The Old New Criticism

In the formulations of Stanley Fish, the literary critic does not seek to elucidate the vision of reality represented by a work of literature, but instead sets out to bend a “text” (so much plastic verbiage) to his own version of things, and to manipulate an audience in the process. Of course as Fish’s language reveals, this interpretive license only operates “within the constraints embedded in the literary institution,” or, as he has taken to calling it, the “interpretive community.” It turns out that maximum freedom is maximum bondage, the critic being as much a product of his socioeconomic situation as a book.

I have come to learn that this state of affairs was anticipated by Cleanth Brooks, the famous progenitor of "New Criticism." In the preface to The Well Wrought Urn, perhaps the single most important work of the "movement," he observed, “The temper of our times is strongly relativistic,” and in the face of this, he affirms the propriety, indeed the necessity, of seeing “what residuum, if any, is left after we have referred the poem to its cultural matrix.” Brooks explicitly affirms the importance of literary history, and anyone familiar with his own critical practice will be aware of his profound knowledge of the historical context of the literary works he treats. “Yet,” he continues, “if poetry exists as poetry in any meaningful sense, the attempt must be made [to view it sub specie aeternitatis]. Otherwise the poetry of the past becomes significant merely as cultural anthropology, and the poetry of the present, merely as a political, or religious, or moral instrument.” The state of affairs about which Brooks offered this caution fifty-odd years ago is now cheerfully flaunted as the New Historicism.

The first chapter of The Well Wrought Urn, titled “The Language of Paradox,” provides perhaps the most vivid clue to both the implications of the New Criticism and of ideological theories that have arisen to challenge it. It is this chapter, for instance, that has been singled out for “deconstruction” by Jonathan Culler. In it Brooks sets out to show that the language of poetry is inherently paradoxical--a blend of “irony and wonder”; that is, what distinguishes a genuine poem is that its verbal pattern, especially its various figures of speech, cannot be reduced to any set of plain prose statements—or at least that any such paraphrase is not the same as, or interchangeable with, the poem. In the language of economics, poetry is not fungible. Precisely this irreducibility is what constitutes a poem’s independent existence according to Brooks.

The poem that Brooks cites to illustrate this view is “The Canonization” by John Donne, a brilliant, if extravagant and sometimes risque, deployment of religious language in defense of human sexual love. The poem is by turns outrageously and defiantly witty, tender, and impassioned. What is more, there are numerous features of the poem that seem to reflect Donne’s own life--he destroyed his hopes for preferment at Court and fell into disgrace and financial ruin by eloping with a very young woman staying in his employer’s household.

The poem, however, was not published until after the poet’s death, and its actual relation to events in his life is finally a matter of speculation. Brooks’ central thesis is that the seemingly contradictory tensions in “The Canonization”—the ironic, even bawdy, references to sexual intercourse jostling against the assertions of human love’s transcendence—finally converge in a unified vision of our experience of love which cannot be expressed in our ordinary, commonsense statements about it. The vision that is verbally manifest in the poem may or may not have been inspired or provoked by this or that incident or preoccupation in the life of the man John Donne, but the poem itself is distinct from the aims and experiences of the poet, and accessible to the experience of readers in a way that the actual life experience of another is not.

Consider, for example, the central stanza of “The Canonization” (also see the wikipedia link:

Call us what you will, wee’are made such by love;
Call her one, mee another flye,
We’are Tapers too, and at our owne cost die,
And wee in us finde the’Eagle and the dove.
The Phoenix ridle hath more wit
By us, we two being one, are it.
So, to one neutrall thing both sexes fit.
Wee dye and rise the same,
and prove Mysterious by this love.

There are more puzzles and obscurities and complex tonal layers than I can begin to unravel here (that, after all, is the point), but I do wish to call attention to the closing couplet. Christ’s Resurrection from death, one of the mysteries of the Christian faith, is evoked here at the same time and in the same words as a bawdy Renaissance pun on “dying” as the attainment of sexual climax. One could choose to regard this as mere blasphemy, but the tone of the poem as a whole seems to preclude such a simplification; yet the lines do gain much of their force from the suggestion of blasphemy. This passage, and finally the poem as a whole, sets out to acknowledge, and so far as possible embrace, our entire equivocal experience of human sexuality, which is funny, embarrassing, obscene, “dirty”; exciting and pleasurable and yet repugnant; tender, exalted, sacred. Marriage is, after all, regarded by some Christian communions as a sacrament and by all as a holy and honorable estate, and it is only consummated by sexual intercourse. Brooks’ comment on the passage is instructive: “The lovers after the act are the same. Their love is not exhausted in mere lust. This is their title to canonization. Their love is like the phoenix. . . . Most important of all, the sexual submeaning of ‘die’ does not contradict the other meanings.”

It is not my purpose here to defend every aspect of Brooks’ reading of “The Canonization” (I myself find the poem less solemn and more boisterous than he); what is at stake, however, is his view of this poem-—or any effective poem-—as a triumph over the inadequacies of our ordinary language. The heart of the New Critical account of poetry, of literature generally, is the discovery of how the work of imaginative writers pushes back the limitations of human language, yet at the same time, in the very act of challenging them, reminds us of the ineluctable presence of such limitations by the extraordinary literary devices required for the confrontation.

The enemies Brooks and his generation were accustomed to were likely to attack from the direction of positivism or a quasi-scientific rationalism: literature was dismissed as merely “emotive,” inaccurate, not “empirically verifiable.” Hence the New Critics were at pains to stress that the language of imaginative literature and of proper literary criticism was, in its own way, as precise as the language of science, that if the knowledge embodied in literature lacked the mathematical certitude of physics, it was nevertheless objective.

From the deconstructivist perspective, however, no discourse can boast precision or objectivity; no signifier can make the signified fully present or available to the mind. Everything, then, is “literature,” but this is not an honorific term. Scientific and philosophic discourse, legal documents, and pastoral elegies are all chains of signifiers that never terminate in the signified: textuality is our prison from which there is no escape.

The typical procedure of deconstruction is to grasp a loose thread in the textual weave of a discourse and to proceed with the unraveling. Jonathan Culler seizes upon Brooks’ comment on the fourth stanza of “The Canonization,” where the “sonnets” and “hymnes” celebrating the passion of the lovers are compared to a “well wrought urne.” “The poem is an instance of the doctrine which it asserts,” Brooks says; “it is both the assertion and the realization of the assertion. The poet has actually before our eyes built within the song the ‘pretty room’ with which he says the lovers can be content. The poem itself is the well-wrought urn which can hold the lovers’ ashes and which will not suffer in comparison with the prince’s ‘halfe-acre tombe.’“

According to Culler, in On Deconstruction, Brooks is attributing to the poem a “self-reference”—a “self-reflexivity . . . seen as self-knowledge, self-possession, a self-understanding or presence of the poem to itself.” But, he assures us, “Under exegetical pressure, self-reference demonstrates the impossibility of self-possession.” Culler proceeds to insist that “The Canonization” is “not so much a self-contained urn as a chain of discourses and representations”; for “if the poem is the urn, then one of the principal features of the urn is that it portrays people responding to the urn.” It turns out that Cleanth Brooks himself becomes part of the poem “he thought he was analyzing from the outside”:

"This self-referential element in Donne’s poem does not produce or induce a closure in which the poem harmoniously is the thing it describes. In celebrating itself as urn the poem incorporates a celebration of the urn and thus becomes something other than the urn; and if the urn is taken to include the response to the urn, then the responses it anticipates, such as Brooks’, become a part of it and prevent it from closing. Self-reference does not close it in upon itself but leads to a proliferation of representations, a series of invocations and urns, including Brooks’ The Well Wrought Urn."

There are two important points to notice here. First, “self-referentiality” is not Brooks’ term, nor his concept; Culler imposes it with no justification. For a poem to be “both the assertion and the realization of the assertion” does not entail “self-reference” or “self-reflexivity.” “The Canonization” refers not to itself, but to what it represents: the speech of a fictive character, whose attitudes and ideas doubtless had their origin in the consciousness of John Donne, but who is certainly not identical with that poet. (The “speaker” or “persona” is as “present” as he ever was; Donne is long since dead.) Second, when Brooks says, “The poem itself is the well wrought urn,” this is a statement of a different order than, say, “The poem comprises forty-five lines.” Brooks uses “well wrought urn” metaphorically, much as Donne does; and so the urn was “something other than an urn” long before Culler noticed. He might as well require Brooks to produce an enameled clay vessel decorated with “Countries, Townes, Courts”; or Keats to account for the deserted village on his “Grecian Urn.” The deconstructionists are quite the cleverest people around the English department these days, but occasionally they resemble the dullest undergraduates in their inability to distinguish between figurative and literal language—or between poetry and pottery.

To be sure, a major goal of the deconstructive project is to put in question such binary oppositions as literal/figurative and literary/scientific; but as the example of Jonathan Culler suggests, we usually get question-begging rather than argument. His deconstruction of Brooks’ reading of “The Canonization” begins by assuming that the notion of self-referentiality applies to a poem in the same fashion as it applies to, say, a legal document that defines itself. Likewise, he assumes that the nature of signification renders nugatory any real distinction between fact and fiction, between literal statement and metaphor. Of course these are the very points that the deconstructionist is supposed to prove. But in fact deconstruction can, finally, prove nothing, for by denying the efficacy of discourse it undermines the significance of proof. Deconstruction is typical of contemporary literary theory in hating the word as an embodiment or manifestation of truth. Hence it attacks the integrity of the fictive world of imaginative literature precisely because literature defines itself in terms of the truth which it is not, but which it represents.

A poem cannot exhaust reality, but it can arrest it: by manifesting a vision of experience available in no other way. This is only possible because, like a physical urn, it is a distinct substantial object: only by its difference from human experience can a poem represent that experience, even as the urn can be a metaphor for a poem only if it is not itself a poem. The alternative to “crystalline closure” is not, then, an endless and chaotic “repetition and proliferation,” but a structured relationship of significance.

Literature helps us to know life precisely in the way that many now deny: literature dramatizes experience by establishing a vantage point outside it. It is just because “The Canonization” occupies a different existential space from John Donne, Cleanth Brooks, and flesh-and-blood love affairs that we are able to learn so much from it about Donne, Brooks, and love--and ourselves.