How meaning is read: I.A. Richards

Richards' first insight, which he worked out with Ogden in The Meaning of Meaning, is one we are familiar with now after we have fully appreciated Peirce and Saussure, though both these authors were not as well known in the circles Ogden and Richards were moving in at the time they formulated it: that a word does not get its meaning without its context. The context determines the meaning of the word.

Now, here is where Richards comes in and shows how we indeed can use a word and have words mean if only the context determines this meaning--a thought which is not at first clear if we think words simply mean by virtue of their own intrinsic power (this is what Ogden and Richards call "word magic"--essentially, it is seeing every word as a proper name). In short, we must understand what we mean by "context" correctly. Richards has many ways of ensuring that we do indeed understand this, and I'll employ one of the most precise: his discussion of these matters in Interpretatation in Teaching (p. viii-ix). There, Richards says there are two ways we can understand context. First, we can understand context as the other words that surround the word, so that we can say a word gets its meaning from other words. Richards calls this notion the "literary context," or the "setting" of the word. The other way we can understand context is as the event of the word's use: the word is used at a certain time and in a certain situation (because it has been used in a similar situation before), and this, not how it occurs in a book, say, makes up the context. Richards puts it well: "Thus a word's context, in this sense, is a certain recurrent pattern of past groups of events, and to say that its meaning depends on its context would be to point to the process by which it has acquired its meaning" (viii).

Richards calls this second form of context context proper: the context is a group of events, not the surrounding words. And he explicitly says that to understand the context of a word solely as its setting, or literary context or setting, would make his whole theory of meaning become nonsense. The word does not get its meaning from other words: it gets its meaning from its use in the past.

However, in every case the word (or sign in general, but I will stick to words or verbal signs) is never without a setting, or a literary context: the word's use in the past is always made up of its being surrounted by other words. "We always take a sign," or word, Richards says, "as being in some setting..., as part of an interconnected sign-field (normally, with verbal signs, a sentence...)" (viii). So in a way the word does get its meaning from other words, from the literary setting. But we can only say this if we remember that context (in its proper sense), however, always remains larger than mere setting, so we cannot reduce that the meaning of a word to other words alone. So while a word's meaning is indeed other words, it is not primarily other words: it is primarily the context, the use, which bears upon the setting and therefore the meaning.

But because context proper (as use) always occurs in a setting, or a surrounding set of words (a sign-field, as Richards calls it), failing to apprehend the setting can affect whether we understand the context or the use. It is in this way (and only in this way) that the setting controls the context proper: "Insufficient attention to the accompanying sign-field (the setting...) which controls the context (recurrent groups of events in the past) is a frequent cause of mistaken understanding" (viii).

Again, this is the only way. For the most important point here is that the context or use still is the ultimate thing determining the meaning. This is why just devoting more attention to the setting will not ensure that meaning is grasped: "No care, however great, in observing the setting will secure good interpretation if past experience has not provided the required originative context" (viii). In other words--and this should totally blow away anyone who associates Richards with the New Critics--close reading, insofar as it is understood as an intimate attention to the detail of a text, cannot, alone, produce any better understanding of meaning. This is because, so understood, it does not bring in context. In fact, paying attention to the setting often brings in the wrong contexts.

I personally think that close reading for Richards is understood differently for precisely this reason. Close reading for him is not greater care in observing the literary setting--and he calls it this I think precisely to counter the impression that reading or interpretation only occurs with literature, in little books, and not more widely, wherever there is communication. It is primarily the closer grasp of context, or rather, the alteration and modification of context so that it bears more closely upon the settings--it eliminates irrelevant contexts or uses which occur because of the "control" setting has over context in the sense we specified above. In other words, it makes uses more visible through the distortion of the literary setting.

A focusing, a narrowing down of the possible contexts is what allows for a more clearer apprehension of meaning through the setting, through other words--and this is what really constitutes close reading. And this is why classrooms in particular becomes so important: they can operate as very focused settings, settings that can narrow down the range of contexts. "The contexts which control meanings are always fluctuating with changes in the setting: the teacher's aim is to help them [the contexts] become as orderly, as supple, and as servicable as possible" (ix). They, the classrooms, and not the virtuosic skill of a particular mind--which allows it to have more and more attention, as the New Critics like Brooks will claim--constitute the real vehicle that produces close reading. And it is only the generation of more spaces, besides the classroom, where the type of narrowing down of context can take place that will produce better understandings of meaning.