem. It is connected spatially and temporally (and causally) with an Ur-text, which itself came into being at a particular place and a particular time. It is what we "have before us," and it can be spoken of as the text only insofar as we conceive it and its other versions as representing a unique poem. We speak of "this text" and "that text" of the "same poem"; we have printed texts and manuscript texts, and the text of some particular edition. The poem as such, on the other hand, might in some theories be equated with an act of consciousness, or an Idea, or some other non-spatial and/or non-temporal en­ tity not identical with the texts that represent it. And yet the interpretation of the poem must depend on the interpretation of the text. As Cassirer says of the physical "substratum" of the common world, "There is no purely 'ideal entity' that can dispense with this support. The ideal exists only insofar as it presents itself sensuously and materially and embodies itself in this presentation."18 I have argued previously that any explicit interpretation of a poem presupposes the division of the work into "mind" and "world." I mean to argue now that any interpretation of the text involves certain presuppositions about the relation of the text to the real world that the reader conceives of him­ self as inhabiting. First, it is impossible to write an interpre­ tive statement without presupposing what I shall call a sub­ ject-matter. The subject-matter is not the fictional world, though it may be closely related to it. Nor is it the case that we identify the subject-matter and then, based on that identifi­ cation, write our interpretive statement. That is, we do not get knowledge about meaning by getting knowledge about subject-matter first. Instead, we understand the text, make that understanding explicit in an interpretive statement, and then discover the subject-matter that is presupposed. If the 18 The Logic of the Humanities, trans. Clarence Smith Howe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), p. 98.

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presupposition thus brought to light seems absurd, we alter our understanding of the text. 1 define subject-matter as the entities or events in the reader's world to which the text is taken to be referring. The subject-matter, then, is a condition for the pos­ sibility of the text. In interpreting Pound's poem "In a Station

of the Metro," for example, we might say that the subjectmatter is the visual appearance of the crowd in a subway station. But subject-matter need not be things or events ex­ ternally verifiable. Keats' nightingale is a figment of his imagination, in the last analysis, created out of the song of a real bird, and perhaps modified in an indeterminate number of ways in the actual process of writing the ode. We might decide, similarly, that the subject-matter of Pound's poem is rather a particular feeling in Pound's mind that he attempts to reproduce by means of the text. We cannot have direct access to Keats' imagination or to Pound's feelings. But in interpreting we presuppose that those figments of the imag­ ination or those feelings were actual events of actual histori­ cal minds that stand in a definite historical relation to us. The subject-matter, then, is not identical to the text; nor, unless we identify the poem with the contents of the author's con­ sciousness, is it ever identical to the poem. It is always the­ oretically separable. We can never explicitly interpret a text without identifying a subject-matter, because, as Dilthey says, What persons have in common is the starting-point for all the relations between the particular and the general in the human studies. A basic experience of what men have in common permeates the whole conception of the mind-constructed world. . . . This is the presupposition for understanding.19 In other words, to understand a text, one must know what it is talking about. This what is the subject-matter. Between two beings with no experience in common, no communi19 Dilthey, "The Construction of the Historical World in the Human Studies," in Selected Writings, p. 186.

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cation would be possible. This would of course be the real difficulty in communicating with extra-terrestrial beings— we would have to build up a body of common experience before communication could occur. And if it should happen that the beings were constituted such that no experience of theirs could correspond to any of ours, we would never be able to talk to them. I cannot write an interpretation of a text by another human being, similarly, without presupposing a what that the text is "about." Furthermore, I must have that what on my own terms. My presupposition might be quite wrong, but this is only to say that interpretations can be mistaken. To say that my presupposition is always quite wrong is to say that communication is impossible. Presupposing a subject-matter for the text, then, involves also presupposing that the text and the reader share a common world. The text is thus by the act of explicit interpretation necessarily "tied to" the world of the reader in a definite way. The text is unavoidably presented as having spatial and temporal relations with other entities or events of the read­ er's world. The subject-matter is one of those entities or events. The conclusion is very simple and obvious, but very farreaching: some entities or events cannot with logical consistency be said to be the subject-matter of the text.

A thirteenth-century text, for example, cannot have for its subject-matter the 1969 moon-landing. It might be clearer now why it helps in our argument to separate the interpre­ tation of the poem from the interpretation of the text. It might very well make sense to say that the thirteenth-cen­ tury poem applies to the moon-landing, whether it was in­ tended to or not. Maybe it is a poem about pride, or about aspiration, or about curiositas. In that sense the poem might be said to be "about" the moon-landing in some particular interpretive statement. But an interpretation of the text can­ not with consistency presuppose that the moon-landing is the subject-matter, because at least some of the spatio-tem­ poral "locations" of the text precede the moon-landing. In short, an explicit interpretation necessarily presupposes a

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common world. That world is the world. In terms of its spatial and temporal relations, the text as material entity can­ not presuppose either the moon-landing as material entity or any contents of consciousness that themselves presuppose the moon-landing. If, therefore, we want the interpretation of the poem to be consistent with the interpretation of the text, we must conclude that the interpretation that necessarily im­ plies that the poem is about the moon-landing is incorrect. We must stop with saying that the poem is about pride, or aspiration, or curiositas, any one of which a thirteenth-century poet could have experienced. The "modern" interpre­ tation might be "valid" in the sense of "valuable," but it is inconsistent with the presupposition, fundamental for under­ standing texts, that the world is unitary and in common. Therefore, it is incorrect. I believe, then, that an interpretive model along Heideggerian lines can provide a standard, if by interpretation we also mean interpreting texts, and if we agree that such inter­ pretation is an essential step in interpreting poems. The stand­ ard is the subject-matter. What does this mean? First, we must insist that subject-matter is not a standard in the same sense that Hirsch's "willed type" is a standard. That is, to "know" the subject-matter is not immediately to "know" the mean­ ing. The text is about the subject-matter, refers to the subjectmatter; whereas the meaning is the relation of the work to the whole of the interpreter's world. The "rule" for correct­ ness, then, is not the exact correspondence of the interpretive statement to some standard, but instead the coherence of the interpretive statement, in regard to its presuppositions, with the rest of the world as thematized. We ask, not "Does the interpretation correspond to the author's intention?" but "Is the interpretive statement consistent with everything we ex­ plicitly understand about the world, including the spatial and temporal relations of the text?" Second, we should notice that the proposed standard, while permitting us to retain the concept of correctness, allows for a multiplicity of meaning. Subject-matter is unitary. The text

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refers to a particular object, a particular content of conscious­ ness, a particular event. But meaning remains a relation, and as such can be multiple within the limits of interpretive "cor­ rectness" (i.e., as long as the interpretive statement itself pre­ supposes a subject-matter that is consistent with the text's inhabiting of the common world). A text with a unique sub­ ject-matter can still mean many things, but it cannot mean "just anything." Third, and most important, we must not fall victim to the illusion that our argument solves any practical interpretive questions. The argument does not imply a fixed hermeneutic procedure. Knowing what the subject-matter is not does not always help us find out what it is, and most interpretive de­ bates arise because two or more interpretations are consistent with "known historical fact." We might in some cases not be able to determine with any assurance whether the subjectmatter presupposed by an interpretation is a possible thing or event. Sometimes we may have satisfactory evidence bearing on this question, and sometimes we may not. Fur­ thermore, the text itself is clearly the best evidence for de­ termining the subject-matter. Are we not then going in a circle, if we maintain that the interpretation presupposes a subject-matter? We are, but it is only the inevitable herme­ neutic circle. I am arguing here that the way of "coming into the circle in the right way" is to take the subject-matter as the standard of interpretation. Because the text does have spatial and temporal relations, it is never the only evidence for subject-matter. Probably the most frequent case, cer­ tainly for lyrical poems, is where we postulate that the sub­ ject-matter is a content of the author's consciousness. Here, no doubt, we would have to solve the metaphysical problem of whether and how we can know other minds before we could be sure we had gained access to the subject-matter. But I have tried to show only that a model on Heideggerian lines can in principle admit of a definite standard of interpretation. Even if in practice we never possess the standard certainly and conceptually, nevertheless the interpretive model is cleared

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of the charge of vicious subjectivity. We overcome our own prejudices, and the fads and fancies of any era, by insisting on our understanding (perhaps constantly changing) of the subject-matter. Interpretation is "objective" when it takes as one of its poles the "objective" world itself. Notice that, in Heidegger's philosophy, the historical event that constitutes what I am calling "subject-matter" is itself involved in the hermeneutic circle, and statements about it are thus not nec­ essarily "objective" in the Kantian sense of being "true for every rational subject" (at all historical periods). But the his­ torical event is "objective" in the sense that it provides a standard in terms of which someone may logically demon­ strate the incorrectness of someone else's interpretation. It provides a standard, that is, in principle. There will be endless arguments about what the historical events in fact were, but there will also be endless arguments about what the author's intention was, for example, if we adopt Hirsch's theory. There is no way of escaping argument in the human studies. But argument about applying a standard does not necessarily vi­ tiate the standard itself. Jacques Derrida is undoubtedly one of the most influential modern philosophers of interpretation. Although Derrida departs significantly from Heidegger,20 his theory of reading is among those Hirsch vehemently opposes. But more to the point here, Derrida's writings seem to challenge severely the concept of "subject-matter" as I have defined it. For Derrida the nature of the sign (including the linguistic sign) is to form part of a chain of signifiers that never ends. There is no pure "presence" of being as such, no pure signified that the lin­ guistic sign merely supplements and from which the sign takes its origin. The signified is instead what Derrida calls "trace." The structure, then, of the sign is not to be that which it signifies, to be different from the signified, and to put off 20 See J. Hillis Miller's review of Joseph N. Riddel's The Inverted Bell: Modernism and the Counterpoetics of William Carlos Williams, in Diacritics, 5.ii,

24-31, for a summary discussion of the differences between Derrida and Heidegger.

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or defer the signified as something not immediately present in the sign. This structure Derrida names diffirance, spelled with the a instead of e presumably to avoid excluding either meaning of the French differer ( = to differ, to defer). By the process of differance, the signifier institutes the signified as the trace or track of itself that "remains" in the signifier. Derrida argues, Within the play of supplementarity [ = the structure of differance], one will always be able to relate the substitutes [signifiers] to their signified, this last will be yet another signifier. The fundamental signified, the meaning of the being represented, even less the thing itself, will never be given us in person, outside the sign or outside play. . . . There is a point in the system where the signifier can no longer be replaced by its signified, so that in consequence no signifier can be so replaced, purely and simply.21 Derrida concludes that "the signified is originarily and essen­ tially . . . trace, that it is always already in the position of the signifier" (p. 73), and that "The trace itself does not exist" (p. 167). The movement of Western metaphysics has been to "efface" the trace, to forget that it is only a trace, by forget­ ting or repressing the process of differance, which process for Derrida turns out to be the fundamental structure of con­ sciousness. Derrida critiques Husserl's theory of signs in this light, in La voix et Ie phenomene: Introduction au probleme du signe dans la phenomenologie de Husserl.22 The sign is treated in Western metaphysics as pure supplement to being, as some­ thing added. As Derrida says in Of Grammatology, "The par­ adox is that one annuls addition by considering it a pure addition. What is added is nothing because it is added to a full presence to which it is exterior. Speech comes to be added to intuitive presence (of the entity, of essence, of the eidos, of 21 Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, cl976), p. 266. 22 Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967.

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ousia, and so forth); writing comes to be added to Uving self-

present speech . . ." (p. 167). This view is what one must "deconstruct" by a "meditation upon writing which would merge, as it must, with the undoing [sollicitation] of ontotheology ..." (p. 73). One must see that "Privation of presence is the condition of experience, that is to say of pres­ ence" (p. 166). Thus, Derrida insists that what I call "subject-matter" does not exist apart from the chain of significations. For him it is a mistake to regard anything, whether in the author's mind or outside it, as ever possessing pure presence. Derrida's the­ ory of reading then rests on the premise that there is nothing outside the text: reading cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical, etc.) or toward a signified outside the text whose content could take place, could have taken place outside of language. . . . There is nothing outside of the text [there is no outside-text; il n'y a pas de hors-texte]. . . . there have never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references, the "real" supervening, and being added only while taking on meaning from a trace and from an invocation of the supplement, etc. And thus to infinity, for we have read, in the text, that the absolute present, Nature . . . have always already escaped, have never existed, that what opens meaning and language is writing as the disappearance of natural presence.23 Now, Derrida admits that "Even if there is never a pure signified, there are different relationships as to that which, from the signifier, is presented as the irreducible stratum of the signified" (p. 159). From the perspective of Derrida's theory of reading, what I have called "subject-matter" could be equated with the thing presented as "irreducible stratum," 23

Derrida, Of Grammatology, pp. 158-59.

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and Derrida says that "The entire history of texts, and within it the history of literary forms in the West, should be studied from this point of view" (p. 159). That is, at one level of inquiry it is legitimate to proceed as if the text is signifier for a signified that could exist without it, since the text itself presents itself that way. That level of inquiry, if I read Derrida correctly (impossible to do, in his scheme), is the level at which Derrida would say I am pursuing the understanding of texts. Derrida calls this the "transcendent reading," or the "search for the signified" (p. 160). What sort of answer might be provided to meet Derrida's challenge? Why stop with the "transcendent" reading of texts as if there were an "irreducible stratum," a "subject-matter," instead of proceeding to "deconstruct" texts with Derrida? Although most of Western literature lends itself to "tran­ scendent" reading, Derrida puts that search "in question, not to annull it but to understand it within a system to which such a reading is blind" (p. 160). For him the task of reading is that of "deconstruction," the attempt to "reach the point of a certain exteriority in relation to the totality of the age of logocentrism," a "radically empiricist" attempt to "think the entirety of the classical conceptual oppositions, particularly the one within which the value of empiricism is held: the opposition of philosophy and nonphilosophy, another name for empiricism, for this incapability to sustain on one's own and to the limit the coherence of one's own discourse ..." (pp. 161-62). Unfortunately, one must carry out this decon­ struction, at least initially, within the philosophical opposi­ tions, the logic, and the vocabulary of Western metaphysics, since there is for us no other vocabulary and no other logic. In slightly less abstract terms, this "deconstruction" means that the reader, realizing that the writer is always dominated to some extent by his system of language and logic, must "always aim at a certain relationship, unperceived by the writer, between what he commands and what he does not command of the patterns of language that he uses. This re-

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lationship is . . . a signifying structure that critical reading should produce" (p. 158). One possible objection to Derrida is the philosophical ob­ jection. Derrida's is ultimately a theory (or non-theory, as the case may be) of language and consciousness. Derrida is non-philosophical in that he attempts to get "outside" West­ ern metaphysics, and so nothing he says is available for "proof' in any traditional sense of the term. It is not clear, then, by what obligation one is constrained to accept or listen to Der­ rida's views, especially since the concepts of "listen to" and "accept" themselves become problematic in his theory. Even if the proofs of traditional metaphysics compel assent only because of the investment of Western culture in those proofs, that investment is a kind of obligation. Derrida's reflections might seem to "explain" or "account for" certain things in our experience of language that are not accounted for by tra­ ditional metaphysics, but his reflections so radicalize notions of thinking that the concepts of "explain" and "account for" themselves no longer mean anything definable. Thus, ulti­ mately one cannot defend Derrida's thought by saying that it accounts for experience. But, on the other hand, Derrida would say that these objections are so much wasted breath, because they themselves depend on a metaphysics of pres­ ence.24 Another possible objection to Derrida is the ethical, and I think that ultimately this would be Hirsch's objection. That is, if we can have no knowledge of texts in any traditional sense of the term "knowledge," can we defend our practice of writing long books and delivering long lectures on texts, to inflict on others? The ethical question turns on the value of "deconstruction" as Derrida attempts to carry it out. I cannot attempt to plumb the issue to the bottom, but I do feel in general with Hirsch on this matter. Derrida is quite correct, I think, to point out that his reflection necessarily attempts to move beyond the consideration of good and evil. He says, "I show the interiority of exteriority, which amounts 24

See Of Grammatology, p. 314.

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to annulling the ethical qualification and to thinking of writ­ ing beyond good and evil. . . . One can no longer see disease in substitution when one sees that the substitute is substi­ tuted for a substitute" (p. 314). Particularly in passages such as the one just quoted, one sees a deeper propriety in Hirsch's choice of the term "cognitive atheist." But of course, depending upon how much of the Western religious and metaphysical tradition one is prepared to jetti­ son, these objections to Derrida are not necessarily conclu­ sive. Ultimately we shall have to content ourselves with seeing Derrida's "transcendent reading" from a different perspec­ tive than his. We have said that we "have" the work by interpretation, in the sense that interpretation makes explicit the understanding by which we appropriate the work in the first place. But explicit interpretation—that is, the act of writing an interpretive statement—necessarily presupposes a subject-matter, or what Derrida calls an "irreducible stra­ tum." This necessity is partly what Derrida means, I think, when he says that deconstruction must borrow from the logic it deconstructs. We, too, might well allow the possibility that the subject-matter itself is not to be gotten hold of, that it ultimately disappears into an infinite chain of significations— that is, that we will never in fact have the subject-matter in­ tuitively present before us so that we can compare it with our interpretations. Indeed, whenever we identify the subjectmatter as something that went on in a particular author's head at a particular time, we have already as much as admit­ ted that the subject-matter will never be intuitively present to us. But the crucial point is this. Derrida seems to assume that there are only two alternatives: (1) "transcendent reading" as an attempt to recover (or get at, or have intuitively present) the subject-matter; and (2) "deconstruction" of the text. I want to argue that such is not the case. There is a third al­ ternative, which is the one that preserves the concepts of "logical consistency," "correctness," and "explanation." In this alternative, the aim is not the recovery of the subject-

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matter. We are not concerned primarily to get at some prelinguistic experience in the author's mind, or to reproduce his experience from the text so that it may be intuitively present to us. We are interested instead in articulating the relation of the work to our world. A postulated subject-matter "falls out" of that articulation, as it were, a subject-matter that itself can be articulated in terms of its relations to our world. It is not only that the subject-matter often does not exist for us without the text; we can go further and assert that the subject-matter does not exist for us without the ex­ plicit interpretation. The explicit interpretation "frees" the subject-matter from the text. We are not concerned, how­ ever, with whether the text gives us that subject-matter in intuitive presence. Perhaps it never does, in fact. Derrida's point is precisely that it never does, and that such is the in­ herent deficiency of transcendent reading. But what concerns us is only whether our statements about the subject-matter thus freed are consistent with all the other statements about the world that we take to be true—whatever our criterion of truth. In other words, is what we say about the subject-mat­ ter when we interpret consistent with everything else we want to say about the world? If it is, then the interpretation is correct. Thus we preserve the concept of correctness, while admit­ tedly perhaps putting off indefinitely any final decision about any particular interpretation. We cannot know with absolute certainty that any particular interpretation is "correct," per­ haps; but we can know that it is as correct as anything else to which the concept of correctness is meaningfully applied. Derrida's challenge does not strike at the root of the concept of subject-matter, for that concept does not require that its object be present intuitively. Even if we never "have" the subject-matter, we always have what is taken to be the sub­ ject-matter by any particular interpretation, and we always have what we take to be the nature of the world. Thus, our reading is not, in Derrida's sense, a "deconstruction," either. For we set out in the first place to preserve the concept of

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"correctness of interpretation"—which presupposes the con­ cepts of "logical validity" and of the "explanation of texts." We have set out, in other words, to do the most that can be done with traditional terms, before we attempt to get outside them by a wrenching that ultimately strips us of all tools of inquiry, including, I should say, speech itself. On balance, then, I think a consideration of Derrida points up certain strengths in Hirsch's position that I should be re­ luctant to sacrifice. If we are not going to become deconstructors, we need a standard of interpretation. Hirsch's "meaning" is not always equivalent to our "subject-mat­ ter."25 But with most poems that we interpret as lyrics, we would say that the subject-matter, and therefore the stand­ ard, is the content of the author's consciousness (with its intentional correlates). Now, until we solve the "problem of other minds," we do not know how accurately we can judge what the content of consciousness is. Each reader has only his own idea of that content—that is, a content of his own consciousness that he thinks corresponds, more or less, to the author's. The question of the exact mode of "corre­ spondence" is left open. This deficiency does not relativize our standard—the standard is what it is, namely the author's content of consciousness—but there will still be arguments about what the standard is. Those arguments constitute a 25 Of course, what Heideggerians call "meaning" corresponds closely to what Hirsch calls "significance " But it is important to note that Hirsch also uses the term "subject-matter." He apparently reserves it, however, to refer to things or events in the external world He argues that subject-matter can­ not be used to determine implications of meaning—that is, just because I know that the author is talking about a tree, I am not allowed to infer that anything 1 know about trees is implied in the text But it is possible to argue that there are cases where Hirsch's principle does not hold with perfect ngor. For some texts, pnor knowledge of speafic subject-matter (in Hirsch's sense) is necessary in order to determine what the meaning is Some of the legendary or quasi-histoncal passages in Beowulf, for example, are mysteri­ ous to us because we do not know the legends or events referred to. Nonexphcit allegories, moreover, always depend on the reader's pnor knowl­ edge of the subject-matter and his ability to deduce implications from that knowledge

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major part of the interpretive enterprise. Now Hirsch, it seems to me, is attempting precisely to get around those arguments as far as possible by erecting the concept of the "type." He argues that the type, as determinate and sharable, is repre­ sented by both the author's content of consciousness and, in correct interpretation, the reader's content of consciousness. It might seem patently obvious that the reader's content of consciousness cannot be identical with the author's in every way, but it can faithfully represent the same type, Hirsch claims. I believe that the concept of the type is problematic, however. We can with logical consistency and without vi­ cious relativism take as our standard of interpretation the au­ thor's content of consciousness. But since we do not have direct access to that content, in practical terms that means taking our idea of the author's content of consciousness as standard. I would argue that when we sound Hirsch's notion of the type to the bottom, we are left with the conclusion that in practice and in principle the standard of interpretation is not the willed type, but the content of the author's con­ sciousness (including also, as Hirsch would hold, the correl­ ative affects and values). Bringing in the concept of the type serves only to qualify the standard by making it the "content of the author's consciousness so far as we can know it"; but the qualification adds nothing, since we can never know any­ thing except so far as we can know it. For the poems that we interpret as being "about" some content of consciousness, some "event" in an author's mind, Hirsch's reflections can be helpful. Of course, in Hirsch's theory we have the meaning when we have the type (or, as I would say, the content of the author's consciousness); in our model the meaning is not the subject-matter. But in poems like Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale," where the subject-matter is Keats' imagining, the standard of interpretation is the same for us and for Hirsch—it is, namely, the content of the au­ thor's consciousness. But Hirsch's "meaning" is not the same as our "meaning." Our "meaning" is an articulation of what the poem says about its subject-matter, a placing of the au-

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thor's content of consciousness (with its intentional corre­ lates, to be sure) in relation to our world. We can now see how Hirsch's insights might be of use. Hirsch points out that we can argue to probability—that is, that we can arrive at statements about the author's intention that we know to be more or less probable—on the basis of various kinds of historical evidence. In our model, too, every text has some historical matrix. That means that we can also argue that some subject-matters are more probable than others, and so we locate a line of argument for defending interpreta­ tions or attacking them. Employing subject-matter as the standard does not, notice, preclude a multiplicity of meaning, since meaning is the articulation of the work in terms of its relation to the reader's world. There is no reason why there should be only one such relation. We cannot necessarily con­ clude that any one interpretation is more probable than others, but only that a particular family of interpretations, perhaps a very numerous family, presupposes a more probable subjectmatter. In practice, our conclusions about subject-matter can be decisive only when they have negative force—that is, when we know that some particular entity or event cannot have been the subject-matter. Then we can say that interpretations presupposing that subject-matter are wrong. The text itself remains the best evidence for subject-matter, and so we should be very cautious in arguing against any interpretation be­ cause the extra-textual evidence suggests that the subjectmatter it presupposes is less probable than some other sub­ ject-matter. It is impossible to demonstrate conclusively that any possible subject-matter, however historically improbable, was not in fact the subject-matter of the text. We cannot require authors always to do the expected. Probability, Hirsch to the contrary, does not mean quite the same thing for the human studies as it does for the natural sciences. Unlike Hirsch's interpretations, notice, our interpretations are not hypotheses that explain why the author wrote what he wrote. Instead, they explain the relation of the work to our world.

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The subject-matter is to be regarded not as the immediate cause of the text, but instead as a condition for its possibility.

Excursus: Interpretive Vocabularies and the Psychoanalytic Approach

The best interpretive vocabulary, then, if we want to think in those terms, is the vocabulary most adequate to the sub­ ject-matter of the text. That is, if we interpret the text as being about a feeling, we might use the vocabulary of psy­ chology to interpret it; if the text has a philosophical theme in our interpretation, the vocabulary of philosophy might be appropriate; a religious theme, a religious vocabulary. I am talking here about the interpretive vocabularies for particular texts, and not about the generic model of literary interpre­ tation. The model involving the three broad genres (lyric, epic, dramatic) is by its nature a framework for specialized vocabularies. Even though we are interpreting a poem as lyric, we still must decide upon the particular vocabulary most fruitful to discuss the reciprocity between mind and world in that poem. We may wish to use the vocabulary of feeling, or of philosophy, and so on. We select the vocabularies that seem most adequate to the subject-matter. As the world-view of critics changes, so might their ideas of the nature of the subject-matter itself. Thus, we might legitimately apply Freudian categories, perhaps, as a critical vocabulary, to a pre-Freudian text, as long as we are careful to avoid any presupposition that the Freudian categories themselves are the subject-matter of the text. As post-Freud­ ian readers, we might best understand the subject-matter in Freudian terms; that does not mean that we can say Hamlet is about an Oedipus complex. It might be about a prince who has psychological experiences that we should nowadays associate with Oedipal conflicts, but we cannot legitimately infer that the play should be interpreted so as to correspond point for point with the Freudian account of such conflicts. Freud's theories do not provide us with a hermeneutic pro-

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gram, with a "machine" for reducing texts to interpreta­ tions—and that is so even when Freud's categories are the subject-matter for some modern text. In the Heideggerian model of understanding, knowledge of texts is not ever "produced" by some interpretive "machine." The danger of the psychoanalytic approach, in particular, lies in its reliance on the concept of the unconscious. It is worth taking some time here with the thorny problems raised by that concept. Certain ways of employing the concept of the unconscious obscure the fact that an interpretation has ceased to be an interpretation of the work, and has instead lapsed into an interpretation of the author's psychology con­ sidered as cause of the work. When that happens, the in­ terpretive process necessarily lapses into the causal model, in which to explain a work means to explain in terms of cause and effect how it came to be. In that model we are after the statement of cause—the complete elucidation of the author's psychology. Our model, on the other hand, regards subjectmatter not as a cause of the work, but as a condition for the possibility of interpretation—which is the same as saying a condition for the possibility of the work, since that which is impossible to interpret is not a work but nonsense. We are after the meaning, and not an explanation of how the work came to be. Yet our model certainly admits that the work can mean things of which the author was unconscious. The author cannot possibly have known and planned all the re­ lations between his work and my world. The confusion arises partly because there are at least two ways of using the word unconscious. In one usage, let us call it sense (1), we say that we are "unconscious" of things in the world of which we are merely unaware. I am normally "unconscious" of my breathing, or temporarily "uncon­ scious" of my toneless whistling that is annoying my wife, or "unconscious" of what is happening at this moment in Times Square. In another usage, sense (2), we say that some­ one is "unconscious" of feelings, desires, and drives which he represses and which he would, unless he is psychologi-

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cally sophisticated, deny having at all. We may know that someone is "unconscious" of something in sense (1) without our having any positive knowledge of what is in fact hap­ pening in his mind. But if we know that he is "unconscious" of something in sense (2), we have positive knowledge that he is in fact repressing something. It is sense (1) of unconscious that we may employ consistently with our model, when we say, for instance, that a work has meanings of which the au­ thor was "unconscious." Psychoanalytic interpretation, on the other hand, lapses into the causal model precisely when it presupposes a subject-matter of which the author is "uncon­ scious" in sense (2). The point can perhaps be illustrated best with a hypothet­ ical example. (I hasten to say that the hypothetical interpre­ tations I present here are just that, and are intended to illus­ trate a point rather than to correspond to my own interpretation or to that of any other critic. In particular, I am not competent to render a Freudian interpretation, even if I were so inclined.) At the end of Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," the poet turns from considering the history of his private emotional experience with Nature. He admits the possibility that the experiences are merely private, and there­ fore perhaps illusory. But the key to the poem seems to be his sister Dorothy (not named, of course), in whom he sees outward evidence of the same order of emotional experiences he has passed through. So Wordsworth's relationship with Dorothy remains, even if Wordsworth cannot make the sweeping claims that he wants to make earlier in the poem. There are many ways of interpreting this turn to Dorothy, and many ways of answering the question of what Dorothy "represents" in the poem. I want to see what sorts of state­ ments about unconscious meanings our model would allow. Suppose we say that Dorothy in the poem is to be under­ stood as a figure like Dante's Beatrice, or even as a repre­ sentative of the Eternal Feminine principle as in Goethe. We could say so without insisting that Wordsworth was think­ ing of Dante while he was writing "Tintern Abbey," and

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Wordsworth of course could not have been thinking of Faust in 1798. Dante's Beatrice and Goethe's Eternal Feminine are merely conceptual tools of interpretation, to help us articu­ late Wordsworth's Dorothy—they are terms in a critical vo­ cabulary, as it were. We presuppose a subject-matter, which in this case is Dorothy as she existed in Wordsworth's con­ scious mind, and we legitimately argue that the work in fact has meanings (i.e., relations) of which the author was not necessarily conscious. This is something like saying that Wordsworth's poem can be "used" to illustrate the impor­ tance of the feminine principle to the artist's conscious mind. Our interpretation does not occupy itself with how the subject-matter came to be, but only presupposes that subjectmatter as what it is. Suppose, on the other hand, that one argues that the last part of "Tintern Abbey" should be interpreted to indicate that Wordsworth had repressed sexual feelings for Dorothy. What would it mean to interpret the work this way? What idea or model of interpretation underwrites the conclusion that the work means that Wordsworth had such impulses? To answer, let us see what subject-matter is presupposed by such an interpretation. The subject-matter is what we take in interpretation as the condition for the existence of the text. Since we do not suppose that "Tintern Abbey" was pro­ duced by automatic writing, we must suppose that Words­ worth had certain conscious thoughts about Dorothy as he produced the text—just as above, where we took those thoughts as the subject-matter. But we have also presup­ posed something else in our interpretation—namely, the psy­ chological drama being played out below the level of Words­ worth's consciousness. Where before we had only two things—Wordsworth's conscious thoughts and the text—now we have three—Wordsworth's repressed sexual impulses, his conscious thoughts, and the text. Introducing the concept of the unconscious causes us to presuppose that we have some positive knowledge about what was happening in Words­ worth's mind, knowledge that we would not have presup-

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posed in the first interpretation. Namely, we presuppose that we know how to separate Wordsworth's mental processes into conscious and unconscious. Already we can see that the interpretation becomes less an interpretation of the poem, and more an interpretation of Wordsworth's psychology, where the text is considered as evidence for the psychological interpretation. Furthermore, and this is the crucial point, we notice that the goal of the interpretation of the work and the goal of the interpretation of Wordsworth's psychology are identical. Both issue in the statement that Wordsworth had repressed sexual impulses toward Dorothy. The meaning of the work is the same as the meaning of Wordsworth's mental processes. The structure of thought exhibited in this inter­ pretation should be familiar. This structure of thought takes the meaning as the mental events that caused the text, and takes the text as evidence for that meaning in the way that an effect is evidence for a cause. The meaning is the hypoth­ esis about mental events that accounts for the existence of the text. Wordsworth's repressed impulses caused his con­ scious thoughts which caused the text. So we see that this form of psychoanalytic interpretation lapses into the causal model. The psychoanalytic inquiry might be perfectly legitimate on its own terms as an attempt to understand Wordsworth historically, but the inquiry is fun­ damentally uncongenial to our model and to our understand­ ing of interpreting poems. Perhaps Wordsworth did uncon­ sciously regard Dorothy as a sex-object, while his conscious mind would have recoiled from the idea. But that does not allow us to say in our model that the meaning of the work is that Wordsworth had repressed sexual impulses. Statements about "unconscious meanings" motivated by a desire to ex­ plain in causal terms how something got written are funda­ mentally incompatible with our notion of what it means to interpret a work. The goal of the interpretive process in our model is not the unconscious events in the author's mind, any more than it is the conscious events there. There appear, then, to be two distinct kinds of uncon-

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scious meanings. There are those supposed unconscious meanings which nevertheless presuppose a conscious subjectmatter. Were we to find that the author was in fact conscious of these meanings, or could we imagine making the author aware of them, we would not think that his awareness would alter our sense of the work or our interpretation. But there are also unconscious meanings that presuppose an uncon­ scious subject-matter. For these unconscious meanings the interpretation itself depends on their remaining unconscious, and our sense of the work would be radically different were we to find that the meanings were in fact conscious. On our model meanings may be unconscious, but the subject-matter presupposed in interpretations must always be conscious when we locate it in the author's mind.26 There will always be controversy about which interpretive vocabulary is best in any particular case, because there will always be arguments about the subject-matter. I have tried by considering Hirsch's reflections to suggest how we might locate lines of argument relevant to determining which in­ terpretive vocabularies are likely to be better than others. Hirsch's reflections show why it might be important to con­ sider what Coleridge could have been thinking, when we evaluate interpretations of "Kubla Khan"; or to consider the intellectual history of England, when we evaluate interpre­ tations of "Dover Beach." Critics who take the extreme po­ sition that in determining the meaning of a poem one can remain indifferent to the mental life of the author or his mi­ lieu, thereby make certain assumptions about the relationship between poem and text. Perhaps we can agree that the poem is not the text, but we will not know what the exact relation between the two is until we know more about the nature of 26 Our model still admits "source-studies" designed to establish that some particular entity or event was available as subject-matter for some particular work. Whether we argue that literary borrowings are conscious or uncon­ scious, these studies are important in our model, not because they show that work A "caused" work B, but because they establish that the subject-matter of work B can be understood in terms of work A, that work B "makes statements about" work A.

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language. Meanwhile, it seems most reasonable to ensure that our interpretations of poems are at least consistent with our interpretations of texts in their material aspect—especially if the principle does not require us to sacrifice multiplicity of meaning. Standards of Evaluation

The remarks about interpretation in this chapter imply con­ sequences for the critic's other task—namely, the evaluation of literary works. But in one sense, there is little to say about evaluation, since interpretation itself is the essential act in valuing. The value-judgment about the work,27 though sub­ ject to revision in the light of subsequent experience, is al­ ready involved in pre-explicit understanding. Conversely, any explicit interpretation at some level implies a value-judg­ ment, even if it is only the judgment that the work is worth interpreting. In our model the critic does not "rate" the work by comparing it with some predetermined standard of value. Instead, criticism qua evaluation consists in making explicit the value-premises according to which the work has already been judged in understanding. Meaning is a relation of the work to the reader's world, and part of that relation is the value of the work in that world. A work that does not have some value, positive or negative, is merely meaningless. Our reflections do not permit us to think that we can unequivo­ cally prove that a work is good or bad, or that one work is better than another—at least, not until we attain general agreement on the question of values. But I think we can see certain lines of argument that can reasonably and consistently be adduced in the quest for agreement about value. Or, to 27 In this section I shall be talking about the evaluation of the work, not the text. The text as material entity, though it is itself interpreted in our model and in our model serves as a control on the interpretation of the poem, is not itself evaluated (except, of course, in the subsidiary discipline of textual criticism). The text nevertheless indicates the subject-matter of the poem, and by taking account of the subject-matter we evaluate the work considered as the entity comprehending text and poem.

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look at it another way, I think we can find explanations for the rather strange phenomenon that there is such general agreement, broadly speaking, about what the "great works" are. I am concerned here primarily to show that evaluative arguments consistent with the genre-theory, like interpretive arguments, can escape vicious subjectivity, even if we admit that evaluative arguments, like interpretive arguments, do not yet admit of certainty. I should like to mention, then, three general criteria of judgment, bound up with each other in the pre-explicit un­ derstanding of the work, but separable in analysis and iden­ tifiable with distinct lines of argument proposed by various theories of criticism. I do not mean to say that these three criteria are exactly equivalent to the criteria in other models to which I shall compare them, for criteria can be adequately interpreted only in terms of their own models. But I shall point to criteria in other models that can, with more or less distortion, be "translated" into our model. I call the three criteria "adequacy," "capacity," and, borrowing a term that Kant employs in a different connection, "relative perfec­ tion." Adequacy refers to the adequacy of the work to its subject-matter. Now, if we confine ourselves to talking about the mind of the work and the world of the work, and how the work expresses them, the concept of adequacy in general can lead us only into trivialities. That is, the work expresses exactly what it expresses, and no different work would express ex­ actly the same thing. In that sense every work is perfectly adequate to what it in fact expresses. On the other hand, if we postulate some mental content that the author was trying to express, and evaluate the work according to his success or failure, we have begged the question. We cannot postulate the author's mental content without having already inter­ preted the work; the subject-matter arises for us as a presup­ position of the interpretive statement. That means that we cannot postulate the author's mental content without having already decided that the work succeeds or fails to express it.

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That is the true sense of the "Intentional Fallacy," an impor­ tant concept of the American New Criticism that has been much misunderstood. But we must remember that once interpretation frees the subject-matter (often, in fact, a con­ tent of the author's consciousness), the subject-matter be­ comes an item in our real world, something about which we can at least theoretically have knowledge and make judg­ ments apart from the work, even if the work remains the best evidence for determining what it is. We are then freed to evaluate the work, not on the grounds of its adequacy to the author's intention, but on the grounds of its adequacy to our understanding of the subject-matter. We could argue, in short, that the work corresponds exactly to the content of the au­ thor's consciousness and expresses perfectly what the author was trying to express, but is still a bad work because of the author's inadequate understanding of his own content of consciousness. We might of course be quite wrong about his content of consciousness, but then at least we can be put straight by someone else who understands the work better than we do. A brief illustration might help here. Let us consider the first couplet of Joyce Kilmer's justly maligned poem "Trees." In isolation the lines might not seem so bad. But I think that if we return to them and read them in the context of the strained metaphors of the rest of the poem, they begin to grate on us. There is nothing inherently fatal about the word lovely in poetry, or about saying that a poem is "lovely as a tree." Other poets have done marvelous work with the word. But after being acquainted with the mind of "Trees," we return to the first couplet with the sense that lovely is not doing marvelous work here. Indeed, if we find the couplet to be worse than we first thought, it is likely to seem that the badness of the lines has something to do with the lovely. What do we mean when we say that? Let us suppose, first, that we interpret the lines such that we take their subjectmatter to be Kilmer's imagining of a tree. Then we might feel that the word lovely in the context of "Trees" conjures

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visions of dowagers, aesthetes, and dead poetic diction. There is even no apparent attempt to revive its etymological asso­ ciations, out of which something might be made. In short, the thought is sentimental. Now, we might still think that the lines are perfectly adequate to Kilmer's imagining, for there seems no strong reason in this poem for separating the speaker from Kilmer, or either from the mind of the work. But the reader who finds the thought sentimental will be justified in arguing that the lines are not fully adequate to his understanding of Kilmer's imagining, because the lines do not recognize their own sentimentality. The reader knows, or thinks he knows, something about the lines and about Kilmer's imagining that Kilmer apparently does not, and the reader experiences a kind of disgust at having to merge with the mind of the work. The reader reserves himself, as it were, and looks with disapproval on that part of him which shares with Kilmer an involvement in the sentimental mind of "Trees." Kilmer, such a reader might say, "should have" felt the sentimentality in these lines. (Note that this is not like the example of Wordsworth's hypothetical sexual longings for Dorothy. There, the psychoanalytic interpretation pre­ supposed as subject-matter something unconscious. Here, Kilmer is unconscious of the sentimentality of his imagining, perhaps, but the subject-matter presupposed is just that con­ scious imagining. The subject-matter with all its qualities, whether Kilmer is aware of them or not, is freed for us by the explicit interpretation. The objection with the Words­ worth-example was just that talking about the author's un­ conscious impulses makes us lapse into the causal model and start interpreting Wordsworth's psychology.) Of course, a sentimental reader might argue that Kilmer's poem embodies a refreshingly innocent imagining of a tree which is perfectly adequate to Kilmer's own refreshingly innocent imagining, and a critical dialectic will be engaged that can be resolved only when there is genuine knowledge of the subject-matter and universal agreement on values. But the existence of the

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dialectic does not vitiate the line of argument of the critic who finds Kilmer's verse bad. The point is even clearer if we suppose that the subjectmatter of Kilmer's poem is an actual tree or trees. Then a critical critic weuld argue that calling a tree "lovely" is jejune and perhaps a bit foolish. That is to say, the work is not adequate to the critic's understanding of trees. To recapitu­ late: any explicit interpretation of a work presupposes a sub­ ject-matter—an entity, event, or content of consciousness in the common world of reader and text. Once the subjectmatter is freed by explicit interpretation, the critic legiti­ mately makes judgments about whether the work is ade­ quate to the subject-matter—whether, that is, the work "says what should be said" about this subject-matter understood as something separate from the work itself. This does not mean, necessarily, that the work must make "true" state­ ments about the subject-matter, although in some particular cases a critic might argue that. In different instances, critics might concern themselves with different kinds of ade­ quacy—intellectual, aesthetic, emotional, imaginative—each particular work demanding its own particular line of argu­ ment. So the criterion of adequacy covers a very wide range of arguments, and an important part of the critic's task is deciding just what kind of adequacy is relevant to the partic­ ular work he is dealing with. The American New Critics, as far as it makes sense to talk of them as a group, would probably dissent from much that I have just said. Nevertheless, I associate one of their char­ acteristic approaches to evaluation with the test of adequacy. Following Coleridge's formula of Unity in Multeity, many New Critics are concerned to demonstrate the unity (or lack thereof) of literary works. Cleanth Brooks, for example, would place poems on a scale from "a rather simple poetry in which the associations of the various elements that go to make up the poem are similar in tone and therefore can be unified under one simple attitude," to "tragedy where the clash is at its sharpest—where the tension between attraction

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and repulsion is most powerful."28 The unsuccessful poem is the one that fails to achieve unity, or achieves "only a spe­ cious reconciliation of attitudes—the sentimental poem" (p. 257). Brooks' standard implies that he considers poems as possessing for subject-matter a complex attitude achieved by the reconciliation of more or less clashing attitudes.29 Now, the more incompatible the clashing attitudes appear to be to the reader, the less likely it is that the reader will be able to say things about the subject-matter that he does not conceive already to be said by the poem. That is, the more difficult it seems to create the complex attitude taken as the subjectmatter, the more likely the reader will be to feel that only the work before him could be adequate to that subject-matter. The very fact that the work appears to reconcile opposites indicates that the complex attitude is something the reader "never thought of before." With the greatest works, the reader stands before the postulated subject-matter in amazement— he will have nothing more to say about it, for he has not conceived of its existence before reading the work. Brooks' scale forjudging poems, then, seems ultimately to be a scale of adequacy. Brooks quotes the philosopher W. M. Urban, to the effect that the test of "good" or "authentic" symbols (or of good or authentic poetry, for Brooks) is whether the symbol expresses "adequately for our type of consciousness that which could not be fully expressed in 'literal' sentences" (p. 263). Brooks calls this the test of "adequacy" (p. 263), and I would argue that it is ultimately a test of whether the work is adequate to the reader's understanding of the sub­ ject-matter presupposed in interpretation. R. S. Crane, a spokesman for the neo-Aristotelian school, attacks the New Critics. But I think his method of evaluating 28 The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York. Harcourt, Brace and Company, cl947), pp. 256-57. 25 We should bear in mind that Brooks is concerned with the attitudes not as they appear m the author's mind as contents of consciousness, but insofar as they are made objective and public through the agency of the work. For the sake of brevity, I am "translating" (and therefore distorting) Brooks' model into the vocabulary of our model.

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can also be closely associated with the criterion of adequacy. According to Crane, the critic who judges poems as concrete wholes must "take the point of view of the poet and his problems and . . . judge what he has done, as sympatheti­ cally as possible, in terms of what must and what might be done given the distinctive form, new or old, which the poet is trying to work out of his materials."30 The concept of "form" is crucial in Crane's language of criticism: form . . . is simply that which gives definite shape, emotional power, and beauty to the materials of man's experience out of which the writer has composed his work. Hence it cannot be separated as mere "form" from the matter in which it exists, nor can we talk about it adequately . . . without talking at the same time about the human qualities of the actions, persons, feelings, and thoughts the work brings before us and the very human, but no less poetic, responses these evoke in our minds. There can thus be no good "literary" criticism, in this language, that does not presuppose a constant making of moral and psychological discriminations and a constant concern with nuances of thought, as well as with subtleties of language and technique. . . . (p. 189) I think it is possible to maintain that Crane's "form" and the "materials" which that form shapes, taken together, are what I have called subject-matter. That is, the form and the ma­ terials are contents of the poet's consciousness, conditions for the possibility of the work, freed in interpretation to become for us entities apart from the work. We then judge the work according to how well it overcomes the problems inherent in that subject-matter—that is, according to its adequacy to the subject-matter, taking adequacy in the sense I have said. Thus, we can see that the New Critics' criterion of "unity" and the neo-Aristotelian insistence that criticism involves moral judgments are not necessarily irreconcilable in our model. 30 The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Toronto: Univer­ sity of Toronto Press, 1953), p. 156.

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Brooks employs, besides the criterion of adequacy, the second criterion named above—"capacity." In The Well Wrought Um Brooks accurately describes the experience of writing an explicit interpretation of a work with "capacity": . . . let the reader try to formulate a proposition that will say what the poem "says." As his proposition approaches adequacy, he will find, not only that it has increased greatly in length, but that it has begun to fill itself up with reservations and qualifications—and most significant of all—the formulator will find that he has himself begun to fall back upon metaphors of his own. . . . (p. 198) The capacity of a work refers simply to its capacity to pro­ duce meaning. There is no way to prove conclusively that a given work is "capacious" in any absolute sense, for the meanings it produces are always only the meanings we our­ selves have. But we can sense, vaguely and in general, the capacity of the work, by having experiences such as Brooks describes. Our interpretive statement, as perfect as we can make it, admittedly fails to capture the whole of the mean­ ing. And so the statement itself stands as a challenge to any­ one else to do better, to exhaust the meaning of the work in any interpretive statement. In a sense, we argue that the work has capacity by continuing to write interpretive statements that we know to be inadequate, thus showing that the best interpretive statements we can write are inadequate. Cassirer is talking about what I call "capacity" when he says in The Logic of the Humanities that "the truly great works of culture never confront us as things absolutely fixed and unchanging, shackling and stifling the free motion of the spirit in their fixity. Their content has being for us only by virtue of the fact that they must be continually possessed anew and hence continually recreated" (pp. 193-94). For Gadamer in Truth and Method, the aesthetic experience "is not just one kind of experience among others, but represents the essence of ex­ perience itself' (p. 63), where "experience" is defined as

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"something unforgettable and irreplaceable that is inexhaus­ tible in terms of the understanding and determination of its meaning" (p. 60). Thus, to the extent that a work offers aesthetic experience, it is inexhaustible in meaning. The capacity of a work to produce meaning is closely bound up with its beauty, if we follow Kant's reflections in the Cri­ tique of Judgment. Although the judgment of taste (the judg­ ment of whether something is beautiful) expects universal assent, for Kant the judgment remains subjective in the sense that one can never prove by means of concepts that some­ thing is beautiful. The beautiful is that which "pleases with­ out a concept." We experience in aesthetic contemplation a certain subjective state, a "free play" of the imagination and the understanding, which we nevertheless judge that anyone constituted as we are must experience in the presence of the object. Kant's theory is thus far perfectly consistent with our model of interpretation. The judgment of beauty occurs as part of the pre-explicit understanding of the work, and our business as critics is to examine our experience, so far as possible, and make it explicit: . . . although critics can and ought to pursue their reasonings so that our judgments of taste may be corrected and extended, it is not with a view to set forth the determining ground of this kind of aesthetical judgments in a universally applicable formula, which is impossible; but rather to investigate the cognitive faculties and their exercise in these judgments. . . .31 The work becomes available as a beautiful object that pro­ duces meanings because of the "spirit" of the work. "Spirit" is "no other than the faculty of presenting aesthetical ideas" (p. 157), and in poetry "the faculty of aesthetical ideas can manifest itself in its entire strength" (p. 158). An "aesthetical idea" for Kant is 31 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Publishing Company, 1951), p. 128.

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that representation of the imagination which occasions much thought, without however any definite thought, i.e., any concept, being capable of being adequate to it; it consequently cannot be completely compassed and made intelligible by language. . . . Such representations of the imagination we may call ideas, partly because they at least strive after something which lies beyond the bounds of experience and so seek to approximate to a presentation of concepts of reason (intellectual ideas), thus giving to the latter the appearance of objective reality, but especially because no concept can be fully adequate to them as internal intuitions, (pp. 157-58) Kant here accounts in philosophical terms for the experience of interpretation that Brooks describes. The "much thought" occasioned by the work is what we write down in our inter­ pretations, and yet we find that no conceptual rendering can be adequate to the work. We therefore cannot prove concep­ tually that the work is in fact beautiful or inexhaustible, but we sense that it is so. Our line of argument is to challenge anyone to write an interpretive statement that exhausts the work. The history of the critical enterprise, then, the forging and re-forging of inadequate conceptual renderings, becomes a kind of experiment to see whether the work in fact contin­ ues to produce meaning while eluding conceptual defini­ tion—whether, in fact, the work has capacity. Another Kantian concept is useful in talking about the third criterion that our model might employ in judging works. The Critique of Judgment is divided into two parts: the "Cri­ tique of Aesthetic Judgment" and the "Critique of Teleological Judgment." In the first section (paragraph) of the "Cri­ tique of Teleological Judgment" Kant explains the concept of "relative perfection." To call properties of geometrical figures or numbers "beautiful" is a misnomer, Kant insists. What we really refer to when we call a property of the circle "beautiful," for example, is a certain sense of admiration born of our insight that something as simple as a circle has so

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many applications and can be used to solve so many prob­ lems. The recognition that the properties of the circle make it adaptable to many purposes Kant calls a recognition of its relative perfection. I think we can speak in analogous terms of the relative perfection of a literary work—in a sense, its adaptability to many purposes. Thejudgment of relative per­ fection is then grounded quite simply in the judgment of the relative importance of the subject-matter. Again, the relative im­ portance of any particular subject-matter is not something that we would be likely to agree on, unless we should hap­ pen to achieve universal agreement about values. But the principle points to a reasonable line of argument to pursue in discussing the value of a literary work. Most critics sense that there is something "more important" about a poem like "Tintern Abbey" that undertakes with some success to dis­ cuss man's relationship to nature and to other men, than a poem that discusses the liquefaction of a woman's clothes and the glittering of her nakedness. Nor is the difference merely one of adequacy. Both works might be quite ade­ quate to their subject-matter. Rather, the subject-matter it­ self is more important in "Tintern Abbey." This greater im­ portance means that the relative perfection of the work seems greater. There are more occasions in life to which "Tintern Abbey" seems applicable, more situations in which the in­ tellectual and emotional construct embodied there can guide, soothe, comfort, or even stand over against us as that which is rejected. The criterion of relative perfection has nothing directly to do with the conceptual "truth" of the work—though works do, when interpreted, sometimes produce thematic state­ ments that are subject to tests of truth. But even a work whose thematic statement one thinks false might still prove relevant to many occasions. It is perfectly possible and desir­ able to judge the "morality" of literary works in terms of intentions or effects, too; but my inclination is to say that the ethical judgment of the work is not necessarily the same as the judgment of the work as literary work. It is true that

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in admitting that I do not know how language is possible, I have admitted that I do not know exactly what literary works are. But it seems desirable to leave open the possibility that a critic can condemn on different, moral grounds a work that he nevertheless feels to be good as a literary work. The judgment of relative perfection, however, does be­ long to the judgment of the work in our model, because in our model it is impossible to separate understanding and interpretation from life as lived. The line of argument lies open, but the relative perfection of a work, like its capacity, is something one senses without being able to demonstrate conclusively. 1 suppose every critic has had the experience of valuing a particular poem very highly, because at a certain period of his life it seems to encapsulate the whole of his own experience; and then finding that as he grows older, the poem fades from his pantheon, whereas others remain and loom larger. So it is, too, with the historical progress of poems—what one age finds important, another age ignores. I think it is sufficiently easy to find critics who explicitly or implicitly apply the criterion of relative perfection. I quote here only one example of a critical theory in which I think the criterion is important. In Principles of Literary Criticism I. A. Richards states one premise of his value theory as fol­ lows, in an eloquent formulation of the criterion of relative perfection in its intimate relation to the criterion of adequacy: The artist is concerned with the record and perpetuation of the experiences which seem to him most worth having. . . . he is also the man who is most likely to have experiences to record. He is the point at which the growth of the mind shows itself. His experiences, those at least which give value to his work, represent conciliations of impulses which in most minds are still confused, intertrammelled, and conflicting. His work is the ordering of what in most minds is disordered.32 32 Principles of Literary Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Com­ pany, 1948), p. 61.

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How should one decide which experiences are "worth hav­ ing" and worth preserving, except by sensing the relative importance of those experiences—that is, by sensing their relevance to many other experiences of life? All three criteria of evaluation proposed here—adequacy, capacity, relative perfection33—have in common that they do not permit us to solve questions of value, but instead only suggest what lines of argument to pursue in attempting ex­ plicitly to set forth value-premises in accordance with our interpretive model. Logic cannot compel agreement about beauty or, perhaps, about other forms of value. The three criteria are closely bound up with each other, and the appli­ cation of all three is essentially bound up with understanding and interpretation. This last point, I would say, is the sense of the formula, "Interpretation is criticism." The human studies cannot avoid value-judgments. But to say that valuejudgments are "rooted" in interpretation is not strong enough. A tree can be cut off from its roots. But our reflections do not permit us to think that even the sharp edge of analysis can completely separate criticism from interpretation. 33 1 should not be surprised if one could show some sort of rough corre­ spondence between adequacy, capacity, and relative perfection on the one hand, and on the other the three criteria of Monroe Beardsley's "instrumen­ talist theory" of aesthetic value—"unity," "complexity," and "intensity," respectively. I shall not undertake to delineate a correspondence here—but I do not think that the correspondence is in any case that of simple identity See Beardsley, Aesthetics· Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, cl958), pp. 524 ff

CHAPTER IV

Gestures Toward a Literary History of Lyric

It is time to ask how our model can help to articulate inter­ pretations. Our discussion of genre suggested that to read a poem as lyric is to read it as creating a reciprocal relation between mind and world. Such reflections do not by them­ selves suffice to ground a hermeneutic theory or a program of interpretation. In one sense, the model is hostile to any­ thing that resembles a program, for we have insisted that interpretation is the making-explicit of what is already understood. Insofar as any program of interpretation prom­ ises to produce understanding, as opposed to making our un­ derstanding more explicit, that program cannot be compati­ ble with the model. No mechanical procedure can substitute for the critic's fundamental act of understanding, and that act remains in an important sense mysterious. One must not look, then, for arguments to show that this model is "necessary" for interpretation or for proofs that it is "better" than some other model. Certainly the model is not "necessary," if by that one means that interpretation can­ not occur without it. Understanding and interpretation occur to some extent whenever reading itself occurs. My object in writing this book is not to teach people how to "get" un­ derstanding of literary works—I cannot do that, since I do not know how I myself get understanding. My object is to provide a means (and not the only means, surely) of articu­ lating such understanding, of placing interpretive statements in some sort of logical relation with each other. Certainly, also, this model is "better" than others only in the sense that it does what it set out to do—it preserves the broad genre-

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concepts as interpretive concepts. That is, this model allows me to mean something specific when I say "lyric," and it allows me to demonstrate logically why any particular inter­ pretation does or does not articulate a poem as lyric. If the genre-concepts are not worth preserving, and if one does not particularly care what is meant by "lyric," then certainly this model is no better than any other consistent model. In a manner of speaking, this whole book is an extended defini­ tion, with illustrations, of the concept "lyric"—and the re­ sult of the discussion is the thesis that the concept tells me something not about the work, but about my interpretation of it. If the model does not provide a hermeneutic program or methodology, what does it provide? First, it provides a ground for defining critical terms and making critical distinctions. I shall try to demonstrate this in the discussions that follow, but let me show in general how it is true by talking about the fundamental literary techniques in the three genres. Crit­ ical terms and distinctions, including those used to talk about literary techniques, seem to arise ex post facto. Or, so I have been arguing. That is, critical terms seem to arise in order to name entities fixed in explicit interpretation, and critical dis­ tinctions arise in order to articulate the differences between things separated from each other by the act of writing an interpretive statement. Examples I have discussed are the terms referring to the genre-concepts themselves, and the distinc­ tion between the "mind of the work" and the "world of the work." These concepts, it seems quite clear, have reference to explicit interpretations, rather than directly to the works themselves. Since the concepts are functions of interpreta­ tions already performed, and do not, as I would argue, have any necessary correspondence to categories of real being (are not metaphysically derived, that is, but spring from the con­ tingencies of particular acts of interpretation), how can they be grounded? How can critical terms be justified, allowed into critical discourse? How can distinctions be maintained as distinctions? The answer, of course, is that they must be

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grounded in some model. They must be logically derivable from some more fundamental set of terms and distinctions. Now, obviously, at some point the chain must come to an end. We shall reach the set of axiomatic terms and distinc­ tions taken without proof (and more or less arbitrarily) as fundamental to the model. In our model, those terms are the genre-concepts. Those concepts should, and I think they do, allow us to derive (or "explain" or "account for") other con­ cepts that appear in our interpretations. Now, I think that in articulating an interpretation of any work as drama, as epic, or as lyric, we shall find that our explicit interpretation pays particular attention to particular literary techniques in each case. That does not mean that works interpreted as drama, say, do not employ literary techniques associated with epic or lyric—they do—but it does mean that some literary techniques seem more fundamentally related to each genre-concept than others, and that we shall find those techniques to be of primary importance in our interpreta­ tions of works that we read in the mode of that particular genre. For example, Aristotle long ago persuaded critics that action (plot) is fundamental in drama. The producing and re­ leasing of tension in a play, of which Emil Staiger makes so much, is directly related to the raveling and unraveling of the plot. But plot results, broadly speaking, from structure: the arrangement of parts in clear cause-and-effect sequence, the push and pull of opposing characters or opposing forces, above all the clear setting up of the conflict and the placing of the crisis. And if we look at structure in the light of our own reflections about drama, we see that when we make statements about the mind of the work, we tend to derive those statements from observations about structure. What, after all, is the difference between a drama as interpreted and an event in "real life" (apart from the fictionality of the drama, which it shares with works of other genres), if it is not the difference between structured and unstructured action? We seem to be enabled to infer the mind of the work exactly to the extent that the world of the work has structure, for the

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mind of the work is by necessity that mind which sees the world of the work as one, as meaningfully structured. So I shall suggest here that the fundamental technique of works interpreted in the dramatic mode is structure. The concept of "structure" as literary technique, a concept so useful in artic­ ulating our interpretations of drama, may thus be grounded in the genre-concept itself. The structure of the work inter­ preted dramatically first appears and becomes intelligible precisely as we trace and articulate the sequence of causal­ ity—and not just the causality within the world of the work, but also the causality of that world itself with respect to the mind of the work. The fundamental technique of works interpreted epically is point of view. The interpretation of a work as epic exists only insofar as there is articulated a point of view, a mind conceived as substance in which the world exists as thought. Even in works where the point of view is that of a fictional narrator, the interpretive problem is to define the exact re­ lation of that speaker's mind to the mind of the work. Char­ acter, plot—everything in the epical work is given first through a point of view, and through the techniques that operate to define that point of view (e.g., diction, tone, even syntax; self-description or explicit authorial intrusion; selection of detail and imagery; and so on). Certainly we could arrive at the concept of "point of view" in other ways. Indeed, most often the handbooks ground their discussion of point of view ini­ tially in grammatical categories—point of view is "first per­ son" or "third person." But my argument here is that the concept of "point of view" can be seen to "fall out" of the genre-theory as a logical consequence of postulating that ep­ ical interpretation regards the mind of the work as a sub­ stance containing its world as the accidents of its thought. What we articulate and fill out when we articulate that sub­ stance in interpretation is precisely the point of view. For all of the poems I have discussed so far, my interpre­ tation turns on some kind of comparison. In the Middle English lyric in the first chapter the comparison is implied;

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it is accomplished through what many critics would call "imagery," in the restricted sense of sensuous detail pre­ sented presumably for the sake of its correspondence with some mental state. In Pound's "metro" poem, we have tech­ nically, I suppose, a metaphor, and certainly an Image in Pound's sense of an intellectual and emotional complex pre­ sented in an instant. In the poems of anomalous voice one mind was, in the interpretation, compared with another, and in the impersonal poems the interpretation supposed that the mind of the work found qualities of itself in the world it talked about. Now, for an interpretation to articulate a com­ parison means precisely that it holds up two things as distinct entities while simultaneously asserting their sameness. It would be premature now (and I think wrong in the long run) to insist that one or both of the terms must be a sensuous en­ tity. I also think it would be premature to say that imagery, in either of the senses mentioned above, is the fundamental technique of interpreted lyric, or that metaphor is—unless one wants to define metaphor in the broadest possible way. There are many resources for making verbal comparisons, and many literary techniques accomplish this in subtly or radically different ways. Simile is different from metaphor and metonymy and synecdoche; onomatopoeia compares sounds of words with sounds of nature; virtually all of the recognized grammatical and syntactical devices involve, or can be used to imply, some sort of comparison. The general name that we usually use for comparisons made verbally is trope. I intend the term to cover both "figures of speech" and also those techniques that in some manuals of rhetoric are classified under "figures of thought." The concept of "trope," then, subsuming any verbal device interpreted as holding up two entities as distinct while asserting their sameness, seems an appropriate term for the fundamental technique of inter­ preted lyric. In fact, in the discussions that follow, it will become obvious that most of the interpretive statements really reduce to analyses of tropes. But the concept of "trope" is itself grounded in the concept of a "reciprocal relation," which

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in our model is associated with interpreted lyric. The concept of "trope" presupposes a whole made up of parts—that is, the comparison made up of its elements. Furthermore, the elements of the comparison necessarily stand in a reciprocal relation with each other. Each is what it is because it is in­ volved in the comparison with the other—-just as Pound's faces and petals are what they are in the poem because they are juxtaposed with each other. So if we regard trope as I have said—namely, as the construction of a new whole out of elements conceived in the interpretation as initially inde­ pendent—the concept of "trope" as literary technique is nec­ essarily connected with the concept of "lyric" as defined in the model. I shall discuss later how other terms and distinctions can be grounded in our model. But I hope that one major func­ tion of this interpretive model is now clear. The model can ground distinctions. To the extent that it can ground distinc­ tions, of course, the model can become a heuristic. That is, roughly speaking, we could go "looking for" tropes in a poem and set about analyzing them. We would then amass a large number of interpretive statements, no doubt, but there would be no guarantee that a coherent interpretation would emerge. The coherence of the interpretation would depend on the coherence of the pre-explicit understanding itself. A heuristic is just that. It provides clues, hints, material for interpretation; but it does not necessarily provide the form that must be imposed on this material in a coherent interpre­ tation. And that brings me to the second thing that an interpretive model should do. Besides providing a ground for defining and making distinctions, an interpretive model should pro­ vide a logical structure for the coherent arrangement of in­ terpretive statements. A disorderly handful (or bookful) of brilliant interpretive statements is ultimately less useful than a logically coherent interpretation. Perhaps it is true that we can never "know" the poems in themselves, but at least we can know what we are doing when we interpret. If we do

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not know what we are doing, critical discussion must dissi­ pate in confusion. For I will ultimately not be able to tell whether my interpretation is different from or compatible with anyone else's. As I hope to demonstrate in the follow­ ing pages, the genre-theory suggests that certain kinds of interpretive statements are essential to the lyrical mode of interpretation, and that other statements are subordinated to these in a definite logical relation. Specifically, interpretive statements about the reciprocity of mind and world as me­ diated through tropes are essential, and other kinds of in­ terpretive statements are premises for these essential state­ ments. The model does not provide the interpretive statements themselves, but it provides a logical structure in terms of which to arrange them and assess their significance. Again, other models provide other structures, and the only advan­ tage I claim for my model is that it does what it is supposed to do. It makes sense, I am arguing, of the concept of "lyric." In no case will I argue that my interpretation could not be articulated in some other vocabulary; in no case do I mean to imply that one must arrive at my interpretation by means of a hermeneutic program beginning with the genre-theory. I wish to argue merely that there is a consistent logical struc­ ture depending on the broad genre-concepts that enables us to articulate the relation between parts and whole in partic­ ular poems. Finally, an interpretive model should provide a logical structure for articulating the felt similarities and differences between poems and groups of poems. That is why I have mentioned "literary history" in the title of this chapter. In mentioning literary history, I do not mean to imply that I am writing one. Whether that can be done in terms of our model will be known only by interpreting a great many poems in those terms. But I do want to address certain fundamental problems of any literary history, or of any discipline that hopes to go beyond isolated interpretations of isolated poems. These are, simply put, the problems of similarity and of dif­ ference. Obviously, to write a literary history of any sort,

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we must be able to say how two poems are similar, and how they are different. On that depend all the fundamental con­ cepts of literary history, such as the concept of "literary pe­ riod," the concept of "influence," the concept of "develop­ ment" either of an individual author or of a literary "movement," and so on. Any model, then, that hopes even­ tually to make its peace with the concept of literary history itself must provide a logical structure in terms of which sim­ ilarities and differences can be articulated. I want to show in this chapter that the genre-theory does that, by taking three paradigmatic cases. First, there is the case of two poems by the same author. I shall actually examine two pairs of poems by Spenser, namely the Fowre Hymnes, to show how an anal­ ysis of tropes allows us to characterize in terms of our model the relation between the two pairs. Second, there is the case of two poems by different authors from the same "school" and period—at least, according to current notions of school and period, which I shall not challenge here. I shall discuss a poem by Donne and one by Herbert, both Metaphysical poems, but I think different in important ways. Finally, I shall discuss two poems from different literary periods: a portion of Tennyson's In Memoriam: A. H. H., and Wallace Stevens' "The Rock." In these comparative studies, I shall rarely give "full read­ ings" of the poems, for I shall be concerned with particular problems. But I have said that a sound model should provide a structure for the logical arrangement of interpretive state­ ments about everything, or almost everything, important to an interpretation of the poem. In other words, a model should provide a way of fully articulating the relation of the parts to the whole—a "full reading." I shall therefore include a relatively full reading of one poem, Wordsworth's "Immor­ tality Ode." The poem is admittedly very congenial with the model, since its patent theme is the reciprocity between mind and world. But this poem has become rather a test case that presents interpretive problems when one attempts a full reading. I shall discuss Wordsworth's poem after discussing

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Spenser, Donne, and Herbert, and before discussing Ten­ nyson and Stevens, in order to preserve chronology.

"Perfect Speculation" in Spenser's Fowre Hymnes Spenser's dedicatory letter to the Fowre Hymnes raises a ques­ tion. In the second pair of hymns, he says, he "resolued at least to amend, and by way of retractation to reforme"1 the first pair. But "retractation" is not exactly the same as "re­ form": a retractation is a withdrawal or revoking of one's opinion, whereas "to reform" has also the sense of "to re­ store" or even "to make over again." Presumably, since Spenser says the readers of HL and HB2 "do rather sucke out poyson to their strong passion, then hony to their honest delight," he felt that there was honey to be had from the first pair of hymns; and he also flatters the Countesses to whom the Fowre Hymnes are dedicated by saying that they excel in "all true Ioue and beautie, both in the one and the other kinde."3 The exact relation between the two pairs of hymns is thus somewhat problematic. This question has exercised critics of the Fowre Hymnes no doubt more than any other question. Appendix V of the Va­ riorum (pp. 656 ff.) displays various opinions. Josephine Waters Bennett and F. M. Padelford marshal an impressive array of evidence from medieval and Renaissance religious writers and Neoplatonists, in a controversy over whether the Fowre Hymnes should be seen as a unit (Bennett) or divided into ' The Works of Edmund Spenser A Variorum Edition, ed Edwm Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, Fredenck Morgan Padelford, and Ray Heffner; vol. VII, The Minor Poems Part One, ed. Osgood and Henry Gibbons Lotspeich (Baltimore. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1943), 193. Cita­ tions from the Hymnes are to this text, hereafter cited as Variorum 21 shall abbreviate the titles of the hymns this way: An Hymne in Honovr of Love = HL; An Hymne in Honovr of Beavtie = HB, An Hymne of Heavenly Love = HHL 1 An Hymne of Heavenly Beavtie = HHB 3 Frederick Morgan Padelford, "Spenser's Foifre Hymnes. a Resurvey," Studies in Philology, 29 (1932), 216, makes this point

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two pairs (Padelford).4 Robert Ellrodt's characterization of the Fowre Hymnes as a "diptych," in which Spenser makes a "fresh start" after the first pair,5 articulates a notion that has proved fruitful. For Ellrodt "The originality of Spenser's philosophy of love lies in the association of Platonic idealism with an acceptance of bodily union limited by ethical stand­ ards" (p. 176). William Nelson agrees that Spenser "neither declares the earthly incompatible with the heavenly, as Sid­ ney does, nor does he envision an unbroken ascent which spurns earth in its aspiration for heaven."6 For Nelson, the second pair of hymns "constitute a palinode for the earthly pair. . . . A palinode makes little sense unless one knows what it is opposed to, and it is evident that the two later hymns are designed to gain strength and meaning from the two former" (p. 99). In a thorough and lucid discussion of the intellectual background of the Fowre Hymnes, Enid Welsford accepts Ellrodt's notion of the "diptych"7 and proposes 4 In "The Theme of Spenser's Fowre Hymnes," Studies in Philology, 28 (1931), 18-57, Bennett argues for "the essential unity of theme, symmetry of plan, and climactic progression of the whole work" (p 18); she concludes that "Each hymn is a carefully articulated part of a fully organized exposi­ tion of the theory of Platonic, or Neo-Platonic, love. The 'Epistle Dedicatorie' is a clever retort upon his critics, by means of which he fitted his censured love poems into an exposition of religious development . . . " (p. 56). In "Spenser's Fowre Hymnes· A Resurvey," Padelford attacks Bennett's arguments and concludes that the first two hymns "were to be thrown into focus, and consequently safeguarded from abuse, by the addition of the complementary hymns of heavenly love and beauty" (p. 217). Bennett re­ plies in "Spenser's Fowre Hymnes Addenda," Studies tn Philology, 32 (1935), 131-57, that Padelford fails to take into account the influence of Renaissance Neoplatonism on Spenser, and that the "pause" between the two pairs of hymns is "dramatic, not biographical" (p 153). 5 Ellrodt's discussion in his book Neoplatonism tn the Poetry of Spenser has been reprinted under the title "From Earthly Love to Heavenly Love," in The Prtnce of Poets· Essays on Edmund Spenser, ed. John R. Elliott, Jr. (New York and London: New York University Press and University of London Press, 1968), pp. 170-86 The quotations are from p. 182. 6 The Poetry of Edmund Spenser A Study (New York: Columbia Univer­ sity Press, 1963), p. 99. 7 Spenser; Fowre Hymnes, Epithalamion A Study of Spenser's Doctrine of Love (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967), p. 48.

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to solve the problem of Spenser's recantation by arguing that Spenser portrays a speaker different from himself, a "fashion­ able Elizabethan gentleman" who repeats the Petrarchan commonplaces in the first pair and then in the last two hymns "has turned his thoughts to religion. . . . In the first two hymns his rhetoric was for the persuasion of his mistress, now it is for the persuasion of others but most of all for the persuasion of himself' (pp. 60-61). More recently, Philip B. Rollinson has argued that the dif­ ference between the two pairs of hymns can be seen as a difference in genre: "The first pair follows that part of the Renaissance tradition which had chosen to imitate and mod­ ify classical objects of praise, as well as to adopt the conven­ tions of the classical form. The heavenly hymns imitate the other school of Vida and Scaliger, which updated the objects of praise in accordance with the values of contemporary Christian culture."8 Finally, Einar Bjorvand argues that the first pair of hymns gives the "distorted picture" of the fallen world, "but when they are combined with the second pair a true picture is seen to emerge although the first, distorted picture is still a part of it. This is what Spenser has tried to say in the dedicatory epistle."9 A typical comment of Bjorvand's is the following: "We might say that the first hymn seeks to convince the reader of the necessity of grace by showing him the misery of life without grace" (p. 34). I shall quarrel with Bjorvand's interpretation. But it is clear that the relation of the two pairs of hymns is still a live critical issue that an adequate interpretive model should be prepared to discuss. The question here is whether the relation between the pairs can be articulated in terms of the genre-theory—whether, that is, we can ground our interpretive statements in the 8 "A Generic View of Spenser's Four Hymns," Studies in Philology, 68 (1971), 304. 9 "Spenser's Defence of Poetry: Some Structural Aspects of the Fowre Hymnes," in Fair Forms: Essays in English Literature fiom Spenser to Jane Aus­ ten, ed. Maren-Sofie Restvig (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1975), p. 46.

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analysis of the tropes mediating a reciprocal relation between mind and world in each pair, and whether those interpretive statements thus grounded will allow a clear articulation of the connections between the two pairs to emerge. Some passages in HHL and HHB seem categorically to deny the value of the earthly love presented in HL and HB: Many lewd layes (ah woe is me the more) In praise of that mad fit, which fooles call loue, I have in th'heat of youth made heretofore, That in light wits did loose affection moue. But all those follies now I do reproue. . . . (HHL, 8-12) . . . in no earthly thing thou shalt delight, But in his [Christ's] sweet and amiable sight. (HHL, 272-73) . . . that faire lampe, which vseth to enflame The hearts of men with selfe consuming fyre, Thenceforth seemes fowle, and full of sinfull blame. . . . (.HHB, 274-76) Ah then my hungry soule, which long hast fed On idle fancies of thy foolish thought, And with false beauties flattring bait misled. . . . (HHB, 288-90) On the other hand, much in HL and HB seems perfectly consistent with Christian doctrine: for example, the sermon against lust in HB, 169 ff. It is also easy to equate "this worlds great workmaister" (HB, 29), or "that great immortall Spright, / By whom all Iiue to loue" (HB, 107-8), with the Christian God, even though Spenser refuses to do so expli­ citly (a device he probably adapted from Chaucer—compare Theseus' speech on the "First Great Mover" at the end of the Knight's Tale). And the description of the effects of earthly love in HL strongly resembles the corresponding description of the effects of heavenly love in HHL: the lustful man in HL is like a mole with "dunghill thoughts, which do them-

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selves enure / To dirtie dross," but the lover knows "that celestiall fyre" that "makes him mount aboue the natiue might / Ofheauie earth, vp to the heauens hight" (183-89). In HHL, similarly, Spenser urges, "Then rouze thy selfe, O earth, out of thy soyle, / In which thou wallowest like to filthy swyne" (218-19); then "all earthes glorie" will "Seeme durt and drosse in thy pure sighted eye, / Compar'd to that celestiall beauties blaze" (275-77). Certain large patterns laid down in HL and HB are repeated in HHL and HHB,W more­ over, and the resonating of the later passages with the earlier makes the second pair of poems seem less a "retractation" than a "reform." Amor's ordering of rebellious chaos, for example (HL, 57 ff.), and its counterpart in the "workmaister's" creation according to the "Paterne" of "perfect Beautie" (HB, 29 ff.), are answered by God's creation, culminat­ ing in the forming of man "According to an heauenly patteme" (HHL, 22-112), and by the catalog of the ordered parts of creation in HHB, 29 ff. Similarly, the descriptions of God's Heaven in HHL, 57 ff. and 281 ff, and HHB, 141 ff, seem less to overthrow Love's heaven in HL, 273 ff. (and also HB, 248-49), than to affirm a real Heaven that grounds, and to that extent justifies, all the more or less playful talk about the heaven of earthly love. As Robert Ellrodt says, "Christ's redeeming love has not only justified sinners; it justifies hu­ man love."11 William Nelson in the same spirit points out that Spenser is operating in the tradition, inherited from Plotinus, in which the life of this world is not rejected "as with­ out purpose, or useful only as a steppingstone. . . . Its worth . . .arises from its imitation, however dim and distorted, of the brilliance beyond, earthly love being a good while celes­ tial love is an infinite. . . . But instead of destroying the finite, the infinite justifies it."12 I think, however, that something other than Spenser's re10 See, for example, Nelson's discussion of structural parallels and con­ trasts (The Poetry of Edmund Spenser: A Study, pp. 99-104). II Ellrodt, "From Earthly Love to Heavenly Love," p. 177. 12 Nelson, The Poetry of Edmund Spenser: A Study, pp. 113-14.

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working of themes or repeating of structures contributes most to the impression that the second pair of hymns is a "reform­ ing" rather than a "retractation." Looking at theme or struc­ ture will not necessarily help us see exactly how the second pair constitutes a reforming. Theme and structure indicate only that there might have been a reforming, leaving its na­ ture problematic. "To reform" implies to restore or to re­ make out of the same or similar materials. The impression of reform is so strong largely because Spenser has, in a cer­ tain sense, made the second pair of hymns out of the same poetic "materials" that he used in the first pair. By the nature of his theme, Spenser must attempt to express the ineffable by means of the sensible. Both Spenser and the reader, then, must know that he is proceeding metaphorically, that the material he brings into the poems to express the ineffable serves merely as (inadequate) vehicle. In one sense, then, Spenser's poetic materials, the "stuff" out of which he con­ structs the poems, are the vehicles of the images. I shall ar­ gue later in the chapter that the distinction between "tenor" and "vehicle" is another ex post facto distinction, arising only as, a result of explicit interpretation. It is enough here to point out, however, that the tenor/vehicle distinction is derivable from the concept of "trope." The tenor, or the "meaning," is that whole which lends the vehicle (the element of the comparison "brought into" the poem to make the compari­ son) meaning as part. If we have tenor and vehicle, that is, we have a whole whose parts (the vehicle and the other term of the comparison) therefore stand in a reciprocal relation. It is remarkable how often the second pair of Spenser's hymns employs the "same" vehicles as the first pair (though actually, I shall argue, the vehicles themselves get changed in the process according to what kind of reciprocity they exhibit with respect to the other term of the comparison). The light-imagery, for example, pervades all four poems too thoroughly to permit of a complete catalog here. But I might mention the image of the lamp, which stands for the woman (HL, 131 and 173) and for Venus' light of beauty (HB, 59

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and 99) in the first pair of hymns (this is the lamp later re­ jected in HHB, 274); and for the Holy Spirit or the light of the "heauens illimitable" in HHL, 43 and 59. The image of the Queen, applied to the beautiful woman (HL, 215), to her soul (HB, 126), to Pleasure (HL, 292), and to Venus (HB, 267) in the first pair of hymns, appears transfigured in its application to Sapience in HHB, 183 if. The drop of pity or dew of grace that the poet begs of his lady or Venus in the first pair (HL, 147; HB, 27, 277, 284) becomes the inspiring drop of the Holy Spirit's dew in HHL, 46. The wounds of secular love (HL, 143; HB, 63 and 242) alter into the lovewound of the crucified Christ (HHL, 156) and the wound of pity for Him (HHL, 247). The riches of beauty (HB, 119 and 185) change into the "heauenly riches" of Christ (HHL, 229), of wisdom (HHL, 112), or of the treasury of Sapience (HHB, 246 if.). The lovers who "feed" on the image of the woman (HL, 198, and also 39) or her smiles (HB, 248) are replaced by the sinners who feed on Christ's body in the sacrament (HHL, 194—96) and the religious contemplatives who feed on the riches of heaven (HHB, 286-87). Examples could be multiplied,13 but I think the list is suf­ ficient to suggest why a reader might sense that the second pair of hymns is an actual re-forming of the first pair. I can­ not examine the re-formings of all of these images, but I want to look closely at one pattern in the Fowre Hymnes to suggest a way of getting at the problem of the relation be­ tween the two pairs. That is, I hope to articulate in terms of the genre-theory a provisional conclusion about the precise sense in which the second pair is a re-forming of the first pair, a conclusion that I hope would not prove too far wrong if all the other patterns of imagery were also taken into ac13 The fullest treatment of this kind of parallel in the poems is Bjorvand's ("Spenser's Defence of Poetry Some Structural Aspects of the Fowre Hymnes"). Working essentially from a concordance to the hymns, Bjorvand points out numerous repeated words and images, mentioning several of those I have mentioned Bjorvand does httle, however, with the imagery of mirrors, which I shall discuss in detail

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count. I want to discuss the images of mirroring in the Fowre Hymnes,14 as one example of Spenser's technique of re-form­ ing. The mirror-metaphor appears explicitly in HL, 196 ff.; in HB, 181-82 and 224; and in HHB, 115. I shall of course argue that other passages in the hymns belong to this nucleus of thought. In particular, I think the passages in HHL that refer to God's begetting of the Son as an image of Himself and to His creation of man in His own image (HHL, 29 ff., 117 ff., 171, 259) are important, even though the mirror or looking-glass does not explicitly appear in those passages. As Professor Bennett has pointed out, "The simile of a mirror . . . is a favorite one" in the Neoplatonic writers on love who influenced Spenser;15 we are dealing, then, with a com­ monplace vehicle, and the interest is in the way Spenser uses it. In the first pair of hymns, the mirror serves as the vehicle to portray the loving mind that contains the image of the loved one. In HL, the power of the "sweet passion" can "expell" all "sordid basenesse" from the mind, and then love . . . the refyned mynd doth newly fashion Vnto a fairer forme . . . Which he beholding still with constant sight, Admires the mirrour of so heauenly light. 14 For a general discussion of images of seeing in Spenser that mentions the Fowre Hymnes, see Kathleen Williams, "Spenser and the Metaphor of Sight," in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Carroll Camden, Rice University Studtes, 60 u (1974), 153-69. Professor Williams points out that visual im­ ages, as metaphors for understanding, "are to Renaissance philosophers and literary theorists . . . things of immense power whether for good or ill" (p 155). In HL, "Spenser develops . . the subtle distinctions and relations of inner and outer sight Love brings about an interaction between the mind and the person physically seen, each being 'refyned' in the process" (p. 158). In HHB, "the things of this world themselves (as in the case of romantic love) bring about a refining of the sight if they are looked upon with aware­ ness that in their beauty is dimly seen the beauty of their creator" (p. 159). 15 Bennett, "The Theme of Spenser's Fowre Hymnes," p. 21

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Whose image printing in his deepest wit, He thereon feeds his hungrie fantasy. . . . (192-98)16 The ambiguity of "Vnto" in Une 193 ( = "into" or "in cor­ respondence with") is apparently deliberate. Either the lov­ er's refined mind is itself made fairer; or, because it is re­ fined, it is capable of containing a fairer form than before. Or, as Enid Welsford puts it in commenting on lines 19096, Is the lover admiring his mental image of his lady's appearance because it mirrors the heavenly light behind her beauty more perfectly than her outward form can do; or is he admiring his mental image of his lady's outward form, because that outward form is a mirror of the heavenly light? . . . It seems to be implied that the refining process is reciprocal.17 The refining can be reciprocal in the logic of Spenser's image because this mirror is thought of as creating the image instead of merely reflecting it—a perfectly possible way of thinking of mirrors, in general. The woman is "Fairer then fairest, in his fayning eye" (line 216). The mind's mirror, in accordance with the Neoplatonism underlying all of the Fowre Hymnes, reflects not merely the physical being of the woman, but instead the form of her beauty. Since the "fairer forme" is the image of the woman's beauty created by the lover's mind, Spenser means exactly what he says when he makes the lover admire the mirror itself (the reflecting mind) in line 196. But again, the line works both ways. The image-making faculty is a mirror, but the image it produces (the "fairer forme") 16 Landrum's note, quoted in Variorum, p. 518, associates 195-% with II Corinthians, ui.18: "But we all behold as in a mirror the glory of the Lord with open face, and are changed into the same image. ..." Spenser with the biblical echo is perhaps indeed looking forward to later uses of the mir­ ror in the second pair of hymns. 17 Welsford, Spenser; Fowre Hymnes, Epilhalamton, pp. 151-52.

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itself also "reflects" the "heauenly light" in a different way, by participating in it.18 From the rather difficult syntax of the stanza emerges an image of a kind of self-contemplation—which is what one usually uses a mirror for, anyway. This self-contemplation achieves value insofar as the "form" contained and contem­ plated in the self participates in the eternal beauty that is more real than the physical body. One knows that the "fairer forme" is more real if one knows Plato; and also Spenser says that the mirror of the mind must be more perfect to reflect it. Juxtaposing with the mirror-metaphor in HL a similar passage from HB makes the ambiguous syntax of both pas­ sages stand out more. In a sense, Spenser by giving his words a double reference suggests the operation of the mirror itself, which "doubles" the image for the eyes. In HB Spenser crit­ icizes those who love too easily, and then says, But they which Ioue indeed, looke otherwise, With pure regard and spotlesse true intent, Drawing out of the obiect of their eyes, A more refyned forme, which they present Vnto their mind, voide of all blemishment; Which it reducing to her first perfection, Beholdeth free from fleshes frayle infection. And then conforming it vnto the light, Which in it selfe it hath remaining still Of that first Sunne, yet sparckling in his sight, Thereof he fashions in his higher skill, An heauenly beautie to his fancies will, And it embracing in his mind entyre, The mirrour of his owne thought doth admyre. (211-24) The similarities between this and the earlier passage are ob­ vious. Again, the lover's mind, as mirror, reflects an image that is a "more refyned forme," superior to (and more real 18 Renwick (Variorum, p. 518), takes the line this way: "That image is the 'mirroure of so heauenly light' in being beautiful."

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than) the "obiect of their eyes." The second line of the sec­ ond stanza quoted is curiously ambiguous. Either the mind conforms the image to the heavenly light that the woman's beauty retains (the more likely interpretation); or the mind conforms the image to the heavenly light remaining in the mind itself (suggested by the fact that the "first Sunne" is sparkling in his sight). In either case, the "fancies will" is the operative faculty—as in the passage from HL the lover is "fayning." But the feigned image is truer than the object of the eyes. Thus, the last line of the quoted passage repeats the ambiguity of HL, 196: the "mirrour of his owne thought" in HB, 224, is either the mind itself ("the mirror that is his own thought"), which the lover admires as capable of cre­ ating the "refyned forme"; or the "mirrour" is the beauty of the woman ("the thing that mirrors his own thought"), which reflects the heavenly light retained by the lover's mind. Welsford says, the lover does seem for once to be admiring his own creativity; though possibly the line means that he admires the heavenly beauty that is mirrored in his thoughts; not that he admires his mind for its power of mirroring heavenly beauty. However that may be, the poet makes haste to explain that the image in his mind is, after all, a true one, for the lady's inner beauty really does exceed the beauty of her outward form.19 " Welsford, Spenser, Fowre Hymnes, Epithalamion, p. 162 Bennett sees the two figures of the mirror in HL and HB as illustrating the third step of the Platonic ladder of love. In HL, she argues, Spenser "descnbes the second step, the idealization of the beloved, the formation of the Idea, which the lover admires as 'the mirrour of so heavenly light' (1. 196) The third step is the recognition of the origin and nature of this 'heavenly light' as a re­ flection of the 'heavenly beautie' descended from 'that first sunne.' With that recognition the lover achieves an understanding of the nature of all corporeal beauty, and so, rationalizing his Idea, 'the mirrour of his owne thought doth admyre' " ("The Theme of Spenser's Fowre Hymnes," p. 23) See also the Variorum notes, pp. 533-35, for further debate about these lines and a discussion of Spenser's possible sources.

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In any case, there occurs again a kind of self-contemplation of the best and most real part of oneself. Regarding love as a species of self-contemplation seems clearly to motivate the other mirror-image in HB: Spenser says to the "faire Dames," But gentle Loue, that loiall is and trew, Will more illumine your resplendent ray, And adde more brightnesse to your goodly hew, From light of his pure fire, which by like way Kindled of yours, your likenesse doth display, Like as two mirrours by opposd reflexion, Doe both expresse the faces first impression. (.HB, 176-82) As Professor Bennett points out, the figure of the lover as mirror is a commonplace, and has roots in the Phaedrus and in Ficino.20 But Spenser condenses a great deal into the sim­ ile. Mutual love, compared first to two fires kindled of each other, becomes two mirrors set opposite each other so that whatever is reflected in one is reflected in the other. Spenser might have added that such an image appears in infinite rep­ etition. Welsford suggests that in the idea of "indefinite mul­ tiplication" Spenser might have been hinting at the notion of "mutual love as a proliferating force" (p. 161). Again, the tenor seems to be that the loving mind reflects a refined form (corresponding to the "faces first impression" in the vehicle). But when the woman turns the mirror of her mind toward the lover's mirror, she sees reflected there her own refined form. We might summarize the use of the mirror in the first pair of hymns, then, by saying that the mirror is the mind as creator/container of a refined form possessing a higher degree of reality than the objects available to the eyes, and that the admiration of that image is a kind of self-contemplation. When we say this, we are saying quite simply that the mind of the work regards itself as standing in a particular 20 Bennett, "The Theme of Spenser's Fowre Hymnes," p. 34. Winstanley's note in Variorum, p. 532, makes this point as well.

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kind of reciprocal relation with its world. The mind has the capacity, stimulated by the world (the beautiful woman) to re-create that world in a way that is more true because it is "feigned"—that is, partly a product of the mind. Contem­ plation of the world thus re-created is at the same time selfcontemplation, and a new whole is formed from the discrete elements of mind and world. The metaphors of the mirror (a species of trope) depend on our understanding of this kind of reciprocal relation. We articulate the interpretation of the metaphors precisely by making explicit and filling out the kind of reciprocal relation the trope presupposes. If we now turn to the only explicit mirror-image in the second pair of hymns, we find similar poetic "material" used to express a drastically different conception of the activity of the mind and of the nature of "reflecting" in itself. In HHB Spenser abandons in an "O altitude" the attempt to describe the beauty of God Himself—he must be content to think about the beauty of God's "essentiall parts," the attributes of truth, love, wisdom, bliss, grace, judgment ("doome"), mercy, and power ("might") "By which he lends vs of himselfe a sight" (104—12): Those vnto all he daily doth display, And shew himselfe in th'image of his grace, As in a looking glasse, through which he may Be seene, of all his creatures vile and base, That are vnable else to see his face. . . . (113-17) If men are to see God at all, they must do so in this mode of reflected glory. If man cannot look upon the sun with his "feeble eyne," Spenser asks, how should he expect to look directly on God (120-26)? The "image of his grace" presents itself to men in God's works, and specifically in those works that are beautiful. Spenser uses the familiar image of God's works as a second "book" supplementing the Scriptures: The meanes therefore which vnto vs is lent, Him to behold, is on his workes to looke,

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Which he hath made in beauty excellent, And in the same, as in a brasen booke, To reade enregistred in euery nooke His goodness, which his beautie doth declare. For all thats good, is beautifull and faire. (127-33) Thus God's works present man with an inferior reflection of the Creator's unapproachable glory. Spenser's mirror-image here is no doubt most immediately related to Saint Paul's statement that "Now we see through a glass darkly" (I Co­ rinthians, xiii.12—see also the Variorum notes on these pas­ sages for other possible sources and commentary, pp. 55556). Nor should one, I think, restrict the catalog of revela­ tory creations to the sublimities of the skies and the beauties of the natural earth. One perceives truth, love, wisdom, mercy, and so on, with the mind, not the senses, and so the activity of the human mind itself also becomes a datum in the inquiry after God's nature, one among many "mirrors" of His glory. God's grace, particularly, singled out in Une 114 of the mirror-simile, is best observed in the workings of the human mind and heart. The metaphorical mirror in HHB, then, differs from the mirror in the first pair of hymns in several important re­ spects. First, the image in the mirror in HHB is inferior to the thing it reflects. It is a poor copy of God's infinite glory, adapted to the feebleness of man's eyes. The image in the mirror of HL and HB, of course, is superior to the "real" woman in its feigning (ideality). Second, and I think more important, the simile in HHB implies a changed attitude toward the sensible world. In HL and HB the sensible world is indeed inferior to, less real than, the ideal world; but because the poet has access to the ideal world through the feigning mirror of the mind, he is the less disturbed by the mere appearances of the sensible world. The lover immediately, by virtue of his love, leaps over those appearances, and he is therefore freed to delight in them for what they are (HB, 232 ff.). In HHB, on the other hand,

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although the sensible is again inferior to and less real than the grace it reflects, it is nevertheless the book in which one must read that grace, for lack of stronger faculties that might allow the direct contemplation of God. The sensible world becomes a mystery we must learn to construe, and the con­ struing is laborious: "Mount vp aloft through heauenly con­ templation, / From this darke world, whose damps the soule do blynd" (HHB, 136-37). 1 think Spenser's changed attitude toward the sensible world explains in part why he ends HHB with praise of wisdom: not alone love, but wisdom with love, will enable man to rise to the contemplation of heavenly beauty from the construing of the sensible world. Finally, the mirror in the first pair of hymns separates world from mind in a different way from the simile in HHB. In the first pair of hymns, the mirror is the mind itself. For every thinking subject, then, there is only the one mirror— his own mind—and the sensible or ideal worlds appear as images in that mirror. In HHB, on the other hand, there are many mirrors. The sensible objects of the natural world are mirrors of God's grace, but so are the activities of the human mind. The mind becomes an object for itself in the search for God. Its activities are data we consult, among other data, to achieve (imperfect) knowledge of God. Instead of being the creative center of activity that contains everything as an image in itself, the mind now appears as itself a creature among other creatures, a part of the world-as-the-book-of-God. In short, in the first pair of hymns, the mirror is purely mind; in HHB, the mirror is world, including mind considered as part of that created world. To know God, the creature must learn to know himself as creature. These differences between the mirrors in HL and HB on the one hand, and in HHB on the other, illustrate how the essence of the vehicle alters de­ pending on the use made of it—in other words, how the poetic material is re-formed in a trope implying a different sort of reciprocity between mind and world. Instead of con­ templating a whole that it has formed, the mind knows itself as part of that whole which is the created universe. There

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occurs the separation of self-consciousness, in which the mind takes itself as object standing in reciprocal relation with other objects as parts of God's creation. To articulate an interpre­ tation of the metaphor in HHB is again precisely to make explicit and fill out the kind of reciprocal relation the trope presupposes. The essence of the mirror in HL and HB is to create an image, more perfect than the original because more ideal. The essence of the mirror in HHB, on the other hand, is to produce an inferior copy of the primordially real. One might put this a slightly different way by saying that mir­ rors, considered as Spenser's poetic material, become essen­ tially different things for Spenser's mind during different in­ teractions with the sensible world, which serves as vehicle of his thought. This can be so only if Spenser's mind (more accurately, the mind of the work) assumes a reciprocal rela­ tion with the world in terms of which it thinks. Spenser changes the mirror-image in HHB, then. But how, precisely, does the image in HHB represent a re-forming, in the sense of an "improving," of the image in HL and HBl How does Spenser hope to redeem the earlier image with the later, if he does? I think the clue lies in the observation that in HHB the activities of the mind are conceived as part of the creation (the "world") that mirrors the Creator's nature. I should like to turn now to certain passages in HHL that I think belong to the pattern of mirror-imagery, even though mirrors are not specifically mentioned. God begets the Son as an objectification of Himself: "That high eternall powre" (HHL, 27) . . . lou'd it selfe, because it selfe was faire; (For faire is lou'd;) and of it selfe begot Like to it selfe his eldest sonne and heire. . . . (29-31) The Son is thus a kind of mirror-image of the Father, but co-equal—neither an idealized version nor a poor copy. Later, Spenser apostrophizes Christ as "Most liuely image of thy

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fathers face" (171). The creation of man, too, presents God with a kind of mirror-image of Himself: Such he him made, that he resemble might Himselfe, as mortall thing immortall could; Him to be Lord of every liuing wight, He made by Ioue out of his owne like mould, In whom he might his mightie selfe behould: For Ioue doth Ioue the thing belou'd to see, That like it selfe in louely shape may bee. (113-19) I think it is appropriate to associate this passage with the opposed mirrors in HB, 176-82: the lovers' mutual contem­ plation that is also self-contemplation resembles God's con­ templation of Himself in man. Since man does bear God's image, line 259 of HHL has two meanings: "And in thy brest his blessed image beare." Man bears the image ( = a poor copy) of Christ's Passion in his mind for purposes of meditation; and man bears the image of God because that is the essence of his created nature. Thus, as man contemplates Christ in love, in a sense he also contemplates and loves the worthwhile part of himself—again like the two lovers in HB. The notion of love (and mirroring) as self-contemplation unites the two pairs of hymns, re-forming the first pair. As HHB suggests, the mind's activity is a mirror of God's grace. Then the activity of the earthly-loving mind in its self-con­ templation is a mirror of God's self-contemplation in the cre­ ation of man. The activity of the earthly-loving mind also mirrors man's self-contemplation in his search for the image of God within. The mirror-imagery culminates in the Fowre Hymnes when Spenser urges men to "Mount vp aloft through heauenly contemplation" by means of "gathering plumes of perfect speculation" (HHB, 134-36). Speculation, from Latin speculum ( = "mirror") is itself a mirroring, a reflection. But neither is the speculation of earthly love rejected. As Ellrodt says, the hymns offer an expression of a traditional Christian paradox:

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Love . . . is to be experienced by the lovers with the full consciousness of fulfilling the design of the God of Nature and the God of Love. Human love, not to degenerate into brutish love, must never be experienced apart from the love of God. . . . Human love is included in divine love, so far as it is humanly experienced; but it must be excluded from divine love, divinely experienced. It is not merely a question of being differently sincere at different times; it may be a simultaneous realization of different modes of reality.21 The self-contemplating love of the eternal mind makes pos­ sible and sustains the self-contemplating love of earthly beauty, and in that sense the love described in HL and HB is vali­ dated. It is validated as a mirroring within a mirroring, an activity of the human mind that, like all experience that is not sin, is a poor copy of the activity of the eternal mind. In short, Spenser re-forms the activities of H L and H B by presenting them as images of activities in the eternal mind. Earthly love o f beauty as Spenser describes it in H L and H B remains valid at its own level, precisely because it can be subsumed under the ultimate scheme of God's creation. The essence of the mirror is finally to be an instrument of selfcontemplation, and it is profoundly true to speak of the ac­ tivity by which the mind contemplates itself as "reflection." In summary, I have addressed a critical problem of Spenser scholarship—namely, the relation of the two pairs of hymns. By examining the metaphor of the mirror in the hymns (a concrete instance of trope) I have tried to show the sense in which the second pair represents a "re-forming" of the first pair. But in interpreting the tropes, I find myself articulating my understanding of them in terms of reciprocal relations between mind and world. That is, my interpretive state­ ments when analyzed reveal that my understanding of the tropes both constitutes and is constituted by an understand­ ing of particular kinds of reciprocal relations. The distinc21

Ellrodt, "From Earthly Love to Heavenly Love," p. 179.

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tions I make, then, and the similarities and differences in the pairs I point out, can be grounded in the concept of "lyric" as I have defined it. But the concept of "lyric" itself also becomes explicit and is filled out as the poems provide me with instances of reciprocal relations. I do not necessarily understand more about the poems than I would have with­ out my model, but I know a great deal more about the log­ ical structure of my interpretation. Verbal Wit in Donne's "Show me deare Christ" and Herbert's "The British Church"

Neither Donne's "Show me deare Christ"22 nor Herbert's "The British Church"23 is its author's most attractive work. But the poems invite comparison because they deal with the same general subject, because they draw from the same fund of traditional Christian imagery, and because they have ver­ bal similarities. Donne's poem comes off better by compar­ ison. In Herbert, lines like "Shows who is best" (9) or "And none but thee" (30) project a sort of intolerable English smugness that is absent from Herbert's best religious poems Herbert seems too close here to what is objectionable in the tone of "The Church-Porch"; Malcolm Mackenzie Ross says that "The Bntish Church" contains the "congealed thought of Hooker "24 Especially if we take Herbert's poem as a mild rebuke of Donne's ecumenical pessimism, we might be tempted to think of the Pharisee and the Publican Be that as it may, the figurative language in these poems is an interesting study. The main symbols of both come from 22 Holy Sonnet XVIII in Grierson's numbering, Westmoreland MS 2 in Helen Gardner, ed , John Donne The Divine Poems, corrected ed (Oxford Clarendon Press, 1966), pp 14-15 Quotations from the poem are from Gardner's text Gardner offers a full discussion and paraphrase, pp 122 ff 23 The Works of George Herbert, ed F E Hutchinson, corrected ed (Ox­ ford Clarendon Press, 1972), pp 109-10 24 Poetry & Dogma The Transfiguration of Euchanstic Symbols in Seventeenth Century English Poetry (New Brunswick, N J Rutgers University Press, 1954), ρ 149

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the shared biblical tradition. Donne develops the symbol of Christ as Bridegroom and the Church as Bride. The symbol arises from exegesis of such scriptures as Isaiah lxii.5 and Revelation xxi-xxii, where God or Christ figures as the Bridegroom of Jerusalem, the Heavenly City (a type of the True Church). For the "spouse, so bright and cleare" of Donne's first line, Helen Gardner points particularly to Rev­ elation xix.7-8 (p. 79). The image of the spouse (sponsa Christi) is perhaps also drawn from the exegetical tradition of the Song of Solomon (especially chapter iv); the image of the Dove (Donne, line 12) occurs several times in the Song (see Gardner, p. 80, for one citation). Certainly also in the back­ ground are passages like Ephesians v.23 ff., where Christ is said to be head of the Church as husbands are head of their wives. Herbert, on the other hand, develops the image of the Church as Mother. But again, the Mother is the Heavenly Jerusalem, the True Church, as in Galatians iv.26. The Mother is also the Virgin Mary, associated with Jerusalem and the Church through the prophecy of Christ's birth in Isaiah lxvi.7. In medieval religious poetry, Mary (the sponsa of the Song of Solomon, in one branch of the exegetical tradition) is often the emblem of perfect earthly beauty and courtliness, and that is no doubt part of the background of Herbert's insist­ ence on the beauty of the British Church (lines 4-6, espe­ cially), and of Donne's comparison of the spouse to the ob­ ject of a knightly quest (the sestet). In spite of their different approaches ( Church as spouse versus Church as Mother), both Donne and Herbert go to the Old Testament prophets for their images of clothing and nakedness. Ezekiel xvi and xxiii, Hosea ii, and Micah i, for example, speak of a people's turning away from God as dec­ orated harlotries, and the destruction that comes upon them as a stripping naked. Helen Gardner sees in the sluttish figure in Donne's poem, for example, a reference to "Jerusalem, the once proud city, now desolate, of Lamentations"; per­ haps "Donne has seen a parallel between the captivity of Is-

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rael and the total collapse of the Protestants after the defeat of the Elector in the battle of the White Mountain, outside Prague, on 29 October 1620" (p. 124). The image of harlotry stripped naked culminates in the Bible with the ornamented Whore of Babylon in Revelation xvii and following, who is to be stripped and cast down. As anyone who reads Book I of The Faerie Queene knows, the Whore for Protestants is of course the Roman Catholic Church. So Donne and Herbert operate within the same system of symbols, even though one talks about a spouse and one talks about a Mother. At the root of both poems is the symbol of the NewJerusalem as the type of the True Church, with all of its associated symbols. That is not to suggest that we get the same idea of the nature of the Church from both poems. We do not. For Herbert the British Church seems as close an approximation as need be to the True Church invisible. For Donne, no earthly church seems to be worthy of serious consideration—even though Helen Gardner has argued per­ suasively that the sonnet "could hardly have been written by anyone but an Anglican" (John Donne: The Divine Poems, pp. 122 ff.). The perfection of the Anglican Church is hardly Donne's point, Anglican though he was. Tracing the im­ agery of these poems back to its biblical sources shows only that the same symbolic system can give rise to quite different meanings and attitudes. How do Donne and Herbert manage such different postures when they are both standing on the same conventional symbolic ground? I think the answer lies partly in the way the poets use the figures generated by the main symbols. I shall be mainly concerned with Donne's and Herbert's metaphors, and I think it might be good first to clarify some concepts. Metaphors compare things felt to be significantly different in respects other than those addressed by the com­ parison. Another way to put this is to say that metaphors bring together two different realms of discourse.25 The dis25

The weakness of this quasi-definition of metaphor, from a philosophi­ cal point of view, perhaps, is of course that it does not go on to explain

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tinction between tenor and vehicle is familiar in discussions of metaphor, but it is not always sharply drawn. I argued above that the distinction can be grounded in the concept of "trope." Now I wish to explain why the distinction should be re­ garded as arising ex post facto, not as a tool for producing interpretation, but as a result of it. The distinction might seem less legitimate from the poet's standpoint. The poet might apprehend his meaning primarily in terms of the met­ aphor itself, and thus it would not necessarily make sense to him to talk about a tenor that is "carried" by the vehicle as if tenor and vehicle were two separate things. But after a critic writes an interpretation of the metaphor, the distinc­ tion is justified. The tenor of a metaphor is just what the critic asserts the metaphor to mean—his interpretation of the metaphor takes the form of a "literal" paraphrase that sub­ stitutes "equivalent" words for the words of the work. Hav­ ing thus separated the tenor, the critic may then talk about a vehicle. Any interpretation assumes that one knows what the author is talking about, what thing or event it is the business of the poem to deal with. As we have seen, this postulated subject-matter might be purely mental, and inaccessible ex­ cept through the poem. But even then, there is something external to the poem to which the interpretation, to be an interpretation at all, must refer the poem. The vehicle is then legitimately analyzed as the thing in the metaphor (the term belonging to the different realm of discourse) that is not a "literal" reference to the subject-matter. In other words, the vehicle exists as vehicle only because of the act of interpre­ tation itself. In "my love's like a red, red rose," the subjectmatter is the love (a woman or an emotion); the vehicle is the rose known apart from the poem (the rose "carries" the how to tell whether things are felt to be significantly different or how to decide whether we are dealing with different realms of discourse. The whole matter of defining metaphor is a very difficult theoretical problem. In my view, "metaphor," Uke many terms in critical discourse, is a problematic term that usually gets only an operational definition, if that. I shall not go into the problem here, however, simply because I think that most would agree that whatever metaphor is, we have examples in Donne and Herbert.

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meaning), and the tenors are the statements that his love is fresh, fair, sweet, rosy, and so on Before returning to Donne and Herbert, I need to make one further distinction that, I think, will prove crucial in un­ derstanding the similarities and differences between their poems The concept of "wit" has generally been considered important in defining and dealing with Metaphysical poetry Joseph Anthony Mazzeo has argued that the best way to de­ fine Metaphysical poetry, in fact, is in terms of Giordano Bruno's theory of "concettismo," the "gift which both the philosopher and the poet have for perceiving the unity of dissimilars or, in other terms, for making heterogeneous analogies perceiving and expressing the universal corre­ spondences in the universe "26 Ifby wit we mean the faculty of finding resemblances ( = making metaphors), we can ground the term in the concept of trope and thus in the con­ cept of reciprocity, as I have argued But I should like to distinguish further between natural wit and verbal wit27 We have the result of natural wit when the resemblances between subject-matter and vehicle are presented as obtaining inde­ pendently of the language used to express them That is, the metaphor presents two dissimilar things as having resem­ blances that the poet "discovers" prior to expression Verbal wit, on the other hand, appears when the resemblances be­ tween subject-matter and vehicle are presented as obtaining precisely because of the language used to express them That is, the metaphor presents the dissimilar things as having re­ semblances that appear only in the expression, because the resemblances consist only in the fact that the same words can 26 "A Cntique of Some Modern Theories of Metaphysical Poetry," in Seventeenth-Century Engltsh Poetry, ed William R Keast (New York Ox­ ford University Press, 1962), pp 63-64 Reprinted from Modem Philology, 50 (1952), 88-96 See also the first four essays in Keast, by H J C Gnerson, T S Eliot, F R Leavis, and Helen Gardner, on the problem of defin­ ing "Metaphysical" poetry 27 I of course do not mean to imply that "natural wit" is somehow inef­ fable or that "verbal wit" is somehow unnatural

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be applied to both subject-matter and vehicle (can be applied in both realms of discourse). An example or two should clarify this distinction. As an example of natural wit I might take again "my love's like a red, red rose." The simile works ostensibly by requiring the reader to find out the resemblances that the poet has already "discovered." To do this, the reader lists the predicates that apply to "love" as he knows it apart from the simile, and the predicates that apply to red roses. He then finds that some predicates appear on both lists: fresh, young, beautiful, sweet, and so on. He interprets the image explicitly by stating these tenors. His assumption in the process is that he is retracing the steps of the poet, that the resemblances between the poet's love and a rose existed before the poet thought of the com­ parison. Indeed, in this model the "discovery" of the resem­ blances apparently motivates the poet's choice of vehicle. Three points are particularly noticeable about this kind of wit. First, the tenor must be constructed; it is not given. Second, the list of common predicates is open-ended, limited only by the reader's (or, as it appears to him, the poet's) ingenuity. Third, and most important, the predicates are thought of as signi­ fying the same thing in both realms of discourse, whether they are applied to the subject-matter or to the vehicle. There is a quality "freshness," a quality "fairness," a quality "youth," all of which inhere somehow both in love and in roses. It is exactly the same quality in either case; indeed, the apprehen­ sion of the identical quality was precisely the poet's "discov­ ery." Freshness, whatever it is, is something that can belong objectively to love (or a woman) and to roses. Verbal wit works quite differently. A good example of verbal wit is the close of the famous compass-conceit in Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning": "Thy firmness makes my circle just, / And makes me end, where I begun." The point here is not that there are objective qual­ ities that lovers and compasses share, but only that the same vocabulary can be used to talk about both. The resem­ blances, in other words, are primarily verbal. The conceit

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does not work by requiring the reader to list predicates and isolate the ones common to subject-matter and vehicle. In fact, the tenor of the conceit is explicitly stated: "Makes me end, where I begun," a perfectly acceptable way of saying "Makes me come home again," even without thinking of compasses. The list of predicates common to subject-matter and vehicle, therefore, is not open-ended. It is completed in the explicit statement of the tenor, and the reader is not en­ couraged to search further. Lovers and compasses have in common just that the vocabulary of the poem can be applied to both. Finally, it is remarkable that the conceit works only because the words do not signify the same thing in the two realms of discourse. "Makes me end where I begun," applied to the compass, seems to mean "Makes my pencil come back to the same point on the circumference of the circle," for that is what the "firmness" of the fixed foot is designed to do.28 But the line as applied to the lovers must mean "Makes me come back home to you." But that is the center of the circle, in terms of the compass-image, not the circumference. And that, of course, is the pleasure of the conceit. We do in our minds what the poem has been trying to do all along, by annihilating the distance between the center and the cir­ cumference. Nothing about this distinction between verbal wit and nat­ ural wit is new or startling. Dr. Johnson must have had something like it in mind when he pilloried the Metaphysicals for the discordia concors and the violent yoking of heter­ ogeneous ideas—that is, for their verbal wit. Recognizing that kind of wit as bad implies that there is some other kind. Nor should we take the distinction as hard and fast. There are figures that would be hard to classify as one or the other kind of wit. Pope's " 'Tis with our Judgments as our Watches: none / Goes just alike, yet each believes his own" is in form verbal wit; but it also seems to function as natural wit, be28 We need not read the line this way. We could say that the "firmness" of the fixed foot is also responsible for the pencil's return to the center. The line would still exemplify verbal wit, but perhaps not so strikingly.

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cause it seems to send us in search of other predicates of watches that might illuminate judgments: "mechanical," "minute in its workings," "repetitive," "slow-moving," and so on. Presumably Dr. Johnson would not have found fault with Pope's verbal wit. I make the distinction between the two kinds of wit only because I think it helps gain access to Donne's and Herbert's poems. Regardless of whether there is really such a distinct thing as verbal wit, Donne's and Her­ bert's poems presuppose a set of mind in which things are presented as if there were verbal wit If we are not prepared to accept verbal wit as a category, we are not prepared to understand the poems—as Dr. Johnson apparently was not.29 The possibility of verbal wit presupposes a certain stance 29 R E Hughes, "George Herbert's Rhetoncal World," Criticism, 3 (1961), 86-94, erects an interesting distinction that, while it is not the same as the distinction between verbal wit and natural wit, has some parallels Hughes argues that in any "genuinely rhetorical frame of reference" there must first be a belief that "isolated phenomena, experiences and perceptions find their real value when they can be absorbed into or subordinated to the abstract realm of probability," where the realm of probability is the realm of all non-factual statements ordered according to probability and significance (pp 86-87) The function of trope is to establish "any single experience or sen­ sation in a field larger than itself," to "subordinate a single idea to a large abstraction" (p 87) Hughes then distinguishes between paradoxical trope and signal trope in the former, there is a "real equality between the experience to be defined and the defining comparison," an "admission of co-existent planes of meaning", in the latter, "the defining term does not co-exist with the term to be defined, but simply points to it The signal trope is an indicator, merely a participant in what is being defined" (p 87) Verbal wit as I define it resembles Hughes' paradoxical trope in positing co­ existent planes of meaning, but in verbal wit the planes are specifically the linguistic plane and the non-linguistic plane Natural wit parallels Hughes' signal trope in positing that the comparison itself is an adjunct to the being of the things compared, but in natural wit neither term of the comparison is ontologically subordinated to the other Hughes goes on to argue that Herbert employs both kinds of trope, but that the signal trope is more frequent "In those poems (and they make up, by far, the majority) in which Herbert demonstrates major attributes of God, the trope is signal Hu­ man narrator and divine subject are both absorbed into an abstract frame­ work, so that the material of the poem becomes a pointer to a tran­ scendent probability" (pp 88-89)

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toward language itself. Words, instead of being merely the signs of things, are seen as entities that exist in their own right. Verbal wit presupposes self-subsistent linguistic enti­ ties, bits of language, that somehow get associated with non­ verbal entities through the process of speech. In verbal wit, the same bit of language is applied to two things felt as dif­ ferent. The bit of language remains identical to itself, and each of the different things remains what it is. The relation between linguistic entity and non-linguistic entity must change, then. In sum, verbal wit regards language as one kind of entity in the world, one part of reality that can be placed in various correspondences with other parts of reality. That is not the case with natural wit. Burns's line assumes that the words depend for their power, indeed for their existence, upon the things they name. There must be his love and the rose and the apprehended resemblances between them before the poet can speak. But in verbal wit, the process of speech itself, of matching linguistic entities with other things, cre­ ates the resemblances John R. Mulder has attempted to account in part for the literary taste of the seventeenth century by examining edu­ cational practices. He argues that etymological study and dis­ putation in the schools made the educated public acutely "conscious of the multiple meanings of single words."30 Mulder points out that seventeenth-century poets and read­ ers would not have thought of poetry in post-Wordsworthian terms as originating from an overflow of feeling. His model of the seventeenth-century poet's process of compo­ sition is worth quoting: The seventeenth-century poet was inventive in the manipulation of his vocabulary, but his inventiveness did not imply the idea of'original discovery.' In the textbooks of logic the topics of 'invention' were the means by which one might gather all the available 30 The Temple of the Mind: Education and Literary Taste in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: Pegasus, cl969), p. 72.

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information on a thing, subject, or person. Having collected his materials, the writer moved on to 'judgment': their combination into a persuasive argument. We may say that the poet approached words in a similar fashion: He 'invented' the known uses of a word and made a judgment about the aptness of fusing some or all of these senses. The result of this approach to words is the multiplicity of meanings already demonstrated in Donne and Herbert, (p. 80) Mulder concludes, "The age admired primarily, not origi­ nality of ideas, but virtuosity in the manipulation of known materials" (p. 151). Whatever the dangers of attempting to reduce a poet's practice to the theory he was taught in school, Mulder's observations do suggest a strong likelihood that Metaphysical poets at least sometimes consciously thought of language in the way presupposed by verbal wit. That is, they learned to treat words as things, "known materials," existing in their own right. Most important for my purposes, however, Mulder's model of poetic composition implies a reciprocal relation between the poet's mind and those "known materials" or linguistic entities which form part of his world. That is, the poet's mind and the linguistic entities are mutually determining. The given bit of language, the word as it exists abstracted from discourse with all of its conventional meanings, deter­ mines the poet's thought by providing him with a means to think of some entity in the non-verbal world. The words "end where I begun" are Donne's way of thinking two par­ ticular kinds of physical movement. On the other hand, the poet's thought determines the bit of language by giving it its application. Donne decides which of the many potential meanings of "end where I begun" will be realized, by decid­ ing which non-verbal entities to apply the phrase to. Now, we can of course say that any use of language implies a re­ ciprocal relation in one sense, for language is by its nature a conventional "given" for the mind, whereas the mind al­ ways decides how to apply those conventions. But verbal

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wit differs from other uses of language precisely in calling attention to this reciprocity and making it the point of the utterance. What Dr. Johnson felt as violent yoking or a wrenching of language is precisely the separation of word from thing, so that the word itself is freed to stand over against the mind in a reciprocal relation. As Earl Miner says, "What is especially acute in [Dr. Johnson's] judgment is its perception that the two elements of metaphor are held at once apart and together, with a pursuit of 'thoughts to their last ramifications' often emerging from the tension."31 The elements of metaphor, the non-verbal entities compared in verbal wit, are held apart by their felt differences from each other; yet they are held together by the poetic energy of the bit of language applied to them both. Understanding the wit depends on being conscious of this tension, and that con­ sciousness involves being acutely aware of the mind and the linguistic entity as two poles of a reciprocal relation. Thus, I should finally argue that the concept of a reciprocal relation mediated by trope is the fundamental concept in a logical structure that will enable us to articulate the essential simi­ larity between Donne's and Herbert's poems. In other words, the distinction between verbal wit and natural wit is a means of articulating how these Metaphysical poems are like each other and thus distinctive of their literary movement. And the distinction between verbal wit and natural wit can be grounded, if at all, in the genre-theory that associates lyric with reciprocal relations. The particular reciprocal relation that exists in interpreted lyric exhibiting Metaphysical verbal wit is a relation between mind, and word conceived as part of the world. That distinguishes interpretations of verbal wit from interpretations of natural wit, which presuppose a re­ ciprocal relation between mind and natural objects such as roses or even artifacts such as mirrors. I think the similarity between the poems is more signifi­ cant than the differences, even though the differences are 31 The Metaphysical Modefrom Donne to Cotviey (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 143.

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probably more striking. Both poems depend primarily on verbal wit. Both also exhibit natural wit, however, usually when talking about the false church. To appreciate the full effect of Donne's "Sleepes she a thousand, then peepes up one yeare?" for example, I think we must picture a slugabed, a comic figure. Peepes certainly does not belong to the realm of discourse of the subject-matter—the Church—and re­ quires interpretation in the manner of a metaphor of natural wit. Similarly, Herbert's image of the Roman Catholic Church as a wanton who is sweating, glowing, and discolored from kissing is primarily a visual image: "She on the hills" of Rome Hath kiss'd so long her painted shrines, That ev'n her face by kissing shines, For her reward. (16-18)

The same remarks apply to parts of Herbert's description of the Geneva Church with her hair "About her eares" (21). But the major symbols of the poems, from which these sallies of natural wit are launched, are the symbols of the spouse and of the Mother. And these symbols are treated with verbal wit. Donne's sestet speaks of the True Church as the object of a romantic quest, again a conventional com­ parison: "Dwells she with us, or like adventuring knights / First travaile we to seeke and then make love?" But the real point of the comparison, the sting, occurs in the last two lines of the sonnet, where Donne completes the paradox of the spouse who is most faithful when she is not faithful to her husband: . . . let myne amorous soule court thy mild Dove, Who is most trew, and pleasing to thee, then When she'is embrac'd and open to most men. The paradox works because embrac'd and open in the last line can belong to both the realm of the subject-matter and the realm of the vehicle. To say that a man embraces the Church and that the Church is open to all does not seem a figurative

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use, in isolation, and certainly does not depend upon a spouseimage. And to say that a man's wife is embraced and open to most men makes sense apart from thoughts about the Church. But embrac'd and open signify different things in the different contexts, and that is the wit. Furthermore, we have to know already the different things they signify, that it is good for the Church to be embraced by many men and bad for someone's spouse to be, if the paradox is to work for us. Donne does not invite us to look for additional tenors, by a prurient imagining of adulterous wives and lovers. He gives us all the tenor he means us to have. The case is perhaps not so strong with Herbert, who might indeed want us to think of a staid British matron with other desirable attributes than the ones he specifically mentions. But the similarities between the Church and the matron are first of all verbal: 1 Joy, deare Mother, when I view Thy perfect lineaments and hue Both sweet and bright. . . . (1-3) A fine aspect in fit aray, Neither too mean, nor yet too gay, Shows who is best. (7-9) Words such as view, lineaments, hue, sweet, bright, fine aspect, fit aray, mean, and gay would signify something different when used of a matron than they would when used of a Church. Applied to a matron, they would refer to acts of sense-ap­ prehension and to the qualities thus apprehended; applied to the Church, they refer to mental apprehension and abstract qualities. If he has not given us all the tenors he means us to have, Herbert has given us most of them. His main image works, like Donne's, at least partly because of our delight in the verbal resemblances the poem constructs. I insist on the point about verbal wit in Donne and Her­ bert, not because it is particularly fruitful yet for interpreting

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the poems, but because I think we have to conclude that the method of revivifying conventional symbols is fundamen­ tally the same for both poets. They accomplish the revivi­ fying through verbal wit, the construction of a kind of met­ alanguage. That is, verbal wit makes statements about language itself, as we have seen. Both Donne and Herbert show, in effect, that there is still room for play in symbols firmly embedded in the language by convention, precisely because linguistic entities dress themselves in different sig­ nifications when they are made to occupy different positions in the world. But the play and the interpretation of the play presuppose a placing of the mind in a reciprocal relation with words considered as entities in the world. The fundamental similarity should not be allowed to ob­ scure the great difference between the two poets. Verbal wit presupposes a recognition forcefully brought home that the same word can be applied in situations that seem to be quite different. What should one make of this phenomenon? It seems to me that there are two ways to go. One can conclude that language is imperfect, in that it can never provide enough counters for every individual situation that has to be talked about; and so one has to make do with the counters one has. In this view, metaphor is necessary in order to say anything new; but nothing can ever be said with perfect accuracy, be­ cause the metaphor always carries some residue not in­ tended. On the other hand, one could conclude that language is more perfect than we know, that there is in fact some deep hidden propriety in calling different things by the same word. In this view, what seems to be "mere" metaphor might turn out to be an important way of revealing hidden truths by calling attention to deep similarities in apparently dissimilar things. Since there are these two views of why verbal wit might be possible, I shall make one further distinction. I want to divide verbal wit into two types, corresponding to the two views just outlined: I call these types paradoxical wit and scholastic wit. In the poems we have been talking about, I think, Donne uses the former, Herbert the latter.

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I call the first type of wit paradoxical because it character­ istically issues in paradox, as in the last two lines of Donne's sonnet. To recognize a paradox is to recognize that one word both does and does not "mean what it says." "He is dead, yet he lives." "This bread is my body." Donne often makes capital out of the fact that in Christian writings, what seem to be logical paradoxes are taken as literally true32—there must be, then, something inadequate about language. The highest truths are non-verbal; language breaks down when we try to express them. Donne's sonnet turns on the paradoxical wit. It is literally true that the Church is most pleasing to Christ when she is most open. But that recognition qualifies the value of the symbol upon which the poem depends, because spouses are not pleasing to their husbands when they are open to most men. The conventional symbol is fine as far as it goes, but it does not go all the way. It is "only" a linguistic device for expressing an inexpressible truth. We can never understand the truth itself, but we can approach understand­ ing just how amazing it is—Donne suggests that the truth is just as amazing as a man who is pleased when his wife is embraced by everyone. That would be a human mystery be­ fore which we would be speechless, and so we are found speechless when we try to express the nature of the True Church. The questions in the sonnet drive the point home. They seem to hover in tone between "I cannot believe that she is the True Church" and "Well, perhaps there was some­ thing of the True Church there." The theme of the sonnet is that man's understanding is inadequate to perceive the True Church, which we know must nevertheless be somewhere, visible or invisible, among men. So, a fortiori, man's under32 John N. Wall, Jr., "Donne's Wit of Redemption. The Drama of Prayer in the Holy Sonnets," Studies in Philology, 73 (1976), 189-203, argues against the emphasis of Louis Martz (The Poetry of Meditation) and Helen Gardner on the Holy Sonnets as meditation For Wall, "The subject of Donne's Holy Sonnets is . . . not a movement of the speaker toward a resolution of his relationship with God, but instead an exploration of the paradoxes of the Chnstian life on earth" (p 191). Wall is talking primarily, but not exclu­ sively, about the first twelve Holy Sonnets in Gardner's edition

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standing is inadequate to fix the True Church in institutional form. And that is largely a matter of the inadequacy of man's language to express the nature of the True Church. So the paradoxical wit of the sonnet is inseparably a part of the state of mind that generates the central paradox—that the Church is and is not among men. Michael McCanles has attempted by tracing the "conceptualist tradition" to generalize about the function of paradox in Donne's poetry, and his conclusions are very close to what I have been saying about paradox in this particular poem. McCanles says that the speakers in Donne's poems "strive valiantly to think as if the conceptualistic demand for concept-object correspondence were indeed a fact," but the structure of their chain of argument "demonstrates through contradiction, paradox, reversal, and dialectic the ultimate inability of the mind to reduce the real wholly to itself."33 Thus, in Donne the extension of the logical argument has as its primary purpose the pushing of a given argument to the point where its inadequacy for reflecting reality becomes fully recognizable. As such it then becomes an 'alarum to truth,' as Donne says, and requires the mind of the reader to take a new look not only at the reality but also at its own capabilities for grasping that reality, (p. 227) Donne's paradoxical wit depends on the presupposition that linguistic entities, from words to arguments, are an inde­ pendent part of reality from the non-verbal entities they at­ tempt to express. I call Herbert's verbal wit scholastic wit by analogy with the scholastic sermon. The sermon is characteristically con­ structed around particular key words from the Scriptures (often in triads), and some sermons seem to have been composed with concordance in hand. Starting from the premise that 33 "Paradox in Donne," in Essential Articles for the Study of Donne's Poetry, ed. John R. Roberts (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1975), p. 227. Re­ printed from Studies in the Renaissance, 13 (1966), 266-87.

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the Scriptures are a strict unity, the scholastic author finds verses in various places that contain the same words, and shows how the verses serve as commentary on one another. Herbert himself thought of the Scriptures this way: in his poem "The H. Scriptures, II," he says, "This verse marks that, and both do make a motion / Unto a third, that ten leaves off doth lie . . ." (lines 5-6).34 The method assumes exactly the set of mind I described before, in which the word is seen as the Logos, the ordering principle which itself re­ veals truth by revealing resemblances beftween apparently dissimilar things. An especially clear illustration of scholastic wit is Herbert's "The Sonne," where Herbert praises the English language for its propriety in giving "one onely name / To parents issue and the sunnes bright starre" (lines 5-6). He then goes on to explain the ways in which Christ, the "Sonne of Man" (14) is like the natural sun.35 I think this is Herbert's set of mind also in "The British Church." In discovering the words that can be applied both to the Mother and to the Church, he reaffirms the value of the traditional symbol. Whereas Donne questions the ade­ quacy of any linguistic means of expressing religious truth, Herbert emphasizes the adequacy of the symbol he has cho­ sen. As we meditate on the symbol, the True Church be­ comes more and more intelligible, until we can "build Jeru­ salem in England's green and pleasant land," to steal a phrase from a poet who would perhaps not have cared for this par­ ticular poem of Herbert's. As with Donne, Herbert's kind of wit is conditioned by the poem he is writing. Only insofar as he can maintain the power of the word, can he maintain the possibility that the British Church approximates the True Church. In The Metaphysical Modefrom Donne to Cowley, Earl Miner 34 1

am indebted to Professor Helen Vendler for this observation. M. M. Mahood, "Something Understood: The Nature of Herbert's Wit," Metaphysical Poetry: Stratford-Upon-Avon Studies II (New York: St. Martin's Press, ¢1970), points to Herbert's penchant for word-play that "oc­ curs at the end of a poem and draws together its otherwise disparate images and their significance" (p. 127). 35

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attempts to articulate the features distinctive of Metaphysical style, and he concludes that the wit of Metaphysical poetry can be characterized as definition that is, as those logical or rhetorical processes bringing together or separating (whether in metaphor or in idea) matter of similar or opposed classes; and as that dialectic, or those processes, that extend such matters by their relation in logical and rhetorical procedures, (pp. xi-xii) Although my approach has an explicitly verbal orientation that Miner's does not, I think we are talking about the same sort of experience of reading. What Miner analyzes as "def­ inition" or "dialectic" I analyze as "verbal wit." Miner goes on to distinguish two kinds of wit: (1) "a procedure of assimilation of disparate elements in explicit or implicit def­ inition— . . . this is wit of fancy"; (2) "a discrimination of either similar or opposed elements—a wit of judgment or reason" (pp. 144-45). Most witty definitions are "Fancy wit," most examples of dialectic use "Judgment wit" (p. 146); of the two poets we have considered, "Herbert is more given to the emblematic, Donne to the dialectical" (p. 132). Again, it might be possible to assimilate Miner's conclusions to mine by making a loose equation between "Fancy wit" and "scho­ lastic wit," and then between "Judgment wit" and "para­ doxical wit." For like Miner I have been concerned here with deep resemblances revealed through witty language, as in the scholastic wit of Herbert's "The British Church"; and with differences obscured in language, revealed when the lan­ guage breaks down into paradox, as in Donne's "Show me deare Christ." Whether the distinctions suggested by our model will work as well as Miner's for the whole range of Metaphysical poetry is a matter for further experimentation. It seems, then, that the distinction between "paradoxical" wit and "scholastic" wit, both falling within the larger cat­ egory of "verbal wit," is useful in articulating the clearly felt differences in tone and purpose between these two Meta-

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physical poems. Can this distinction also be grounded in the genre-theory? I think it can. Both paradoxical wit and scho­ lastic wit, as verbal wit, presuppose a reciprocal relation be­ tween mind, and word conceived as entity in the world—as I have argued. The word becomes what it is because of the mind's placing of it in certain relations, and the mind places the word in those particular relations because the word is what it is—that is, exists as a potential for entering into a variety of relations. But in paradoxical wit, the word as en­ tity, though it remains in a reciprocal relation with the mind, stubbornly refuses to enter into a reciprocal relation with the other entity, the "thing," to which the mind applies it. Words and things are just different entities, ultimately incommen­ surable, and neither determines the other. That is the source of the paradox or contradiction. We "know" that all entities stand in a reciprocal relation with each other, as parts of the whole that is the world, but the experience of paradoxical wit seems to indicate not mutual dependency of words and things, but their independence. That independence throws into clearer relief the mutual dependence of word and mind. In scholastic wit, on the other hand, the word enters into a reciprocal relation with the thing to which the mind applies it. The pleasure of the scholastic wit is the recognition of the mutual dependency of the word and the thing. The thing is perceived as the thing it is because the particular word is applied to it, and the word is what it is because it is grounded in the being of the thing to which it is applied. Thus, when we articulate an interpretation of paradoxical wit, we presup­ pose a constructed reciprocity between mind and word that breaks down when we attempt to push it further to embrace other entities in the world. And when we articulate an inter­ pretation of scholastic wit, we presuppose a reciprocity be­ tween mind and word that enables the word to become a middle term, as it were, between the mind and the other entities in the world. I think, then, we can articulate how Donne's and Herbert's poems are like and how they are different, in terms of dis-

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tinctions grounded in the genre-theory. Certainly, we could feel the similarities and differences without articulating them at all, or we could articulate them in terms of some other model. But this model provides a way of structuring the articulation such that it is logically coherent and such that it preserves the concept of "lyric" as interpretive concept. The Epistemological Vocabulary of Wordsworth's Immortality Ode Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Rec­ ollections of Early Childhood" has been written about often. It is certainly one of the "standard" poems of which any model of interpretation should be expected to give some ac­ count. Unlike some of the other poems I have discussed, the Ode takes as its explicit theme the reciprocity between mind and world. The poem is about how we know the world external to the mind and what we know of it, and it is there­ fore inevitable that Wordsworth should employ a rather ex­ tensive epistemological vocabulary. Already in the title of the poem, for example, the words intimations and recollections suggest two distinct modes of knowing. I think that in Wordsworth's epistemological terms we find the major tropes on which the poem depends. Often, the epistemological term itself constitutes a trope, a borrowing from the realm of sen­ suous apprehension to express supersensible knowing. That is why the concept of "lyric" as I have developed it, with its close connection to the technique of trope, is especially help­ ful in articulating an interpretation of this poem. I shall briefly mention here some of the most important critical controversies surrounding the Immortality Ode, be­ cause my reading will touch on these issues. A test of any interpretive model is its success in providing a structure for articulating answers to questions that many previous critics have felt to be important. One controversy was touched off by Lionel Trilling's analysis of the Ode as a description of the process of growing

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up, the "development of the sense of reality."36 Thomas M Raysor disagrees with Trilling: childhood is not "regarded as a period of divine illusions, but rather of celestial insight into reality. The human tenderness of maturity is not an ad­ vance beyond childish visions but a consolation for the loss of glory in nature, which in some sense compensates for that loss. . . ."37 Geoffrey Hartman agrees that in the Ode we have something more than just Trilling's "growing up"; the poem represents a rescue of the soul from solipsism, where "The soul's eventual turning to nature is . . . a real conver­ sion, and proof of self-transcending powers. Man's growth into humanity is founded on this conversion."38 One impor­ tant question, then, is exactly how much is lost and how much is gained in compensation in the Ode. A related question is that of the unity of the poem. Cleanth Brooks charges that the Ode fails to reconcile the apparent contradiction it creates by asserting that the Child is at once closer to God than the adult, and also closer to nature, where supernatural and natural existence are apparently opposed to each other; the "recovery" section of the poem is not clearly dramatized, and the "high instincts" are not clearly related to the "primal sympathy."39 E. D. Hirsch, Jr., on the other hand, argues that while the "consistent rhetorical strategy" of the Ode is to take away with one hand what it seems to give with the other, its aim "exemplifies the primary goal of Enthusiasm which is to reconcile contraries."40 Thus, at the end of the poem "The poet has come to learn that his present 36

Trilling's analysis, originally appearing in The Liberal Imagination, pp 129-53, is reprinted as "The Immortality Ode," in English Romantic Poets Modern Essays in Criticism, ed M H Abrams (New York Oxford Univer­ sity Press, cl960), pp 123-43 The quotation is from ρ 137 37 "The Themes of Immortality and Natural Piety in Wordsworth's Im­ mortality Ode," PMLA, 69 (1954), 875 38 Wordsworth's Poetry 1787-1814 (New Haven Yale Umversity Press, cl964), ρ 277 39 The Well Wrought Um Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York Reynal & Hitchcock, ¢1947), pp 136-37 40 Wordsworth and Schelling A Typological Study of Romanticism, Yale Stud­ ies m English, vol 145 (New Haven Yale University Press, 1960), 153

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thoughts are themselves childhood glory in a different form," where the "primal sympathy" that remains is "nothing other than a loving connection with God" (pp. 173-74). C. E. Pulos, proceeding like Brooks through a detailed analysis of the light-imagery, attempts to show that the "visionary gleam" and the "master-light" in the Ode are "related because with­ out the 'light' there would be no 'gleam,' but they are at the same time antithetical because the 'gleam' draws youth's at­ tention away from the 'light.' "41 Thus, another important question is the extent to which the major pattern of imagery, the light-imagery, is self-consistent. Finally, I might mention some of the attempts to explain the Ode in terms of Wordsworth's philosophical develop­ ment. Robert L. Schneider maintains that between "Tintern Abbey" and the Immortality Ode Wordsworth moves away from pantheism and toward Christian dualism. In the Ode "external nature is composed of heavy, unintelligible mate­ rial, which can be vitalized only by the creative energy that a human soul projects upon it"; sympathy "flows exclusively from the soul of man," and "the consolations Wordsworth offers to himself in the last part of the poem are derived from thought, not feeling."42 Kenneth R. Lincoln agrees that "From the outset Wordsworth qualifies the childhood vision as em­ anating from the child himself, not inherent in Nature."43 As my own reading of the poem will indicate, however, I think that Alan Grob is closer to the truth. Grob maintains, as I shall, that the "Fallings from us, etc." in the Ode are "vali­ dated at least as recollected fact," so that "these experiences and the central imperishable truth disclosed by them offer natural man a principle that orders the otherwise random events of his existence with intelligibility and purpose. . . . And by reclaiming this principle from the losses of child41 "The Unity of Wordsworth's Immortality Ode," Studies in Romanti­ cism, 13 (1974), 188. 42 "The Failure of Solitude: Wordsworth's Immortality Ode," Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 54 (1955), 628-31. 43 "Wordsworth's Mortality Ode," Journal of English and Germanic Phi­ lology, 71 (1972), 215.

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hood, Wordsworth is able to bring the separate elements of his dualism into a single coherent pattern, to assimilate the order of sense within the order of spirit."44 Thus, Grob ar­ gues, Wordsworth thought of dualism as "only a tentative statement of the nature of things"; in the Ode a "third mode of cognition" between spirit and sense is "thought," or "that power by which we abstract, remember, reflect, and judge . . . a way of converting our first intuitions into more con­ ventional objects of knowledge" (pp. 256-57). Wordsworth, "though retaining the vocabulary of dualism, has, in effect, passed beyond it" (p. 257). I do not follow Grob in placing such weight on "thought" in the Ode—I read the term as much more general than Grob does, and I take it as including conscious emotion as well as analytical or reflective thought. But I do think it is a mistake to read the poem in terms of a simple dualism. My immediate point, however, is that an important issue in criticism of the Ode is the question of Wordsworth's metaphysical presuppositions. I should like, then, to examine the epistemological terms in the Ode to see how the conception of reciprocity between mind and world develops in the course of the poem. To the extent that an interpretation traces this development through an analysis of tropes, the interpretation can be grounded in and structured according to the genre-theory. I shall say little about the Ode that has not been said already, or at least hinted at in one way or another, by somebody. But the question is whether reading the poem in terms of our model will permit a relatively full reading that is nevertheless economical in its logical arrangement of interpretive statements. Probably the most important epistemological term in the Ode is the very frequent see, along with its derivatives (e.g., Seer) and words expressing closely related concepts ( behold, look, eye, watch, etc.). Of course, the word see is very gen­ eral, and it can be used of understanding something ab­ stract—a mathematical proof, for instance—without causing 44 The Philosophic Mind: A Study of Wordsworth's Poetry and Thought, 17971805 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, c!973), p. 255.

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anyone to think that the speaker is being figurative. Seeing something with the eye and seeing something with the mind are somehow thought of as similar activities. As Lionel Trill­ ing says, the Ode "is incidentally a poem about optics and then, inevitably, about epistemology; it is concerned with ways of seeing and then with ways of knowing."45 Words­ worth plays on the equivocal see in the first stanza, where seeing with the eye and seeing with the mind are not at all distinguished. The "celestial light"46 is on visible things— "meadow, grove, and stream." The last line of the stanza deliberately emphasizes the verb: "The things which I have seen I now can see no more." The mode of knowing that Wordsworth is talking about is simple unmediated percep­ tion. Whether or not celestial light actually stimulates the Child's retina, knowledge of the celestial light comes through an immediate perception that does not seem to the Child to be anything other than ordinary physical seeing. The heav­ enly dimension of the natural object is given with its physical form. But there is already a serpent in the garden: the "seem" of line 3 is also an equivocal word. The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light. . . . Does "seem" mean simply "were seen"? Or does it mean "appeared to be, but in reality were not"? The division in the adult mind between "appearance" and "reality" is noth­ ing more than the result of splitting the word see: its signif­ icance becomes dual in admitting the possibility that percep­ tion can deceive. Cleanth Brooks remarks on the shift from seeing to hear­ ing, light to sound, in stanza 3. For Brooks the "effect is that of a blind man trying to enter the joyful dawn world,"47 and 45 Trilling,

"The Immortality Ode," p. 125. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, vol. IV, ed. E. de Selincourt and Helen Darbishire, corrected ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966), 279. 47 Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, p. 124. 46

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the concentration on sound culminating in line 50 ("I hear, I hear, with joy I hear!") is another pitiful reminder of the poet's loss of visionary power. Brooks' point is well taken, but we must not lose sight of the value of hearing in the Ode by overemphasizing the contrast between seeing and hear­ ing. As Alan Grob puts it (in his commentary on stanzas 8 and 9, but the remark is applicable to the earlier stanzas, as well), Ways of seeing . . . come to stand for man's divine endowments, spiritual faculties carried into this life that enable him briefly to maintain communication with a more perfect order of being than nature; and the power of hearing becomes a symbol that governs the whole range of man's natural attributes, sense organs, and reflective faculties by which he comes to know and understand the natural and human worlds to which his activities must eventually be confined.48 Wordsworth speaks of seeing the celestial light, but he hears the birds and lambs and the shouts of the Shepherd-boy. Perhaps more important, poetry itself is something heard, and whatever the "timely utterance" was, it gave "relief' (line 23). The lines following the mention of the "timely utterance" by their position are made to seem almost refer­ ences to a poetic annunciation and, literally, a dream-like in­ spiration:

The cataracts blow their trumpets from the steep; No more shall grief of mine the season wrong; I hear the Echoes through the mountains throng, The Winds come to me from the fields of sleep. . . . (25-28) Geoffrey Hartman perhaps has these lines in mind when he speaks of passages in the Ode that approach "the Psalms in sublimity."49 Here, the importance that the Psalm-like dic48 49

Grob1 The Philosophic Mind, p. 253. Hartman, Wordsworth's Poetry: 1787-1814, p. 274.

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tion places on the powers of hearing validates Grob's com­ ment on the great metaphor ending stanza 9, that of the "im­ mortal Sea" where we can "see the Children sport upon the shore, / And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore" (16768): "Wordsworth . . . claims in the culminating metaphor of stanza IX that sight and hearing are, in fact, related, that they are simply separate ways of apprehending a single ob­ ject of experience, separate ways of knowing the varied man­ ifestations of divinity" (p. 255). Thus, in moving from seeing to hearing in the early stanzas, Wordsworth does two things: he emphasizes the loss of visionary power, and he hints at the theme of compensation that the Ode will develop more fully later. But the metaphor of seeing remains the most important metaphor in the Ode, and Wordsworth turns again to sight in the lines about the lonely Tree, the "single Field which I have looked upon," and the Pansy (lines 51 ff.). Brooks hears a "sudden collapse of afflatus" in these lines, following upon the "I hear, I hear" which should be "I see, I see."50 E. D. Hirsch, Jr., explains the passage as a painful turning to par­ ticulars, with respect to which the poet feels his loss of vision most keenly, even though he can still by an act of will have a sense of participation in the whole.51 It is important to distinguish the use of see in the first stanza of the poem from the later use of such words in the pervasive light-imagery. Consciously to use light as an image of mys­ tical knowledge is already to have accepted that mystical knowledge is not given directly in perception, that physical seeing is only an analogy for mental or spiritual seeing. That is exactly what happens in stanza 5: Heaven lies about us in our infancy! Shades of the prison-house begin to close Upon the growing Boy, But He 50 51

Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, p. 125. Hirsch, Wordsu/orth and Schelling, pp. 158-59.

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Beholds the light, and whence it flows, He sees it in his joy; The Youth, who daily farther from the east Must travel, still is Nature's Priest, And by the vision splendid Is on his way attended; At length the Man perceives it die away, And fade into the light of common day. (66-77) The growing Boy "Beholds" and "sees" the light, but it is a figurative light, just as the "Shades of the prison-house" are figurative. The Man "perceives it die away," and again the perception is a mental act expressed by analogy with physical seeing.52 There is a nice progression: "Beholds" is rather a poetic word; "sees" common, but by now fraught with overtones; "perceives" is public, business-like, and prosy. But the point is that the consciously figurative use of verbs of seeing, contrasted with their use in the first stanza, implies a new epistemological situation. No longer does the poem 52 Cleanth Brooks, whose discussion of light-imagery in the Ode is still the standard, notes the ambiguity of the progression of light-imagery in stanza 5: we expect it to end in darkness, but it ends in a different kind of light. In general, Brooks says, Wordsworth "is trying to state with some sensitiveness the relation between the two modes of perception, that of the analytic reason and that of the synthesizing imagination They do have their relationships, they are both ways of seeing The ambiguities which light and darkness take on in this poem are, therefore, not confusions but nec­ essary paradoxes" (The Weil Wrought Urn, p. 122). See also C E Pulos' analysis of the light-imagery, in "The Unity of Wordsworth's Immortality Ode." Robert L Schneider remarks like Brooks that a fundamental image is the career of the sun as metaphor for human life; he also argues that the complementary image is "the use of hght to suggest spiritual energy, and the sense of sight to stand for creative intuition" ("The Failure of Solitude," ρ 629). For E. D. Hirsch, Jr., the meamng of light "implicit in the sun metaphor" is that "True light is not glory but something which underlies both glory and the light of common day. Light is our sense of divinity Each stage of life realizes this religious msight in a different way . . . The glory which the chdd first senses is fundamentally the same as the truth which the 'philosophic mind' perceives" (Wordsworth and Schelltng, ρ 170).

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assert that knowledge of the supersensible is being given im­ mediately in perception. A greater gulf opens between mystical knowledge and or­ dinary rational knowledge in stanza 8, where the Child be­ comes the "Mighty Prophet" and the "Seer blest" (115), the "Eye among the blind" (112). The extreme language calls particular attention to the fact that it is figurative. The Child may have direct access in perception to the "truths" he sees, but from the point of view of the adult speaker such a thing is marvelous and requires extravagantly figurative language to express it. The split between seeing as perception and seeing as discursive knowledge is also acute here. Direct perceptual access to truth is so lost as to seem mysterious and even terrible; the speaker is left with his unsuccessful "toiling" to find the truth. The Child is "deaf and silent"—he cannot tell what he sees, being non-discursive, Uterally an in-fans. Nor does he hear the "noisy years" (155), the noise of life that in stanzas 3 and 4 comforts the speaker and yet does so partly by distracting him from remembering his lost visionary power. The seeing the Child does in stanza 8 sharply contrasts with the seeing the speaker does in stanza 7. In Unes 71-72 (stanza 5), the "growing Boy" both "Beholds" and "sees" the Ught of celestial glory. The verbs are employed figura­ tively, but they express a vaUd mode of perception that the Child retains from his infancy. Wordsworth echoes those same verbs in stanza 7: Behold the Child among his new-born blisses, A six years' Darling of a pigmy size! See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies . . . See, at his feet, some little plan or chart. . . . (86-91) In the new context, the verbs are ironic. They refer to strictly physical seeing, the only kind of sight the adult seems capa­ ble of at this point, the perception of the Child's "exterior semblance" (109). Furthermore, the irony is intensified be­ cause the verbs are in the imperative mood. The Child's im-

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itative activities are held up as something to be admired, whereas the reader knows that those activities will only has­ ten the accumulation of the soul's "earthly freight" (127). The irony at the beginning of stanza 7 is directed at the pro­ saic, visionless adult point of view that mistakes the Child for an amusing miniature. Wordsworth parodies that point of view by adopting its characteristic diction in the first part of stanza 7,53 the diction of a visionless speaker who is, in­ terestingly enough, trying to get the reader to imitate his visionlessness. Wordsworth then begins to modulate back into the more characteristic voice of the Ode, finally arriving at the sobering, ominous lines "As if his whole voca­ tion / Were endless imitation" (107-8) For the most part, stanza 9 continues to employ physical seeing as a metaphor for supersensible seeing. The "sight of that immortal Sea" (164), like the sound of the "mighty waters," is figurative, as is the "fountain light of all our day" (152). And the things that are that "fountain light" are in fact mental events. But the most remarkable and powerful use of the concept of "seeing" in the poem occurs, I think, in line 153, where Wordsworth says that our recollections of childhood experiences "Are yet a master light of all our seeing . . ." The line is a thematic turning-point For Wordsworth seems to mean here again both kinds of seeing at once The recollections are not only the "master light" of all mental seeing, but also of all sensory perception Thus, the man is given continuity with the Child "The Child is father of the Man." The problem of continuity, as Grob points out, is intimately related to the problem of immortality itself Wordsworth's two primary tasks in the Ode, Grob argues, were the "resolution of the perplexities of human identity . . . ; and satisfaction of his deeply rooted desire that human 53 I am indebted to Professor Helen Vendler for the suggestion that lines 86 ff are satirical in tone I think this reading is more satisfying than Brooks', who sees "amused tenderness" in the best parts of the stanza, but finds it on the whole a weak stanza (The Well Wrought Urn, ρ 129)

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self-consciousness transcend life's purely physical bounda­ ries."54 The "obstinate questionings / Of sense and outward things" (142-43) must have arisen from the consciousness that sen­ sory perception was not all that it could be, was not all that it had once been. Thus, the recollections serve the adult as an ideal standard of the truth of sensory perception. It is of ultimate importance to "know" discursively "That there hath past away a glory from the earth" (18). The adult's physical seeing does not give him the "splendour in the grass" or the "glory in the flower" (179); it is no longer true that "Heaven lies about us" (66) with complete openness to our seeing. The "radiance" is "taken" from both physical and mental "sight" at once (176-77). But our physical seeing, like our mental seeing, should be guided by the faintly recollected ideal of that openness, that patent, directly accessible truth. The epistemological situation is clarified: as adults, we do not have truth by means of direct sensory perception. On the other hand, we are not completely cut off from truth by perception, either. Appearances need not deceive, if we hold to the standard of our recollections of childhood perceptions. Thus, we must admit, as in stanza 11, that the mind in sen­ sory perception makes the world in its own image: The Clouds that gather round the setting sun Do take a sober colouring from an eye That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality. . . . (197-99) But the perception need not therefore be false or deceptive. As Wordsworth shows, physical seeing can still achieve for the adult a particular kind of patency that, while it is not the splendor of childhood perception, is nevertheless true in a different way. In fact, lines 197-99 once again destroy the distinction between mental seeing and physical seeing. The same "eye" both watches over man's mortality and sees the sunset. Thus, Wordsworth makes a powerful statement from 54

Grob, The Philosophic Mind, p. 249.

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the fact that words of seeing, as already given in the language itself, tend to belong to two different realms of discourse: the realm of sensory perception and the realm of mental grasping of truth. The whole poem is in one sense an expla­ nation of why the two realms seem so closely related. Dreams and visions are non-cognitive modes of knowing that are particularly important in the first part of the Ode. The word vision and its derivatives seem to remain fairly stable. The vision is what the Child sees and what the adult loses, and as such the vision is both true and ideal: "Whither is fled the visionary gleam?" (56); the Youth "by the vision splendid / Is on his way attended" (74-75). But the concept of the dream undergoes early in the poem an interesting de­ velopment that parallels the deliberate splitting of seeing into its two significations. In stanza 1, the dream is figurative: for the Child, every "common sight" has "The glory and the freshness of a dream" (5). By focusing on the emotional tone of the dream, Wordsworth avoids raising the question of its truth. The dream is clearly figurative because the line seems to mean that every common sight was invested with the emotional tone of a vivid dream—without actually being a dream in any other sense. Actual dreams can be false. They can present a deceptive appearance. But in harmony with the state of mind described in stanza 1, Wordsworth avoids in­ troducing that problem. The truth of the dream is not a tenor; only its emotional tone is. The problem emerges the more powerfully when Words­ worth specifically links the vision with the dream and calls what the Child sees a "dream": "Whither is fled the vision­ ary gleam? / Where is it now, the glory and the dream?" (56-57) It is as if the speaker himself thinks he is talking about the dream of line 5, but in line 57 dream is used liter­ ally. The unobtrusive shift from figurative to literal splits the significance of dream. Before, a dream was simply a wonder­ ful experience of some sort, a word from the realm of ro­ mance where probability is not an issue; here it is an ideal, which for that very reason may be impossible to attain. Fi-

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nally, the word descends to become part of the vocabulary of skepticism. Dream comes to signify a poor copy of human life, a source of error and frustration, as the "six years' Dar­ ling" acts out his childish view of life: "See, at his feet, some little plan or chart, / Some fragment from his dream of hu­ man life" (91-92). This is not the same dream as the other; this dream is false and partial. But the word is the same. As Brooks points out, the later uses of dream infect line 5 with ambiguity.55 Doubt is cast on the earlier dream precisely by the adult's awareness of a potential difference between ap­ pearance and reality, between what is open to seeing and what is concealed. Where perception is faulty and dreams are false, the human being is reduced to an "Actor" who "cons" a part by means of "imitation" (103-8). But to "con" a part is not necessarily to understand what the playwright had in mind, and "imitation" here is rather a mode of practical be­ havior than a mode of knowing or of "seeing." The meta­ phor from the realm of the theater calls into question the validity of all human knowledge. Does it reduce to a mere accumulation of "tried and true" responses to stimuli? Is that all that "art" (93) in all of its senses is? Wordsworth is mod­ ulating in this passage from the parody of lines 86 ff. to the sublime diction of stanza 8, and the tone is a subtle mixture of irony and sadness. Thus, Wordsworth poses himself in the first part of the Ode the problem of the validity of human knowledge, and stanzas 8 and 9 represent the heart of his solution. Not sur­ prisingly, these stanzas contain many more epistemological terms, proportionately, than the rest of the poem, and I want to consider them in some detail. "Thou, whose exterior sem­ blance doth belie / Thy Soul's immensity ..." (109-10): the strong contrast between the Child's "exterior semblance" (a "seeming" that somehow lacks truth) and the "Soul's im­ mensity" is symptomatic of the stage the speaker has reached in his epistemological reflection. What appears is not neces­ sarily what is real; external appearances "belie" the deeper 55

Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn, p. 118.

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reality. Thus, the Child becomes the "best Philosopher" (111), the "Mighty Prophet" and the "Seer blest" (115), and the "Eye among the blind" (112) who is not yet susceptible to external appearances. The verb Wordsworth uses for the Child's act of knowing is to read: "... thou Eye among the blind, / That, deaf and Silent, read'st the eternal deep" (112— 13). The verb is interesting because it implies, more than the simple verb see, an act of construing or interpretation—and especially because, as is usually the case in reading a text, one is not conscious of the construing as an activity apart from simple perception. Wordsworth suggests that even for the Child perception is not purely passive. In fact, the Child is the one "On whom those truths do rest, / Which we are toiling all our lives to find ..." (116-17). The implication of "rest" is that the Child is somehow the supporter or ground of what he sees. This resting contrasts with the burden of "custom" at the end of the stanza, however, where words implying heaviness and difficulty cluster: Why with such earnest pains dost thou provoke The years to bring the inevitable yoke, Thus blindly with thy blessedness at strife? FuU soon thy Soul shall have her earthly freight, And custom lie upon thee with a weight, Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life! (124-29) Custom is what we do without understanding why; to ex­ plain a practice by saying that it is "customary" is to abdicate explanation. Custom is something "conned" or "imitated," as in stanza 7, and as such is the antithesis of the "heavenborn freedom on thy being's height" (123) that characterizes the Child's knowing. As Hirsch says, the end of stanza 8 is the "darkest point in the Ode and the only unqualified asser­ tion of life's diminishment. "56 And yet the Child is "Haunted for ever by the eternal mind" (114), and over him his "Immortality / Broods like the Day, 56

Hirsch, Wordsworth and Schelling, p. 169.

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a Master o'er a Slave" (119-20).57 The paradox that the Child is simultaneously free and a slave reflects the fragmented view of the adult speaker. The Child's condition is terrifying to the adult because the Child is in touch with the ultimate truths from which the adult's accumulation of "earthly freight" in­ sulates him. The Child's epistemological situation is a strange one, from the adult point of view—the Child construes, yet he is haunted; his thought is determined, yet it is free. Wordsworth's Child here seems to me very close in some respects to the terrible male Babe in Blake's "The Mental Traveller." There is a kind of reciprocal interaction between mind and world in the stanza; neither is free of the other and neither exists intelligibly without the other. The direct nondiscursive perception of the reciprocity, inaccessible to the adult corrupted by custom, seems to characterize the Child's knowing. The mode of knowledge that concerns Wordsworth in stanza 9 is of course remembering or "recollection": "nature yet remembers / What was so fugitive!" (132-33) The epis­ temological doctrine is reminiscent of Plato's theory of knowledge, as has often been pointed out. Trilling presents a sensible formulation: the theory of pre-existence for Wordsworth is "a very serious conceit, vested with relative belief, intended to give a high value to the natural experience of the 'vanishings.' "58 In fact, Wordsworth does not seem to be concerned primarily with a memory of Forms encoun­ tered in some pre-existent state. Instead, he is interested in the recollection of things experienced in this life. And the 57 Grob's comment on the line about brooding Immortality is illuminat­ ing: "His knowledge of immortality . . does more than simply shield man from despair; it provides a principle of interpretation, an argument from design for an existence that must otherwise be judged purposeless" (The Philosophic Mind, p. 254). But I still insist that the point of the line is the difference between the Child's direct, non-discursive apprehension of his immortality, terrifying to the adult; and the adult's discursive knowledge of immortality, which is what Grob describes. 58 Tolling, "The Immortality Ode," p. 134

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experiences are always in some sense experiences of negativ­ ity: . . . those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things, Fallings from us, vanishings; Blank misgivings of a Creature Moving about in worlds not realised. . . .

(142-46) The verbals name processes. It is not that Wordsworth is conscious of an emptiness where something has been that is now completely gone. Rather, he is conscious of something that is still present in a diminished form and is in the process of disappearing.59 The effect is striking. It is as if we are pursuing a thought, and the faster we pursue it the faster it recedes. That is exactly the epistemological situation Words­ worth is trying to portray. We question sense and outward things in order to heal some apparent rift between world and mind of which we have become conscious; but the more we question, the more we posit the external world as divorced from the mind, and the further the solution recedes. The more we try to grasp the Child's remembered experience in terms of adult categories, the faster that experience vanishes. It is like pursuing a phantom; but Wordsworth asserts that, helpless as we are to encounter the object directly, we must 59 Stuart M. Sperry, Jr., "From 'Tintern Abbey' to the 'Intimations Ode'· Wordsworth and the Function of Memory," Wordsworth Circle, 1 (1970), 40-49, distinguishes two kinds of memory important for understanding Wordsworth's poetry: (1) reconstitutive, as in "Tintern Abbey"—"the power of memory to reanimate the past within a consciousness of present scenes and objects"; (2) premonitory, as in the Immortality Ode— a sense of "some­ thing missing" that acts "to intimate, in some sense to verify, the existence of a past that can never be restored" (pp 42-44). I think, however, that in the Immortality Ode the premonitory memory is less a sense of something missing than a sense of something in the process of vanishing. That seems to be the point of Wordsworth's verbals, and I think Wordsworth wants to maintain that no visionary experiences are absolutely lost

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hold to the belief that in its very vanishing it proves its truth. And only in that sense can "The thought of our past years . . . breed / Perpetual benediction" (134-35). We are perpet­ ually creatures "Moving about in worlds not realised" (146— Trilling, "The Immortality Ode," p. 134, takes "realised" also in its "most literal sense" of "made real"), and that is in fact the defining character of adult human consciousness. Wordsworth is also moved to "raise / The song of thanks and praise" (140-41) for those "High instincts before which our mortal Nature / Did tremble like a guilty Thing sur­ prised" (147-48), and for "those first affections" (149). The terms instincts and affections do not necessarily belong to sci­ entific discourse, but here they seem to bring with them a faint odor of academic psychology. Both terms refer to men­ tal constructs that are postulated to explain behavior, but which themselves remain unexplained. (I am thinking of affection now in the technical sense of "disposition.") To say that a spider has a web-building "instinct" may in a certain sense explain the spider's behavior, but of course it does not ex­ plain where the instinct came from or exactly what it is. Wordsworth, on the other hand, is attempting to account in epistemological terms for observed psychological facts. Our instincts and affections, in the technical psychological sense as well as in broader senses, result from the fundamental na­ ture of consciousness as a moving about in worlds not real­ ized. We can explain our "natural" affections, our instinctive behaviors, as remnants of the Child's vanishing apprehension of the world. Thus, the "recollections" of line 150 and of the title are epistemologically of crucial importance. If we cannot have the Child's direct access to truth, and if we cannot re­ construct his experiences discursively, literally all we have worth knowing are the recollections of our experiences of negativity, of something that vanishes in the distance as we approach it and nevertheless by doing so proves its validity. The recollections, as the "master light of all our seeing" of whatever sort, are at the base of a final mode of knowing

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whose family of terms I have not yet discussed. These are the terms of feeling—empathy and love—which in the poem refer to a kind of knowledge replacing the Child's direct ac­ cess to the truth, and in some sense consoling the adult for its vanishing. Feeling is in the poem from the early stages: in stanza 4 the poet in a sense knows the happiness of the "blessed Creatures" by an act of empathy: "The fulness of your bliss, I feel—I feel it all" (41). But he protests too much; he strains to participate because it would be wrong not to, as the intrusion of the "evil day" in the next line suggests: "Oh evil day! if I were sullen" (42). When Wordsworth turns again to the Birds and Lambs in stanza 10, he asserts the human ability to join them "in thought" (172). This time, there is less sense of strain, for the empathy has been earned. Grob60 and Schneider61 equate Wordsworth's "thought" with the powers of memory, reflection, and reason or judgment. I think Wordsworth must include more than that, especially in the last line of the poem: "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears." Thought seems to be the inclusive term for not only the powers of memory and reason, but also the emotional component of memories and judgments, the whole state of the conscious mind in the performance of any of its various activities. Thus, the final result of Wordsworth's meditation is to understand "primal sympathy / Which hav­ ing been must ever be" (182-83) between the mind and the external world. Primal sympathy is a mode of knowing. The external world that is known through it includes other minds. The primal sympathy thus "remains behind" (181) after the Child's vision has faded. This is the solution proposed in stanza 10, after all the admissions are made and all the facts are in. Hirsch equates the primal sympathy with a "loving connection with God"; but whether or not we want to make the Ode that specifically Christian, I think Hirsch is certainly right when he says that in the Ode "Sympathetic identifica­ tion . . . is nothing other than love. It is the sense of fusion 60 Grob, 61

The Philosophic Mind, p. 256. Schneider, "The Failure of Solitude," p. 631.

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in separation which tends to characterize all of Enthusiasm's experience. . . . This primal sympathy is the essential quality of the soul."62 But I think everyone would agree that had the poem ended with stanza 10, we would have felt cheated and seriously let down. The "soothing thoughts that spring / Out of human suffering," the "faith that looks through death," the "years that bring the philosophic mind" (184-87), while valid ideas, are all rather ordinary consolations, the vocabulary of a somewhat dull Christian stoicism. This kind of stoicism is bankrupt after the emotional peaks of the poem. Words­ worth knows it. The flatness of the lines deliberately pre­ pares for the last stanza, where Wordsworth genuinely comes full circle and again achieves the kind of direct access to truth that marked the first stanza. Trilling observes that in lines 197 and following "We are back again at optics, which we have never really left. . . ."63 Grob says that Wordsworth "now looks to nature for an image of order and expression of law or for a potential alle­ gory of destinies higher than nature's own."64 But there is more to it than that. This time, the mode of knowing is not physical seeing, but love. The love that one feels for "Foun­ tains, Meadows, Hills, and Groves" is different in kind, surely, from the love that one has for other human beings, just as physical seeing and mental seeing are different experiences. But Wordsworth in the last stanza connects the two kinds of love: he feels the "might" of the natural world in his "heart of hearts" (190); he loves the Brooks (193); and he finds the new Day "lovely" (196—compare line 16, where the sun­ shine was "glorious"). And all of this seems to be because his eye has "kept watch o'er man's mortality" (199). It is "thanks to the human heart by which we live, / Thanks to its ten­ derness, its joys, and fears" that "To me the meanest flower that blows can give / Thoughts that do often lie too deep for 62

Hirsch, Wordsworth and Schelling, p. 178. "The Immortality Ode," p. 140. 64 Grob, The Philosophic Mind, p. 260.

63 Trilling,

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tears" (201-4). The flower recalls the Pansy, emblem of lost visionary power in line 54. To the emblems of diminishment, human love adds also thoughts of compensation. Line 203, with its emphatically placed "To me," recalls Hnes 2-3: "The earth, and every common sight, / To me did seem. . . ." Sympathy has replaced seeing; the heart has assumed the function of the eye. Far from requiring the chilling of emotion suggested at the end of stanza 10, Wordsworth frees emotion as the final mode of adult knowing. The consola­ tions at the end of stanza 10 are "philosophic" consolations, discursive and exactly to that extent not fully satisfactory. But in the last stanza the flower "gives" Wordsworth thoughts. The verb is deliberately general and colorless, and seems to mean something like "is the occasion of." The thoughts do not come entirely from the flower, exactly; nor do they come entirely from the poet. The venture is cooperative, as the emphatic "To me" suggests. The adult in his emotional knowing finally achieves something of the same reciprocity with the world, though in a different mode, as the Child in his seeing. Paradoxically, it almost seems more difficult to see what the genre-theory has to do with Wordsworth's poem than to see what it has to do with some of the other poems, just because Wordsworth's subject-matter is already the rec­ iprocity between mind and world. We are so engulfed in reflections on that reciprocity that it is perhaps hard to see how we could write any interpretation of the poem without talking about that reciprocity. In one sense, of course, it is true that one could say most of what I have said about the poem without considering the genre-theory at all. In fact, much of what I have said has already been pointed out in various ways by other critics. But it is important to pay at­ tention to how the interpretation is articulated here. I articu­ late the interpretation by analyzing Wordsworth's epistemological terms as tropes, and by articulating those tropes as presupposing particular kinds of reciprocal relations between mind and world. Seeing, hearing, feeling, dreaming, recol-

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lecting, sympathizing—all these modes of apprehending the world become in the interpretation tropes that we under­ stand and articulate by taking each of the terms as the name of a particular moment in the developing reciprocal relation­ ship between mind and world. That principle prevents the articulated interpretation from being merely a list of obser­ vations about the poem. It grounds the interpretation in a particular logical structure—namely, the genre-theory—and provides a means of arraying the interpretive statements and assessing their relative significance. The theory does not pro­ duce knowledge of the poem, but it does provide me with a logical structure in terms of which I can explain what I am doing when I interpret the poem explicitly. So it is not just that Wordsworth's subject-matter is the reciprocity of mind and world. It is also the case that the explicit interpretation of the poem presupposes a mind of the work that is in rec­ iprocity with the world of the work. My demonstration of the "worth" of the genre-theory here must stand or fall not according to whether it produces new understanding of the poem, but according to whether it makes such understand­ ing more explicit by providing a framework within which to articulate coherently what is felt to be essential about the poem.

Tennyson's In Memoriam, i-v, and Stevens' "The Rock" It might seem quixotic to compare a portion of In Memoriam: A.H.H. with one of Wallace Stevens' late poems. The works are after all very different, and I shall need to consider at least two points before even beginning such a comparison. First, there is the question of what justifies singling out a portion of In Memoriam—not just one of the lyrics, but five successive ones. Then, there is the question of the grounds of comparison between Tennyson's poem and Stevens'. I shall say something about both of these points shortly. But I do not plan to provide a complete reading of either

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poem, or even so much to argue that the poems illuminate each other (though they do). I want to see, again, how our particular theoretical construct can deal with a particular problem of literary history. We have two poems from two different literary periods. The poems are, as I shall argue, comparable in certain respects. We feel the poems to be quite different from each other in many ways, and we might also feel that each is in various ways "typical" of its period. What motivates this discussion, then, is the question of how well the interpretive model permits us to articulate the felt differ­ ences between the poems. To be as specific as possible with­ out advancing further into the interpretive process—since the model is, after all, a model and not a program—can we ar­ ticulate the felt differences in terms of different modes of reciprocity between mind and world, with particular atten­ tion to the differences in tropes? I cannot undertake here to say what makes Tennyson typically "Victorian" and Stevens typically "Modern"—though I should hope the interpretive model might eventually help to do that—so I must beg the questions of typicality and of the validity of the traditional literary periods. This discussion is another tentative step, an example in outline of the sort of thing that would have to be done many times if a "literary history of lyric" is to be writ­ ten in terms of the model. First, then, let me say why I think we can take lyrics i-v of In Memoriam as a unit. These lyrics admittedly have clear connections with the introductory lyric and with the lyrics that come after, and the emotional problem posed by lyrics i-v is not resolved until the end of the poem. Strictly speak­ ing, then, there is no unanswerable argument for treating lyrics i-v as a group, not even along the lines we might pur­ sue to argue for isolating a single lyric of In Memoriam— namely, that the lyrics were written singly or in groups over a long period of time, and only later arranged in the final groupings. But I cannot discuss all of In Memoriam here, and many Tennyson critics seem to enjoy assembling and disas­ sembling the poem. So I shall venture that lyrics i-v can be

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treated as a unit (though never thus exhaustively treated) be­ cause they introduce in universal terms the problem of which Tennyson's personal experience provides a special case. As Valerie Pitt says, "In Memoriam is the archetypal poem of the mid-Victorian age" partly because of "the extent to which private grief has been . . . thrust into perspective, impersonalized until it comes to reveal the pattern of any bereave­ ment."65 The introductory lyric of In Memoriam is clearly introductory to the whole poem, prefiguring the resolution of Tennyson's grief. Valerie Pitt characterizes it as "an after­ thought written when In Memoriam was finished" (p. 115). And not until the sixth lyric does Tennyson begin to specify the particular death, the particular grief, that is the immedi­ ate subject of the poem. Lyrics ι-v pose a general problem— the problem of loss which is always the problem of death. If there are so many difficulties in treating lyrics i-v as a unit, why not pick some other Victorian poem, or even a single lyric of In Memoriam, to compare with Stevens? The answer lies in the deep affinities I think "The Rock" has with the first five lyrics of In Memoriam taken as a group—though I do not mean to suggest that Tennyson is Stevens' "source." It is theoretically desirable to compare works that are thematically similar without being causally connected with each other. When our interpretations maintain that the poems compared depend on similar subject-matters, we can elimi­ nate an important variable from the discussion. We are freed to talk sensibly about Tennyson's "way of handling" a par­ ticular subject-matter, as distinct from Stevens' "way of han­ dling" a similar subject-matter; whereas if we compare poems with very different subject-matters, it might seem a good deal more likely that the differences we find are primarily attributable to the difference in subject-matter.66 65

Tennyson Laureate (London Barne and Rockhff, 1962), pp. 116-17. Our model makes the concept of "literary period" dependent upon the concept of "subject-matter" in a complex way It seems likely that, if the concept of "literary period" is ever to contain more than a chronological designation, we shall have to argue that the works of a particular period are distinctive either because of their preoccupation with certain themes (i e , 66

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The thematic similarities between the two poems are per­ haps not immediately striking, but I think they nevertheless go very deep. Both poets consider the problem of loss, which in both is ultimately but indirectly the problem of death. The problem is obvious in Tennyson. It emerges in Stevens in the first section of "The Rock," where the poet, whose three­ score and ten are used up, faces the bleak possibility of the absolute loss of experience: It is an illusion that we were ever alive. . . . The sounds of the guitar Were not and are not. Absurd. The words spoken Were not and are not. It is not to be believed.67 I shall argue that this problem of absolute loss is the main problem of the poem, that "The Rock" attempts to deal with the apparent annihilation of the past, a nothingness which infects the present and destroys its meaning. Stevens must concern himself with the operations of memory and its cor­ relative, imagination. The distrust of memory in the first section is "cured" by the "fiction" that "makes meanings of the rock." Tennyson also worries about the deficiencies of human memory. If the "victor Hours" can wear away grief, as in lyric i, it is also possible that they wear away love. And even when grief is fresh, sleep transmutes a specific pang into a vague sense of loss. An effort of awaking will is required to reassert both grief and love and to avoid becoming the "fool of loss" (lyric iv). But Tennyson, like Stevens, seeks a kind of "cure" for loss. Tennyson does not find it, as I think Stevens does, in the compass of the poems I shall consider. But Tennyson's lyric suggests at least a course of treatment. certain similar subject-matters), or because of their distinctive way of han­ dling the themes they share with other periods. Of course, we always end by arguing both. When an interpretation articulates how mind and world are related and how tropes are employed, subject-matter "falls out" as a presupposition. Then the interpretation itself can sensibly be regarded as an answer to the question of "how the subject-matter is handled." 67 The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1972), ρ 525.

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He will treat the symptoms by means of poems, the "dull narcotics, numbing pain," until a more genuine cure super­ venes. For Stevens, poetry as fiction is the cure "of the ground and of ourselves." Poetry itself is more than therapeutic; it is man's final answer to the problem of loss. The different views of the importance of language furnish, I think, good clues to aid in articulating the essential differences between the poems. But my immediate point is only that both poems deal with the problem of loss as a generalization of the prob­ lem of death, in terms of memory and imagination, and with strong emphasis on the importance of poetry itself as treat­ ment or as cure. I think even a casual reader of lyrics i-v of In Memoriam must be struck by the frequency of kinesthetic imagery. Bod­ ies move everywhere as vehicles of metaphors, and the whole feel of the lyrics is analogous to the feel of the body's action on and reaction to its environment—approaching and avoiding, tugging and pushing, resisting and resisted. In i, Tennyson rejects the hope that "men may rise on steppingstones / Of their dead selves"68 as less sweet than the drunk­ enness of loss where one remains to "dance with death, to beat the ground." Man's inability to see future good in pres­ ent loss is an inability to "reach a hand through time to catch / The far-off interest of tears." Love and Grief in ι have bodies that can "clasp" and "be drowned," like Sorrow in πι who "whispers" from a "lying lip" and who may be em68 The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks (London and Harlow: Longmans, Green and Co., 1969), p. 864. This edition provides rather full notes throughout on Tennyson's likely sources. Ricks (p. 864n) notes that Tennyson said he was alluding to Goethe in the line about the "dead selves." Lore Metzger, "The Eternal Process: Some Parallels Between Goethe's Faust and Tennyson's In Memoriam," Victorian Poetry, 1 (1963), 189-96, discusses Tennyson's allusion, considering the significance for the poem of the "ev­ olutionary" theory of human development. Metzger concludes that the poem "carries on the humanistic optimism of Goethe's Faust" (p. 1%). Paul Turner, Tennyson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1976), offers a fuller discus­ sion, suggesting that Goethe's Wilhelm Meister is Tennyson's source for the harper of 1.2, and that a passage in The Sorrows of Young Werther suggested Tennyson's image of supercooled water in iv.11-12 (pp. 122-23).

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braced or crushed. Sorrow expresses the impotence of Na­ ture to solace man by making of Nature a kind of negative body, a "phantom" or "hollow form with empty hands," and Nature is again some sort of body where Tennyson says in ν that "words, like Nature, half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within." In iv, griefs hand shakes into frost the tears in the heart's vase; and in v, grief itself is the body whose "outline" is wrapped in "coarsest clothes" of words, as it is also apparently the body numbed by the "narcotics" of poetry. But perhaps the most intense kinesthetic imagery occurs in lyric π (the only one of the five that is especially good, I would say), where the effect of the first stanza de­ pends on the reader's feeling himself into the Yew as it em­ braces the bones: Old Yew, which graspest at the stones That name the under-lying dead, Thy fibres net the dreamless head, Thy roots are wrapt about the bones. The poet envies the changelessness of the evergreen Yew, and actually feels himself embodied ("incorporate") in the tree. AsJonathan Bishop puts it, the Yew's grasping "is ex­ pressive of the emotional armlock Love has on Grief, and negatively exemplifies the affectionate embrace the protago­ nist has lost, and now longs for. . . . we find him about to . . . 'grow incorporate into' the yew, like the skeletons in­ terpenetrated by its roots."69 The weight of the metaphor in these lyrics, then, makes the world seem to arise as a series of embodyings. But it is important to see what kind of embodying Tennyson is talk­ ing about. We might contrast Tennyson's technique with the normal use of personification allegory. Parts of Tennyson's lyrics, especially the portrayal of Sorrow in m, might easily be confused with other personification allegories, but I think 69 "The Unity of In Memoriam," in Tennyson, In Memoriam: A Casebook, ed. John Dixon Hunt (London: Macmillan and Co., 1970), p. 227. Re­ printed from Victorian Studies, 1 (1963).

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Tennyson is doing something quite unusual. The distinction is this: it makes a very great difference whether something intangible is compared to a body, or whether it is compared to my body. My relation to my body is different from my relation to everyone else's body. I am on much more inti­ mate terms with it, so that only by an act of reflection, and sometimes a very strenuous act, can I separate my body from my self. Personification allegory normally relies on the body as distinct from the self, the body as "someone else's body." Indeed, the function of personification allegory is usually to get the emotion or abstraction "outside" the perceiver. We might think of Spenser's (or almost any author's) Seven Deadly Sins. Or, since Sorrow is Tennyson's concern, we might think particularly of Spenser's portrayal of Despair in Book I of The Faerie Queene (Canto ix, stanza 35): That darkesome caue they enter, where they find That cursed man, low sitting on the ground, Musing full sadly in his sullein mind; His griesie lockes, long growen, and vnbound, Disordred hong about his shoulders round, And hid his face; through which his hollow eyne Lookt deadly dull, and stared as astound; His raw-bone cheekes through penurie and pine, Were shronke into his iawes, as he did neuer dine. Despair is given a body, and the details provided, though iconographic, are not the sorts of things one notices about one's own body except in rare moments of reflection. Al­ though the reader might admit that Despair exists only "in oneself," in order to understand the allegory he must regard Despair first as external. He must first stand in relation to Spenser's figure as in relation to someone else's body, and after that he might apply the lesson he has learned to his own soul. Spenser's Despair is susceptible to being embraced or crushed, but only as one would embrace or crush someone else. With Tennyson's metaphors, the situation is different.

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The embracing one does with Tennyson's Sorrow is very like hugging oneself. The crushing is very hke smashing one's own finger with a hammer. Tennyson's poem sets up a re­ lation between the mind of the work and the embodied emo­ tions that is rather like the relation between oneself and one's own body, that peculiarly intimate and entangled relation­ ship—in fact, a particular kind of reciprocal relationship, de­ fined most immediately in our experience of the personality as a unity of body and mind. We get the first suggestion in the movement from the second to the third stanza of lyric i: the poet asks who shall . . . reach a hand through time to catch The far-off interest of tears? Let Love clasp Grief lest both be drowned. . . . The alternative to reaching a hand (the poet's hand, the read­ er's hand)70 through time is that Love should clasp Grief. The hand stretched out at the end of the second stanza, a part of the poet's or the reader's body, becomes the hand of person­ ified Love. Love by the modulation becomes the embodying of the immediate self, not some external body as normally m personification allegory. The image of drowning perhaps reinforces the impression. Do we now picture the "steppingstones" in stanza 1 as mounting from a drowning sea of grief (the "tears" of stanza 2)? Then are Love and Grief actually the "selves" that will not die and beyond which the poet refuses to rise? At any rate, the poet has his present possibil­ ities in the world because of the hand of Love and the hand of Grief, just as the mind has its possibilities in the physical world by virtue of the body. Similarly, Sorrow in HI has a body that seems more like 70 Imagery of hands is of course quite frequent in In Memortam Charles Richard Sanders, "Tennyson and the Human Hand," Victorian Newsletter, no 11 (Spring, 1957), 5-14, collects the "hands" passages of In Memoriam, and Ward Hellstrom, On the Poems of Tennyson (Gainesville University of Flonda Press, cl972), pp 44 ff, discusses the hand-imagery as a technique for associating Hallam with Love and with Christ

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the poet's own than someone else's—partly, no doubt, be­ cause of what has gone on in i. Although Tennyson might seem closest in m to normal personification allegory, making Sorrow a "Priestess" and giving her a dramatic speech, there is an interesting reversal in the last stanza: And shall I take a thing so blind, Embrace her as my natural good; Or crush her, like a vice of blood, Upon the threshold of the mind? In the personification, Sorrow71 as emotion is first given a body, but then that body is compared to an intangible en­ tity—a "vice"—that inhabits bodies. The "vice of blood" is thus in turn "embodied," as it were, by the body of Sorrow. But a man's vice is embodied in his own body. Sorrow is no doubt like a "vice of blood" partly because of her speech about Nature. IfNature is as she says—blind, aimless, mean­ ingless—then Nature must be "red in tooth and claw," and Sorrow is by association a bloody vice because she reveals Nature's bloodiness. As Lionel Adey puts it, Sorrow is "lying" because what she says is not truth in the sense of "that-whichmakes-for-life"; it is a "nightmare delusion," and what must be crushed is the "obsessive grief which . . . annihilates . . . the earth and all therein."72 On the other hand, "blood" in Ii seems to be the blood of the human race, a synecdoche for the human body. The poet says to the Yew, "I seem to fail from out my blood / And grow incorporate into thee." If Sorrow is like a "vice of blood" in this sense, the line recalls Othello, I.iii. 123, as Ricks' note (p. 867n) suggests: "I do confess the vices of my blood." Then Sorrow is crushed with 71 I take the "her" in the stanza to refer to Sorrow. It might be possible to argue that the antecedent is Nature, but since Nature is presented as a phantom image of Sorrow herself, I hope the immediate point holds in either case. There are also other reasons for interpreting "her" as referring to Sorrow, as I hope will become apparent later 72 "Tennyson's Sorrow and her Lying Lip," Victorian Poetry, 8 (1970), 262-63.

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all the difficulty one experiences in controlling the sinful ap­ petites of one's own body. It is easy to remain quite detached from, or to feel gentle pity for, someone else's sorrow. The poet's reaction to the body of Sorrow is too violent to be a reaction to someone else's body. Crush is a strong word. There is a squeamishness, a horror of smashing some sort of disgusting vermin on the doorsill. But the doorsill here is the "threshold of the mind." One can keep the body from polluting the soul only by the most horrible effort, by giving rein to absolute re­ pulsion. Only one's own vice can crawl over the threshold of the mind; only for one's own vice is it necessary to feel such absolute repulsion and squeamishness. Tennyson's Sor­ row, then, is like his own body, the body that he can "em­ brace" as his "natural good," and that he finds the more disgusting when vicious precisely because it is not perfectly distinct from his inmost self. His attitude is ambivalent in just the same way as his attitude toward his own body is ambivalent. I am trying to suggest, then, that Tennyson's tropes pre­ sent emotions as the embodiments of mind—not as an exter­ nal embodiment, but as an embodiment corresponding to the only kind of embodiment we really know "from the in­ side" by experience, the embodiment of our minds by our own bodies. The point is important because only thus can the emotions become what I think they are for Tennyson, namely the middle term between the mind and the external world. The emotions or feelings are the "substance," so to speak, of the personality; they are the part of the self "found" by the self, apprehended by the self as a given. Personifica­ tion allegory as a rule is psychomachy. There is not yet with it any necessary connection between internal and external; the characters are the soul, and the landscape is the soul. But if feelings are seen as the embodiment of mind as Tennyson sees them, there is an immediate implication of the external world, the "world of the work" properly so called. The feel­ ings as body are thereby defined as that which grapples with

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the world, that by means of which the mind enters into re­ lation with its world—if one may borrow Stevens' phrase, a "metier." By an act of reflection, the feelings can be put "out there," but for Tennyson it is an objectification as one's own body is objectified. Especially when one is ill, it becomes most difficult to separate the body from the self. One says, "I am ill," not, as a rule, "My body is ill." That is the kind of situation Tennyson is talking about with respect to the feelings, a set of conflicting and painful feelings, a sickness of the soul. Lyrics ι—ν express the somehow stifling feeling of inhabiting a sick body. Sorrow in in is the ailing member that one may cherish ("embrace"), lop off ("crush"), or cure, but may not disown. Grief in ν is the body that needs nar­ cotics. Since the feelings are, in the metaphor, that by means of which one lives in the world, the relationship to the ex­ ternal world takes infection from the sickness of the feelings. The feelings as middle term embody the mind, provide it with a means of connecting itself to the external world; and the feelings themselves are then in turn embodied for the mind by the external world itself. The world thus arises through processes of embodying, and is to be understood in terms of the relation between body and mind. Alan Sinfield has noticed this tendency in In Memoriam. He quotes a particularly acute observation of Hallam him­ self, made in Hallam's review of Tennyson's 1830 volume. One thing that Hallam especially admired in Tennyson's po­ etry was the "vivid, picturesque delineation of objects, and the peculiar skill with which he holds all of them fitsed, to borrow a metaphor from science, in a medium of strong emotion. . . ."73 Adapting T. S. Eliot's concept of the "ob­ jective correlative," Sinfield argues that description of exter­ nal objects in Tennyson often compels us to explain its in­ tensity in terms of the poet's mental processes. Tennyson realizes that "the mind tends to find its own reflection in this way. He also realizes that nature exerts a reciprocal influence 73 Hallatn, quoted in Sinfield, The Language of Tennyson's In Memoriam (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1971), p. 124.

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on our feelings. . . ."74 In a later article, Sinfield rejects the concepts of "literal" and "figurative" as inadequate for talk­ ing about Tennyson's imagery, and identifies a technique he calls "displacement," or a "contribution of (logically) sepa­ rate background description to emotions" such that "the reader is invited to displace emotion from the description to its true focus in the adjacent context."75John D. Boyd has suggested that In Memoriam proceeds according to the logic of emotion, and the most obvious and successful tactic is the "distinctive way of evoking landscapes and other external scenes, so as best to realize and dramatize the subjective center through whom 'the logic of feeling' is enacted."76 Finally, in a book that has a great many things in it that are indirectly relevant to my topic here, David Shaw speaks of the "sacramental landscapes" of In Memoriam that correspond to the speaker's soul, but in which the "reciprocal inadequacy of nature and spirit prevents the mourner's veneration of sacramental land­ scapes from degenerating into mere idolatry."77 All of these critics are talking about Tennyson's apprehension of the external world as embodying the emotions, the world as sep­ arate from, yet inexplicably fused with, the mind. The mid­ dle term in this reciprocal relation is feeling. Lyric u, as I have already suggested, turns on the meta­ phor of world as tangible body of intangible feeling. Alan Sinfield also cites π as an illustration of the "reciprocal influ­ ence" that nature exerts on the feelings.78 The poet projects his feelings onto the Yew: And gazing on thee, sullen tree, Sick for thy stubborn hardihood, I seem to fail from out my blood And grow incorporate into thee. 74

Sinfield, The Language of Tennyson's In Memoriam, pp. 125-26. "Tennyson's Imagery," Neophilologus, 60 (1976), 468. 76 "In Memoriam and the 'Logic of Feeling,' " Victorian Poetry, 10 (1972), 100. 77 Tennyson's Style (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1976), p. 157. 78 Sinfield, The Language of Tennyson's In Memoriam, pp. 127-29. 75

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The tree is "stubborn" and "sullen" because of the poet's mood. He is "sick for" the tree's hardihood in two senses: he both desires what the tree has, and yet is afflicted by the tree's having it. He is sick because the tree seems to have a changelessness he lacks, and he is sick because the gloom of the tree reminds him of the fact of death. The tree in the simile provides a body for the sick feeling, a body that per­ mits a continued grasping of and wrapping about the dead body. The mind connects itself to the world through emo­ tion because emotion gives itself a body in physical things. In ill, Nature is apparently considered by Sorrow as the mere total aggregate of physical things, devoid of any in­ forming principle. Thus, Nature is nothing more than "A hollow echo" of Sorrow's own music, "A hollow form with empty hands," illusory and offering nothing. Nature em­ bodies Sorrow, as the Yew embodies the poet's sickness. Things are the external image of the emotion. Tennyson's attitude is different from Wordsworth's, as K. W. Gransden says: for Tennyson, "The phenomenal world provides no direct link between the mind of God and the mind of man; we take our dark night of the soul with us, even into our contemplation of the natural world."79 Language, too, ap­ pears momentarily in ν as a kind of external embodying of emotion. Grief can be "put in words," though words "half conceal the Soul within." I shall have more to say about Tennyson's attitude toward language, but I think the exam­ ples here are sufficient to show how Tennyson's metaphors work with the concept of embodying. The emotions "em­ body" the mind, and the physical world embodies the emo­ tions. Thus, the emotions are thought as the middle term in the relation between mind and world, in a way analogous to the way the sense-organs, perhaps, are thought as a middle term. The tropes in Tennyson's poem thus imply a particular kind of reciprocal relation between mind and world, the kind of reciprocal relation that one experiences in experiencing one's own body. But in Tennyson the feelings make possible the 79

Tennyson: In Memoriam (London: Edward Arnold, 1964), p. 27.

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embodying of mind by external world. They also make pos­ sible the experience of loss, grief, and sickness that it takes the whole of In Memortam to cure.80 Stevens, on the other hand, finds the cure for loss in the fact that language itself, and not emotion, for him serves as the middle term between mind and world. Probably the most interesting reading of "The Rock" so far is J. Hillis Mil­ ler's.81 Miller says several things about the poem that I think are not incompatible with what I shall say, after allowances have been made for the differences in approach. For Miller, the poem is ultimately a mise en abyme, the abyss that is the "enigma of the nameless," the "impasse of language." Miller finds four "scenes" in the poem: the love-scene, the geo­ metrical diagram, the natural scene, the theory of poetry. Each of the scenes is "both literal and metaphorical, both the ground of the poem and a figure on that ground, both that which the poem is centrally about and a resource of termi80 One might well ask whether the particular kind of reciprocal relation 1 have described is merely a function of the particular kind of trope Tennyson has elected As a partial answer, I might mention briefly another "typical" Victorian poem, Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach " Here the sea is impor­ tant precisely because it embodies poetic emotion—it brings the "eternal note of sadness in " Here, too, emotion is the prime point of contact be­ tween mind and world, the "middle term " The withdrawal of the Sea of Faith leaves darkness and confusion That is, the loss of a feeling that was particularly successful in organizing the world does not leave some different order, some world organized according to an antithetical principle It barely leaves a world at all—certainly not a cosmos in the pregnant sense, but only a "darkling plain / Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight " The loss of faith is in itself like a bodily illness One can abhor one's own faith­ lessness, but one cannot disown it Like one's own body, it must be dealt with The embodymg of mind as faith (i e , as feeling) gives the mind its possibilities in the world, but it also makes the mind vulnerable to the world And of course, Arnold's suggested cure is again a matter of feeling, a shift from a feeling that organizes large parts of human experience to a feeling that probably can organize only individual bits of private lives "Ah, love, let us be true " I should argue, then, that Arnold's tropes, though of different kinds from Tennyson's, work like Tennyson's to imply a recip­ rocal relation between mind and world that is mediated by emotion 81 "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure," Georgia Review, 30 (1976), 531 and 330-48 The quoted phrases are from ρ 11

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nology used figuratively to describe something other than itself, in a fathomless mise en abyme" (p. 17). Thus for Miller the fundamental tactic of the poem is "catachresis," or "the violent, forced, or abusive use of a word to name something which has no literal name" (p. 28). All the terms in the poem are catachreses—following Derrida's theory of language, Miller asserts that the point of the poem is to show that there is no literal, no existent apart from the language of the poem to which the words may be said to refer: "All the catachreses in the poem reform the fiction of the referential, the illusion that the terms of the poem refer literally to something that exists. . . . All words are initially catachreses. . . . The fiction of the literal or proper is therefore the supreme fiction" (p. 29). Although I shall ultimately agree with Joseph N. Riddel that "The poem is . . . plainly about poetry,"82 I think it is essential to see with Miller how the language of the poem "explodes the distinction between literal and figurative" (p. 28). Just as one must be struck by the prevalence of bodies in Tennyson, I think one must surely find the most obvious (and impeding) verbal device in "The Rock" to be the con­ tinual piling-up of appositives or alternatives: As if nothingness contained a metier, A vital assumption, an impermanence In its permanent cold, an illusion. . . . These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man. The rock is the habitation of the whole, Its strength and measure, that which is near, point A. . . . Miller comments on this tactic as a "constant feature of Ste­ vens' poetic procedure": The relation among the elements in such a series is undecidable, abyssed. Since the phrases often have the same syntactical pattern and are objects of the same verb 82 The Clairvoyant Eye: The Poetry and Poetics of Wallace Stevens (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), p. 249.

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(most often the verb "to be"), it seems as if they must be equivalents of one another, or at least figures for one another, but can [they] really be equivalent? Perhaps the phrases form a progression, a gradual approximation through incremental repetition . . . ? Perhaps each new phrase cancels the previous one?83 One way to gain access to the workings of Stevens' tropes is to examine in some detail the use of this device in the three sections of the poem. For as Mac Hammond says, poetry about poetry "presents, of necessity, a highly grammatical drama, for it consists of concepts about poetic language itself of which grammar makes up a large part of the story."84 In "Seventy Years Later" Stevens begins in what Santayana calls the "solipsism of the present moment," the ultimate extension of Cartesian doubt, in which one doubts not only the existence of the external world and of other minds, but also the experience of time-consciousness itself and the valid­ ity of memory—in fact, everything that is not immediately before the consciousness in the vanishing instant. Harold Bloom thinks of the passage in Stevens as representing the last phase in the "decay of Stevens' version of the Wordsworthian intimations or visionary gleam."85 Stevens' point 83 Miller, "Stevens' Rock and Criticism as Cure," p. 13 Frank Doggett, "Wallace Stevens' Later Poetry," ELH, 25 (1958), 137-54, early pointed out that the use of grammatical apposition in this way is characteristic of the later Stevens Doggett describes the device as a movement toward aphor­ ism, by means of which Stevens suggests the fundamentally metaphonc nature of language by showing the reader that "Some quite ordinary forms of expression provide effects that resemble those of usually recognized met­ aphor. Relationships and conjunctions of concepts are provided by the de­ vice of apposition and of predicate nominative" (pp. 144-45). Riddel also remarks on Stevens' "Long rhetorical periods" that "flow easily into the aphorisms on which Stevens came to rely more and more in his late poetry. The meditative style fosters aphorism, contemplation encircles abstraction . . " (The Clairvoyant Eye, p. 248) 84 "On the Grammar of Wallace Stevens," in The Act of the Mittd Essays ott the Poetry of Wallace Stevens, ed Roy Harvey Pearce and J. Hilhs Miller (Baltimore. TheJohns Hopkins University Press, cl965), p. 184 85 Wallace Htevens The Poems of Our Climate (Ithaca, N Y Cornell Uni­ versity Press, 1977), ρ 340

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is precisely that the existence of the past and the validity of memory are called into question by loss. There is no way of knowing that what is not now ever was: "It is an illusion that we were ever alive." It is "Absurd" and "not to be believed" that the past is absolutely lost, but there is no proof that will allow us to suppose otherwise. So it is also "Absurd" and "not to be believed" that the past ever was. Life itself in this mood appears absurd. The first lines set the verbal pattern that dominates the section: It is an illusion that we were ever alive, Lived in the houses of mothers, arranged ourselves By our own motions in a freedom of air. The "freedom of air" is perhaps the only strictly metaphor­ ical phrase here, but for the moment I am more interested in the grammatical pattern itself. In Anglo-Saxon poetry the device would be called "variation," a way of saying "the same thing" differently, in order to embellish, to qualify, or to emphasize some different aspect. "Lived in the houses of mothers" is presented as another, different way of saying "were ever alive"; "arranged ourselves / By our own mo­ tions in a freedom of air" continues the pattern. All three locutions are "equivalent" in the sense that the third can be apprehended as a variation of the first as well as a variation of the second. The lines define, as it were, giving the thing more and more fully by piling up a list of rough equivalents. The pattern repeats in the more metaphorical lines of the section. "The meeting at noon" (for Bloom, "the one great romantic memory of the poet's life")86 now seems "An in­ vention, an embrace between one desperate clod / And an­ other," "a queer assertion of humanity," "A theorem." As the terms are presented, any one is a rough (though perhaps metaphorical) equivalent for any other, and none is a perfect equivalent for the thing itself (the "meeting," or the recog­ nition of another human being as a center of consciousness). Consciousness of another seems something invented, desper­ ately asserted without proof, posited. But language itself 86

Bloom, Wallace Stevens, p. 341.

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presupposes another human being, another center of con­ sciousness. The terms are metaphorical, perhaps—though it might make "literal" sense to call consciousness an "inven­ tion" or an "assertion"—but even so they are apparently mo­ tivated by a desire to define through comparison. The dis­ tinction between metaphor and definition is somewhat obscured in the lines. Santayana's philosophical move to escape "solipsism of the present moment" relies on "animal faith," the unshakeable certainty of the material creature that there is something out there. Stevens' poetic move is similar. Whether we can know it by logical proof or not, we proceed as if . . . nothingness contained a metier, A vital assumption, an impermanence In its permanent cold, an illusion. . . . Again, the terms are presented as rough equivalents, tenta­ tive stabs at articulating the essence of human consciousness as it flickers against the background of an indifferent nature, "a nature of the sun, / In the sun's design of its own happi­ ness. ..." The strength of the illusion brings forth the leaves, the fiction that appears as a "blindness cleaned" but is really a "birth of sight." That is, the successful fiction creates what it talks about, but it does so in such a way as to appear a discovery of what was there already, the lifting of scales from the eyes. The leaves' "blooming and musk" themselves, the fiction, "Were being alive, an incessant being alive, / A par­ ticular of being, that gross universe." The section ends with the same pattern with which it began. Again, the series is constructed upon the principle of variation. In the pattern, "that gross universe" is, as I take it, a variation on the pre­ ceding "being"—the universe is "gross" in both senses: the gross as the whole, divided into its particulars; the gross as the crude. Like the first lines, the last series is presented as literal, a specification of what the leaves are metaphors for. The section completes a circle in another sense, too, from "It is an illusion that we were ever alive," to "the illusion was

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itself a being alive." The movement is, as Bloom says, from "mere illusion to desired illusion."87 Stevens in the first section exploits, then, primarily one particular power of language. I shall call it the power of variation (which is also the defining power), the ability to say "the same thing" in different ways. If one could not do that, no definition could be valid, because the subject could never be equivalent to the predicate. The "thing" Stevens defines by means of piling up rough equivalents is conscious­ ness, the only thing we have absolutely certain experience of. To define is to assume above all that the thing remains the same throughout the metamorphoses of the language used to talk about it. The first section of the poem illustrates how language operates when it defines, by forcing the reader to adopt the assumption upon which the defining power rests. We must think of the items in each series as all referring to the same thing, and therefore as all roughly equivalent. Of course, the other side of the coin is immediately implied. Language possesses the defining power only because the equivalency is rough. If a number of different linguistic structures can refer to the same thing, then no single linguis­ tic structure is completely adequate to the thing. The defin­ ing power presupposes that the thing transcends language. If that is so, then it is possible that the leaves "really" are, and must remain, only "illusion." They are, after all, "only" po­ etry, only fiction, only linguistic structures. A different tactic dominates the second section of "The Rock." Instead of variation, Stevens exploits primarily the metaphorical power of language properly so considered—that is, the possibility of equating two things felt as different in important respects.88 The equation may be strictly meta87

Bloom, Wallace Stevens, p. 342. I am erecting only a rough schema. Obviously, no section of the poem is "pure"—there are "metaphorical" structures in the first section (e.g., cer­ tain passages about the leaves) and "defining" structures in the second sec­ tion (e.g., "the icon // Of the poem, the figuration of blessedness"). Ulti­ mately, too, as I shall argue, the "two powers" of language are not 88

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phorical, as in "These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man"; or it may be primarily syntactic coordination, where the items in the series are felt as different items but where all of the items perform the same syntactic function: . . . the leaves, if they broke into bud, If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit. . . . But even this latter mode of equating different things seems to hint at metaphor for Stevens. In the lines just quoted, for example, Stevens syntactically equates budding, blooming, bearing fruit; and later in the section these activities are ex­ plicitly linked to three ages of man: They bud the whitest eye, the pallidest sprout, New senses in the engenderings of sense. . . . They bloom as a man loves, as he lives in love. They bear their fruit so that the year is known. . . . Budding, blooming, and bearing fruit are different from each other, but they are metaphorically the same in that all stand for something in the human realm, and thus each always implies the others. So Stevens can say of the leaves, "They bud and bloom and bear their fruit without change." The statement is obviously false, self-contradictory, as applied to the leaves—what the first part of the statement in fact de­ scribes is a process of change. But as applied to the human, the statement is in one sense "true"—in the fiction the leaves are always available for metaphor, always budding, bloom­ ing, and bearing fruit at the same time precisely because one thinks of the whole natural process together as a metaphor for human life. The series of budding, blooming, and bearing fruit illus­ trates an important difference between the operation of the metaphorical power of language and the operation of the de­ fining power. In the case of the defining power, the "thing" is thought of as stable and the word as variable. Thus, the fundamentally distinct from each other. I wish to argue here only that one technique or the other dominates each section.

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advent of the word introduces the possibility of illusion. But in the case of the metaphorical power, the terms are re­ versed. The word is thought of as stable, and the thing as variable. Bud as word remains the same whether it is applied to plants or to people, but the thing it refers to is quite dif­ ferent in each case. To use bud as a word in the first place assumes that it has some referent; but that referent shifts and alters with the context. Metaphor depends upon this fact about language. If one could not shift back and forth between leaves and people while thinking bud as the self-identical word, metaphor would be impossible. We would have true and false statements, but probably no poetry. When Stevens says, "These leaves are the poem, the icon and the man," the items in the list are felt as different—not as variations for each other, but metaphors. But the point is that when one compares an icon (thing) to a poem (thing), one thinks of the icon as quite different from the icon that is compared to a leaf or to a man. The word icon is stable; the thing-icon shifts and alters in the mind. This is all as much as to say, of course, that the met­ aphorical power is creative, and so verbal illusion is in one sense impossible. If language in fact creates the thing it is talking about, then there is no room for discrepancy between word and thing, and thus no illusion. If there is only meta­ phor, Stevens has found fiction as cure of illusion, and he has found it "In the predicate that there is nothing else" than the leaves, nothing else than the fiction. The man is his fic­ tion, his poem, his icon, and thus there can be no loss of the sort described in the first lines of the poem. But the second section of "The Rock," though it discovers the metaphorical power that is the "cure," does not yet reckon fully with the fact, the world as given. The cure is "a cure of the ground and of ourselves." The ground and the rock are given, are somehow there before the advent of the human and before language. "It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves." It is not sufficient to decorate the world with ornamental fictions. The line implies, nevertheless, that the rock is somehow there whether it is covered or not, is some-

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how a brute given at the base of fiction and not created by fiction. Our fictions could make us forget that the rock is there, perhaps, but Stevens seeks a "cure beyond forgetfulness." We must recognize, then, that there is one sense in which the metaphorical power does not create the rock. It only creates it as what it is, or, to use the old terms, gives its "substance" the "form" that makes it intelligible: in the "plenty" of wisdom and experience, . . . the poem makes meanings of the rock, Of such mixed motion and such imagery That its barrenness becomes a thousand things And so exists no more. This is the cure Of leaves and of the ground and of ourselves. Without attempting to foist upon Stevens any particular philosophical positions, I think it is helpful to look at the rock as something very like Santayana's "matter."89 For San89 There are of course almost as many different interpretations of Stevens' developing symbol of the rock as there are critics The standard treatment is Ralph J. Mills, Jr., "Wallace Stevens. The Image of the Rock," in Wallace Stevens· A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Mane Borroff (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, cl963), pp. 96-110. For Mills, the rock-symbol finally joins the "two primary components of Stevens' poetic cosmos, the brute material fact and the imagination which lends it meaning and value" (p 101); the rock also has a relation to death in the third section of "The Rock" (p. 106), and it is connected with the traditional religious image of the rock as the church—Stevens wants to replace the Christian formulation (pp. 1078). Riddel emphasizes the complexity and the changing nature of the sym­ bol, but in "The Rock" it represents "that in which man must dwell, the inclusive world of thing and idea which harbors the self, and paradoxically, which the self harbors" (The Clairvoyant Eye, p. 245). Roy Harvey Pearce, "Wallace Stevens; The Last Lesson of the Master," in The Act of the Mind, equates the rock with "reality," and says that the poet cannot be satisfied by knowing the rock "mediately" in poems—he must be "cured," which is "wanting to have God's mind" and "to be responsible for God's thoughts— which are reality." Then, if the cure works, reality will be equivalent to the mind or the imagination: "God is a revelation of the ego, because reality is" (pp. 123-24). Frank Doggett, Stevens' Poetry of Thought (Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press, ¢1966), also equates the rock with "real­ ity," and argues that the rock is presented under three different aspects in the three sections of "The Rock": (1) the "possible but unrealized funda-

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tayana, matter does not exhaust being—there is also "spirit," for example, dependent on matter, and there are "essences" that spirit apprehends—but matter does exhaust the category of things with spatial and temporal relations (things that "ex­ ist," to use Santayana's term, instead of merely "being"). But matter is a surd. It is ultimately unintelligible in itself, and we know it only insofar as it serves as the principle of in­ stantiation of essences. This seems to me very close to what Stevens is saying in the lines I have just quoted. The rock pre-exists in its "barrenness," its unintelligibility, and the poem "creates" the rock as something by means of the metaphorical power. But the rock, like Santayana's matter, is always at the base of everything. It is the existing world of things of which we ourselves are ultimately a part, and upon which our consciousness itself depends. This last idea is an important theme in the third section of ment for conscious being"; (2) the "base or ground of the impermanent", (3) something whose aspects are "recounted in a music that issues from the primal source of being," where the "compendium of things for which the rock is said to stand constitutes all the specifics of human experience" (pp. 195, 197-98) Adalaide Kirby Moms, Wallace Stevens Imagination and Faith (Princeton, N.J Princeton University Press, cl974), discusses Stevens' use of the rock in his poetry as an "appropriation of the biblical image," the "truth and the object of worship and belief' (p 139) The rock also "em­ bodies the interchange of environment and self, visible and invisible, reality and imagination which is, for Stevens, the essence of poetry" (p. 141). For Alan Perhs, Wallace Stevens A World of Transforming Shapes (Lewisburg, Pa. Bucknell University Press, cl976), the rock in "The Rock" is "the mind itself, shattered into such diamond-faceted brilliance that it encompasses all possibilities for human thought" (p. 120) Bloom adds that the rock in the final section of the poem becomes everything, "a composite trope for his repression or internalization of poetic tradition" (Wallace Stevens, ρ 344) All of these formulations could perhaps be assimilated to Santayana's con­ cept of "matter," with more or less distortion of the critics' views Santa­ yana's concept, although it is by no means simple or free of problems, still seems to me more philosophically rigorous and more elegantly worked out than the usual formulations of "reality" or "mind" or "imagination" that critics apply to the symbol of the rock I use Santayana's concept here not because I think Stevens necessarily had Santayana in mind (though he may have), but because it is better to use a relatively well-defined concept to analyze a problematic symbol than to use an undefined concept At least we should then have a fairly clear idea of where our interpretation has led us.

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"The Rock." The third section does exactly what Stevens promises: it gives us "Forms of the Rock . . . ," the rock seen under different aspects and therefore created by the meta­ phorical power as the sum of the metaphors about it.90 The interesting thing about the third section for my purposes is again the dominant verbal device. Stevens in this section combines the two powers of language. The overall form of the section is that of a series of quasi-defmitions, as in the first section: "The rock is the gray particular. . . . The rock is the stern particular. . . . The rock is the habitation of the whole. ..." Stevens thus seems to invoke the defining power. Presumably the rock "remains the same" while the poem seeks one verbal approximation after another. But certainly within each "definition" (and perhaps also when we begin to compare the apparently "equivalent" definitions with each other), Stevens invokes the metaphorical power. For the items in each of the defining series are clearly felt as different from, and sometimes incompatible with, each other. For example: The rock is the gray particular of man's life, The stone from which he rises, up-and-ho. . . . Thinking of a rock as a stone does not involve an exercise of the metaphorical power, but it does involve that power to think of a stone as a "gray particular of man's life" (i.e., perhaps something like the "malady of the quotidian,"91 the necessity of material beings to make their way in a material world). 90 Riddel's characterization of the third section as "a recitative as it were in which meditation becomes an iconic act, and rock and self achieve what union, what 'cure,' is possible" (The Clairvoyant Eye, ρ 250) seems fine as far as it goes, but Riddel is rather vague about the nature of the union or the techniques for achieving it. Nor does it seem satisfactory to conclude with Bloom that the "forward motion" of the poem ends with the second section, leaving the third section as a "reflective coda" (Wallace Stevens, ρ 350). 91 Professor T. Pnce Caldwell suggested to me comparing these lines from "The Rock" with the phrase from "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad "

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More clearly, The rock is the stern particular of the air, The mirror of the planets, one by one, But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist, Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams. . . . Perhaps one could think of the "stern particular of the air" as something like the law of gravity, a synecdoche for that about matter which limits freedom. The law of gravity is a "particular" with respect to imagination. The universe did not have to be built this way, for we can imagine it other­ wise. The rock thus "mirrors" the planets in two senses: (1) it is the material law that holds the solar system together, and the "literal" rock is composed of particles obeying the same laws that the planets obey; (2) the rock appears to be different under different aspects of seeing, as the "literal" rock appears to be of different colors depending upon whether it is seen under the sun or under the moon. I think the sun and the moon must be the planets Stevens is talking about, as in "Someone Puts A Pineapple Together"—a poem that has important affinities with this one. The gray rock is tur­ quoise in moonlight, red at sunset. Sometimes, even, the natural world seems perfectly to match the poem in the "dif­ ficult Tightness of half-risen day." But the point is that the human being "colors" the rock with emotion in different and mutually incompatible ways. The rock cannot be gray and turquoise, gray and red, at the same time, except by an ex­ ercise of the metaphorical power—as with the leaves that bud, bloom, and bear fruit "without change." In reading the lines just quoted, there is a moment when "their silent rhapsodist" might seem to be in apposition not with "man's eye," but with "the stern particular" and "The mirror of the planets" (that is, the rock as "silent rhapsodist" of the planets), all three things felt as different, as metaphors for each other in­ stead of variations. And in a later definition the rock seems to be both point A and point B, that which is near and that

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which is far, the center and the circumference (the "origin of the mango's rind," where "origin" keeps also its geometrical meaning). In short, Stevens in this section applies the cure he found in the second section. He admits a kind of precedence or stability of the rock by means of his structures of definition, but he at the same time denies illusion and loss by means of the metaphorical structures inside those definitions. The rock is created, not absolutely, but as what it is, by the power of language. The rock is no longer that which destroys the hu­ man, but that which sustains consciousness. The poem ends with what seems almost a string of paradoxes, and in the middle of the string one gets lost in the syntax and cannot tell whether the rock or the mind is being talked about: It is the rock where tranquil must adduce Its tranquil self, the main of things, the mind, The starting point of the human and the end, That in which space itself is contained, the gate To the enclosure, day, the things illumined By day, night and that which night illumines. . . . Are all of these things the rock, or the mind? Stevens' syn­ tactic appositions and alternatives throughout the poem build to this point, where one loses the thread, loses track of whether there is variation or metaphor. Where the powers of lan­ guage merge in the mind, as here, a particular kind of rec­ iprocity between mind and world is set up. We become aware of the reciprocity between mind and world precisely when we have the experience of being muddled in language, of not knowing whether we are defining something that exists sta­ bly apart from the words we are using, or whether we are creating or changing something by means of our language about it. More accurately, we experience the reciprocity be­ tween mind and world when we seem to be doing both of these things at the same time. Stevens' tropes work toward an illustration of this reciprocity, where language itself be­ comes the middle term. Language as poetry (fiction) can be

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the cure of loss because it creates the world as what it is, while at the same time taking adequate account of the world as given. It remains to see how Tennyson's view of language differs from Stevens'. The crucial passage is of course lyric ν of In Memoriam, where the metaphors applied to language undergo a curious modulation. In the first stanza, language is itself like a body for the emotion, apparently. Grief can be "put in words," and words are "like Nature" in that they "half reveal / And half conceal the Soul within." The latter image seems to depend on the body/soul division; words are the body of the emotion, which is the soul. But in the second stanza, words are no longer the body. The "measured lan­ guage" is a "sad mechanic exercise," or like "dull narcotics, numbing pain." Words merely result from the activity of some body (either the actual physical body, the writing hand; or, more likely, the body of the emotion as it "exercises" itself in the world). At best, words can drug some body (again, no doubt, the painful body of the emotion). Words lose their substantiality, becoming external activities or therapy.92 Fi­ nally, in the third stanza, the words become the external, crude wrappings of the body of grief, a protection, but also a concealment as in the first stanza: In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, Like coarsest clothes against the cold: But that large grief which these enfold Is given in outline and no more. Again, the body of the emotion is like the poet's body, and not some other body in the world. But the words do not embody the grief, as perhaps the Yew does. They only "out­ line" it. It is interesting that the Yew itself grasps "at the stones / That name the under-lying dead" (lines 1-2), some­ what like the poet himself, who grasps at language as some92 K. W. Gransden mentions Tennyson's emphasis on the "therapeutic quality" of the poem as the "end product of compulsive activity" (Tennyson: In Memoriam, p. 48).

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thing external to the experience. It is almost as though one requires a physical embodiment of the emotion, a thing like the Yew, to be able to grasp words at all. Emotion through taking on some physical body in the external world makes language possible. In v, then, language suffers a process of demotion. It descends from the status of something inti­ mately tied to the experience, as body is tied to soul; to the status of something external to the experience, as clothes are to the body. It is necessary for Tennyson to reach this point. If words were really the body of the experience, then words could heal grief and not merely numb it. But the effective­ ness of this whole section of the poem depends upon our willingness to assume that there is something deeper than language, something ineffable beyond it that is the emotion. We must, that is, take the tropes as attempts to express or to point to something that pre-exists them and upon which they depend absolutely. Whether in fact language is as powerless and external as Tennyson presents it in ν is another question. There is In Memoriam itself to refute the idea, and perhaps we could read the whole poem as the account of Tennyson's progress toward realizing, among other things, the intimate power of language.93 The introductory lyric is, after all, in the form of a prayer. But the point here is that in one sense Tennyson recognizes the doubleness of language just as Stevens does. Although Stevens does not regard things as prior to language 93 F.S.L. Priestley, Language and Structure in Tennyson's Poetry (London: Andre Deutsch, 1973), discusses Tennyson's theory of language in In Memoriam. Priestley analyzes lyric ν (pp. 147-48), and then describes how the ambiguous nature of language and its complexity become more explicit themes in later sections of the poem (LII, XLVIII, XX, XVI, LXXIV, IXXV, LXXXVIII): "One is tempted to think that sections of the poem begun only with the conscious feeling that the discipline of setting words into the formal pattern of the quatrain provided a distraction from sorrow, using ideas and themes which arose spontaneously, surprised the poet on re-reading with the depths of their meanings" (p. 153). Shaw mentions that Tennyson's stylistic traits come in part from his "theory of language": "Words are not simply tokens or shadows, . . . but neither can they be direct apprehensions" (,Tennyson's Style, pp. 302-3).

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in every way, apparently, and Tennyson does, both agree that language is somehow at once representational and rev­ elatory or, to use the familiar metaphors, that language can be presented as "mirror" or as "lamp." The crucial differ­ ence in the two poets is in the significance attributed to the double nature of language in the workings of their tropes. We can interpret Tennyson's tropes only under the presup­ position that emotion is prior and language is external. To interpret Tennyson explicitly is to adopt the assumption. We must understand the world as embodying emotion not in a linguistic sense, but as a pre-linguistic embodying, an em­ bodying that would occur without language, as we can make ourselves believe that we inhabit our bodies and have emo­ tion before the advent of language. Language is secondary for Tennyson in a way that the rest of the external world, the Yew and Nature, is not. His tropes exploit that secondariness. The tropes invite us to look beyond them to the prior emotion, and so we have the emotion as something pointed to. To interpret Stevens' tropes, on the other hand, I have argued that we must be prepared to understand the world as linguistically determined, to allow "things" to change shape and meaning in our minds in a kind of free play, depending upon what words are used of them, and to be aware of that freedom. The doubleness of language is of ultimate signifi­ cance in Stevens. The difference between the two poets is in one sense thematic. One treats emotion as the middle term between mind and world, and the other finds the middle term in language. But the difference goes deeper than that. The tropes of each poet as interpreted presuppose the pecul­ iar stance of each toward the question of reciprocity between mind and world and the question of the nature of language. I would argue that the model provided by the genre-theory, then, once again provides us with a logical structure for ar­ ticulating the differences between poems that we feel very clearly to be different, and provides us with a way of giving

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a coherent account of what we have done in interpreting the poems. Conclusion

In this chapter I have addressed some elementary problems that must arise in any attempt at writing "literary history": the problem of "reading" an individual poem, and certain problems of comparing poems with each other. I have tried to show that our interpretive model provides a logical struc­ ture and a terminology that makes comparisons possible, and that it provides a basis for making certain critical distinctions helpful in interpretation. I have left a great deal to be said about all of the poems I have talked about. For the most part, my readings are not especially radical in their approach or in their conclusions. Rather, my aim has been to ground gen­ uine critical insights, not all of them my own, in an explicitly articulated model of interpretation. I hope I have indicated what the interpretive model can do with a variety of poems and problems, and I hope I have suggested how it might provide a logical structure compati­ ble with the concept of "literary history." I hope I have also sufficiently demonstrated why the model can never provide a program, a machine for the interpretation of literary works. Reciprocity between mind and world, as mediated by trope, is a condition for the understanding of a work as lyric, and not primarily a heuristic concept to be used as a tool for prying out meanings. The greatest danger for this or any interpretive model is that it be taken as a means of producing understanding, instead of merely articulating it. But if we can avoid letting the hermeneutic circle become vicious in that way, I believe we have a chance of understanding what we mean by the various terms of critical discourse, of know­ ing what we are doing when we interpret works, and of accounting for our activities as rational beings should be ex­ pected to account for them.

Index

a prion concepts, 42, 45 See also categones accident, 42, 45, 49, 51, 60-62, 179 Adams, Hazard, 95n adequacy, 164-69, 174-75 Adey, Lionel, 249 aesthetic contemplation, 51-52, 68, 104, 106, 109, 120, 171 allegory, 154n See also personifica­ tion allegory Amencan New Cntics, 24, 69-70, 78, 80, 124, 165, 167-69 Anderson, John Q , 98n anomalous voice, 78-86, 94, 101-6, 180 Aristotle, 42, 44, 52, 59, 178 Arnold, Matthew "Dover Beach," 162, 254n authenticity, 122n, 168 axiomatic terms, 5, 178 Beardsley, Monroe, 175n beauty, 171-72 "Because I could not stop for Death," 97-101 Bennett, Josephine Waters, 184, 185n, 191n, 195 Berthoff, Ann E , 110-lln Bishop, Jonathan, 246 Bjorvand, Einar, 186, 190n Blake, William "The Divine Image," 94 "The Human Abstract," 94 Jerusalem, 90 "London," 94 "The Mental Traveller," 235 "Nurse's Song" (Experience), 94-97 Songs of Innocence and of Experi­ ence, 94

"To Summer," 97n Bloom, Harold, 90, 93-94, 256, 257, 258, 263n, 264n Booth, Wayne, 82n Boyd, John D , 252 "The Bntish Church," 202-4, 21315, 218-20 Brooke, Nicholas, 90-91, 93-94 Brooks, Cleanth, 69, 167-68, 170, 172, 222-23, 225-26, 227, 228n, 230n, 233 Bruno, Giordano, 206 Caldwell, T Pnce, 264n The Canterbury Tales, 62-67 capacity, 164, 170-72, 175 carpe diem, 114 Cassirer, Ernst, 10, 39, 50, 142, 170 catachresis, 255 categoncal judgment, 44-45 categones, 41-53, 57, 75-76 causal model of interpretation, 158, 161, 166

causality, 42, 46-49, 51-52, 57, 5859, 61, 75-76, 80-81, 178-79 Chatman, Seymour, 78n, 82n Chaucer, Geoffrey, 187 The Canterbury Tales, 62-67 Chesterton, G K , 95n "The Church-Porch," 202 cognitive atheists, 129, 138, 152 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 162, 167 community, 46-52, 67, 75-76 compass of perspectives, 32-33 complexity, 175n conceit, 206, 207-8 consensus See public consensus convention, 22-23, 25-29, 60 correctness, 122-47, 152-56

272 Crane, R S , 12-13, 31, 168-69 Crashaw, Richard Wishes To his (supposed) Mistresse, 112

"Crazy Jane and Jack the Journey­ man," 92-93n "Crazy Jane Talks With The Bishop," 89-94 critical pluralism, 12-13 critical terms, 177-78 Croce, Benedetto, 24-25, 27, 3435, 37, 40 Damon, S Foster, 95n, 97n Dante, 159-60 Dasetn, 16, 37-39, 57, 128, 132 deconstruction, 4-5, 149-53 definition, 259-61, 264 Dernda, Jacques, 147-54, 255 Descartes, Rene, 49, 256 determinacy, 25, 129-30 Dickinson, Emily, 94 "Because I could not stop for Death," 97-101 dtfferance, 148-49 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 10-11, 14-17, 19, 25, 51-52, 68, 125, 133, 143 discordia concors, 208 disjunctive judgment, 45-46 "The Divine Image," 94 Doggett, Frank, 256n, 262-63n Donne, John, 202-20 Holy Sonnets, 216n "Show me deare Christ," 202-4, 213-20 "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," 207-8 Donoghue, Denis, 89 "Dover Beach," 162, 254n drama, 31-34, 35, 37-39, 41, 48-49, 58-62, 68, 78, 80-81, 101-2, 17879 dualism, 223-24 Eliot, T S , 33, 206n, 251

INDEX

Ellmann, Richard, 108-9 Ellrodt, Robert, 185, 188, 200-201 empathy, 16, 68, 84-85, 88, 91, 9293, 96, 97, 100-101, 104, 238 Enthusiasm, 67n, 222, 238-39 epic, 35, 37-39, 41, 48-49, 59-62, 68-69, 103-4, 106-7, llln, 179 evaluation, 163-75 existential functions, 13, 37-38 explanation, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 1920, 36-37, 40, 135, 151-52, 154, 161, 178 The Faerie Queene, 204, 247 Feldman, Alan, 87n form, 169 Fowre Hymnes, 184-202 The Franklin's Tale, 65-67 Freudian interpretation See psy­ choanalytic interpretation Friedman, Donald M , 110-1 In, 112, 115, 116n

Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 16n, 18, 54-55, 127-28, 133-34, 135n, 138-41, 170-71 Gardner, Helen, 202n, 203-4, 206n, 216 genre-concepts, 11, 19-43, 57-62, 67-70, 74-76, 140 German idealist tradition, 31, 36 Gleckner, Robert F , 95n, 97 "God's Grandeur," 103 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 159-60, 245n Gransden, K W , 253, 267n Gnerson, HJ C , 206n Griffith, Clark, 99n, 100-101 Grob, Alan, 223-24, 226-27, 23031, 235n, 238, 239 "The H Scriptures, II," 218 Hallam, A H , 251 Hamburger, Kate, 69, 106 Hammond, Mac, 256

273

INDEX

Hartman, Geoffrey, 222, 226 Hegel, G W F , 30, 35-37, 39, 4041, 59, 61, 69 Heidegger, Martin, 13, 15-18, 23, 25, 26, 37-38, 41, 57, 124-25, 128, 132-34, 138, 147 Heideggenans, 122n, 124-29, 13132, 133-36, 138-41, 154n Hellstrom, Ward, 248n Herbert, George, 202-20 "The British Church," 202-4, 213-15, 218-20 "The Church-Porch," 202 "The H Scriptures, II," 218 "The Sonne," 218 hermeneutic circle, 16-17, 21, 2627, 74, 124-25, 132-33, 138, 14647, 270 hermeneutics, 11, 16, 124 Hernadi, Paul, 30-36 heuristic, 181, 270 Hirsch, E D , Jr , 25-29, 35, 37, 40, 67n, 95, 97n, 124, 127-38, 140-41, 145, 147, 151-52, 154-56, 162, 222-23, 227, 228n, 234, 23839 Holloway, John, 96 Holy Sonnets, 216n Homer, 62 Hone, Joseph, 88 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 106 "God's Grandeur," 103 "Spring," 103-4 Hughes, R E , 209n "The Human Abstract," 94 human studies, 11-12, 14-19, 126, 135, 138, 156, 175 humanities See human studies Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 50n Husserl, Edmund, 50, 128-29, 137, 148 hypothesis, 135, 156, 161 hypothetical judgment, 45-46 Idealism of Freedom, 51-52

imagery, 180 Imagism, 73, 180 immanent perceptions, 137 "Immortality Ode," 221-41 impersonal lyric, 79, 102-6, 109, 120, 180 implications, 136, 154n "In a Station of the Metro," 72-74, 143, 180-81 In Memortam AH H , 241-54, 26769 influence, 183 inherence, 45-46 instrumentalist theory, 175n intensity, 175n intention, 131, 135, 147, 164-65 Intentional Fallacy, 165 intentionahty, 50, 137, 154, 156 interpretation, 5, 11-14, 16-22, 25, 27-29, 34-35, 53, 55-56, 74-76, 77, 124-47, 152-65, 167, 170-72, 174-75, 176-77 interpretive models, 19-20, 22, 40, 52-53, 181-83 interpretive vocabularies, 157, 160, 162 intrinsic genre, 25-27 Jeffares, A Norman, 90n, 108n Jeffrey, David L , 72 Jerusalem, 90 Johnson, Samuel, 109, 208-9, 212 Kant, Immanuel, 10-11, 24, 25, 37, 41-53, 57, 75, 147, 164, 171-73 Keats, John "Ode to a Nightingale," 143, 155 Kenner, Hugh, 72-73 Kilmer, Joyce, 165-67 knowledge, 3-4, 14-18, 25, 121, 128-31, 133-38, 142, 151, 158-59 language, 9-11, 50, 54-55 Leavis, F R , 206n

274 "Leda and the Swan," 107-9 Legouis, Pierre, 109, 115n Leishman, J B , 112 Lincoln, Kenneth R , 223 "Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey " See "Tmtem Abbey" hterary history, 182-83, 242, 270 literary period, 183, 242, 243-44n literary techniques, 177-81 Locke, John, 49 "London," 94 lyric, 22-23, 31-34, 35, 37-39, 41, 48-49, 67-70, 75-76, 79, 94, 1016, 108-9, l l l n , 120, 176-77, 18082, 202, 212, 221, 270 Mahood, M M , 218n "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad," 264n Mannmg, Stephen, 71 n Mantam, Jacques, 61-62 Martz, Louis, 216n Marvell, Andrew, 120 "On a Drop of Dew," 109-16 "To His Coy Mistress," 81 matter, 262-63 Mazzeo, Joseph Anthony, 206 McCanles, Michael, 217 meaning, 14, 26-28, 124-41, 14546, 148-49, 154-56, 158-63, 17072 Melchion, Giorgio, 108-9 "The Mental Traveller," 235 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 9-10, 50, 54, 125-26, 134 metaphor, 180, 196, 204-6, 212, 215, 258, 259-61, 264, 266 Metaphysical poetry, 206, 208, 211-12, 218-20

metaphysics, 3-4, 10-13, 15, 31, 35-40, 51-52, 148, 150-51 Metzger, Lore, 245n Miller, J Hilhs, 118-19, 147n, 25456

INDEX Mills, RalphJ , J r , 262n mind of the work, 48-57, 59-61, 67-70, 77, 78-79, 80-82, 85, 88, 94, 96, 97, 100, 101-2, 104-7, 108-9, l l l n , 120, 166, 177, 17879 Miner, Earl, 72-73n, 212, 218-19 model, 4-6, 11-15, 19-20, 26, 34, 43, 57, 176-78, 181-83 Mont Blanc, 83 Morns, Adalaide Kirby, 263n Mulder, John R , 210-11 Myers, Neil, 116 narrative, 31-34, 59-61 narrator, 59-61 natural sciences, 10-12, 14-20 natural wit, 206-12 Naturalism, 51-52 Nelson, Wilham, 185, 188 neo-Aristotelian school, 168-69 Neoplatonism, 184-85, 192 New Critics See American New Critics normative employment of genreconcepts, 24-25 "Nou goth Sonne vnder wod," 7072 novel, 59-62 "Nurse's Song" (Experience), 94-97 object, 31, 36, 37, 50-51, 69 objective correlative, 33, 251 Objective idealism, 51-52 objectivity, 42-43, 69, 122-23, 138, 147 "Ode Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood," 221-41 "Ode to a Nightingale," 143, 155 "On a Drop of Dew," 109-16 Padelford, F M , 184-85 paradox, 216-17, 219-20 paradoxical wit, 215-17, 219-20

INDEX Parkinson, Thomas, 86, 93n, 108n Pearce1 Roy Harvey, 262n Perlis, Alan, 263n personification allegory, 246-50 Pitt, Valerie, 243 Plato, 184-85, 193, 194n, 195, 235 plot, 178-79 point of view, 179 Pope, Alexander, 208-9 Poulet, Georges, 53-54 Pound, Ezra "In a Station o f the Metro," 72-74, 143, 180-81 The Prelude, 83, 105 Priestley, F.S.L., 268n The Prioress's Tale, 63-65 probability, 26, 131, 135, 156 projection, 37-38, 41, 132 psychoanalytic interpretation, 15762, 166 public consensus, 131 Pulos, C. E., 223, 228n

Ransom, John Crowe, 69 Raysor, Thomas Μ., 222 reciprocity, 46-47, 50-52, 67-69, 71-74, 81, 85, 94, 102, 104, 108, 110-lln, 113, 115, 119-20, 18083, 189, 192, 196, 198-99, 201-2, 206, 211-12, 215, 220, 221, 235, 240-41, 248, 252-53, 254n, 266, 269, 270 recollection, 38, 41 reflexivity, 19-25, 29, 34, 36, 43, 48, 52-53, 74-76, 140 relational categories. See categories relative perfection, 164, 172-75 relativism, 121, 128 Richards, I. A., 174-75 Ricks, Christopher, 245n, 249 Ricoeur, Paul, 9, 13, 126-27 Riddel, Joseph N., 147n, 255, 256n, 262n, 264n Ridley, Florence H., 64-65

275 "The Rock," 241-45, 254-69 Rollinson, Philip B., 186 Romanticism, 67-68n Ross, Malcolm Mackenzie, 202

Sanders, Charles Richard, 248n Santayana, George, 5, 11, 52, 256, 258, 262-63 Saveson1J. E., llln, 115n Schneider, Robert L., 223, 228n, 238 scholastic wit, 215, 217-20 scientific cognition, 15-20, 34, 135 sentimentality, 166, 168 shared type. See type Shaw, David, 252, 268n Shelley, Percy Bysshe Mont Blanc, 83 "Show me deare Christ," 202-4, 213-20 sign, 147-49 significance, 128-29, 154n signified, 147-50 signifier, 147-50 Sinfield, Alan, 251-52 "Someone Puts A Pineapple To­ gether," 265 Songs of Innocence and of Experience, 94 "The Sonne," 218 "A Sort of a Song," 119 source-studies, 162 Spannung, 41, 59 Spenser, Edmund The Faerie Queene, 204, 247 Fowre Hymnes, 184-202 Sperry, Stuart M., Jr., 236n "Spring," 104 "Spring and All," 116-20 Spring and All, 109, 116 Staiger, Emil, 23, 30, 37-41, 59, 60n, 69, 178 standard, 122-23, 131, 140-41, 14547, 154-55, 163

276 Stevens, Wallace "The Man Whose Pharynx Was Bad," 264n "The Rock," 241-45, 254-69 "Someone Puts A Pineapple Together," 265 structuralism, 9 structure, 178-79 subject, 31, 36, 37, 50-51, 53-54, 69 subject-matter, 40-41, 69, 141-50, 152-62, 163n, 164-65, 166-69, 173, 205-8, 213, 243-44n subjectivity, 35, 37, 40-41, 53-54, 69, 122-23, 138-39, 171 substance, 42, 45-46, 47-49, 51, 6062, 75-76, 179 symbol, 83-85, 100, 104-5, 112-14, 120, 168, 213, 215-16, 218 Tennyson, Alfred In Memortam A H H , 241-54,

267-69 tenor, 74, 189, 205-8, 214 text, 54-55, 141-46, 149-54, 156-57, 161-63 thematic modes, 31-34 "Tmtern Abbey," 78, 81, 105, 15961, 166, 173, 223 "To His Coy Mistress," 81 "To Summer," 97n Todorov, Tzvetan, 61n Tohver, Harold E , 114, 115n trace, 147-49 tragedy, 167-68 transcendent reading, 150, 152-53 transcendently directed experiences, 137 "Trees," 165-67 Trilling, Lionel, 221-22, 225, 235, 237, 239 trope, 110, 180-82, 189, 196, 19899, 201, 205, 206, 209n, 212, 221, 240, 269, 270

INDEX

truth, 127, 173 Turner, Paul, 245n type, 27, 130-31, 134, 135-38, 140, 145, 155

unconscious meanings, 158-62, 166 understanding, 11, 14-21, 25, 26, 37, 41, 44-45, 53-55, 57, 121, 125, 129, 132-35, 138-39, 142-45, 147, 152, 158, 161, 163, 171, 174-75, 176, 270 unity, 167-69, 175n Unity in Multeity, 167 Urban, W M , 168

"A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," 207-8 Valery, Paul, 134 validity, 122, 134, 141, 145 variation, 257, 259, 266 vehicle, 74, 189, 198-99, 205-8, 213 Vendler, Helen, 218n, 230n verbal wit, 206-12, 213-15, 219-20 Victonan poetry, 242, 243, 254n voice, 78n, 81-85, 92, 104 See also anomalous voice

Wall, John N , Jr , 216n Wellek, Rene, 22-25, 29-30, 36, 40 Welsford, Enid, 185-86, 192, 19495 Weltanschauung See world-view willed type See type Williams, Kathleen, 191 η Williams, William Carlos "A Sort of a Song," 119 "Spring and All," 109, 116-20 Spring and All, 109, 116 Winters, Yvor, 100-101 Wishes To his (supposed) Mistresse,

112

277

INDEX

wit, 206, 219. See also natural wit, paradoxical wit, scholastic wit, verbal wit Woolf, Rosemary, 71n Wordsworth, William, 166, 253, 256 "Ode: Intimations of Immortal­ ity from Recollections of Early Childhood," 221-41 The Prelude, 83, 105 "Tintern Abbey," 78, 81, 105, 159-61, 173, 223 world of the work, 48-57, 59-61, 67-70, 77, 81, 104-7, 108-9,

11 In, 120, 177, 178-79 world-view, 51-52, 55 Yeats, William Butler "Crazy Jane and Jack the Jour­ neyman," 92-93n "Crazy Jane Talks With The Bishop," 89-94 "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory," 86 "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death," 86-88 "Leda and the Swan," 107-9 "Shephard and Goatherd," 86

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA

Rogers, William Elford. The three genres and the interpretation of lyric Includes index. 1. English poetry—History and criticism. 2. Lync poetry—History and criticism. 3 American poetry—History and criticism. 4 Literary form. I. Title. PR509.L8R63 1983 821'.04'09 82-12293 ISBN 0-691-06554-3