Talking about poems

You all might be wondering, why the continual interest in I.A. Richards? Well, quite frankly, strange, brilliant, complex, and fragmentary discourses, like Coleridge's, like Derrida's--these are always the most exciting and productive for me to research and to read. Bordering on incompleteness, they provoke you to think in order to complete, and then test and weigh, in a way that something more finished fails to do.

And Richards' certainly belongs in this group. His fault, I think, is that he is actually too fragmented. His remarks are so scatterbrained in what they are trying to get at, that he falls far short of someone like Coleridge (whose fragments have more to say in them), and often embarrasses those who would defend him. In short, he ends up being too idiosyncratic, too quirky--a quality that is actually thankfully lacking in the strange, complex, fragmentary discourses I mentioned earlier. These, I would say, remain unique or singular, and repay--much more than Richards can--the effort of reconstruction.

Nevertheless, Richards still has amazing things to say that are often too quickly dismissed. Here's a bit, for example, that should get people thinking:

Northrop Frye has written: "The great writer seldom regards himself as a personality with something to say: his mind to him is simply a place where something happens to words." This, as it stands, looks like a generalization from biographies; but that, I think, is largely a façon de parler. Language invites us continually to talk about poets under conditions which only entitle us to talk about poems. The substance of this sentence, for me, is that well-organized poems can be studied as places where transactions between words take place.
-from "How Does a Poem Know When It Is Finished?" (1970)

"Language invites us continually to talk about poets under conditions which only entitle us to talk about poems." Notice he says language, language in general, and not as an abstract medium or force but as a system (which is what the next sentence implies, when it talks about "the substance" of Frye's sentence) that is psychological and social at once. When we talk about poems, we talk about minds, but minds that we can only talk about in terms of poems. My point is that this doesn't necessarily reduce to something like "the autonomous text," which anti-formalist critics (and even some formalists) hate, even though it is a pretty quirky view.

More radically, I'd say it accomplishes two things that anti-formalism misses--the bad, first aspect of which it actually ends up unselfconsciously (that is, stupidly) repeating:

1) Making the work immanent to language itself qua communication, and by way of this, to an immediate situation of language-users, and then to society at large. That is, the work becomes a concretion of the capabilities of minds to form and understand sentences, which can can be projected onto various capabilities of society as a whole. This is absolutely torn apart even by Geoffrey Hartman (no anti-formalist he) in his various discussions of Richards, and rightly so. The notion is this: the work, as read, represents a psychology (as we said above), which in turn represents a linguistic capacity (talks about itself by putting itself into language, or is, at some level, an instantiation and internalization of language structures that are social because universally shared, like metaphor), which in turn represents some level of acculturation, or of health more generally, within society. Thus, Richards can point, in Practical Criticism, to the horrible misreadings of his classes at Cambridge and say that if this represents the reading abilities of the best educated in England, the state of society must be horrible. What we have here is the remnant of a certain Arnoldian insistence that the act of criticism must be ultimately social in its influence: here, criticism is clearing away the misreadings of the text, and thereby improving the capacities of the nation in general to understand, to comprehend, to communicate effectively. Richards is at least rigorous enough (unlike someone like Empson, I believe, and unlike some cultural criticism) to say that these capabilities are indeed psychological, and have to unfold themselves along lines that are ultimately at work only in one sort of cultural capability. But the notion that poems let us talk about minds, minds that use a social language and therefore have the same (linguistic) structure, preserves a sort of linkage between the poem and society that is dubious, because so little mediated.

2) The other side of this (and this is certainly not present in Empson or in bad cultural criticism) is the creation of a sort of network through which the poem is indeed triangulated in its relationship to structures larger than itself, situated within a context that is concrete, and yet ultimately not empirical. In Richards in general we see both the empirical and the ideal coalesce: we have a psychologist who is at the same time a Platonist, and so he brings into birth both an empirical poetic text with immediate, and also empirical, ties to culture and society--which we said were dubious, though concrete--while at the same time we have the poem as a representative of a structure that is not actually on the page, a mind. I'll be clearer: if the poem is what we talk about when we talk about minds, it is not really there on the page. At the same time, if it is precisely what we need to talk about, if it is only what we have to talk about, it has to be the thing there--it has to be these words, concretely there, so organized. The poem here is then both empirical and ideal, and where Richards is good is in actually saying that our reading of the poem is, ultimately, an ideal process with empirical consequences at each point. When we read, we are reading a mind, a thing not there in the poem, however much it is there as the poem. What this does is direct us to another structure which produces the reading. What this does is make us explain whatever we read in terms of something that is not empirically there, and what this does is start to involve us in a series of questions about where the reading came from. Richards proceeds to answer these psychologically, but is continually made to articulate them also as ideal structures responsible for the production of such and such effect, which brings out such and such effect, which eventually produces the poem. The process of reading is then dependent on the model with which we explain this reading to an unprecidented degree. This is how Richards can move from psychology to linguistics, ultimately, throughout his career: he switches models. But what this sort of explanation does is also create vectors along which possible explanations of the poem must proceed, which are indeed ideal. In this way, what we have is the creation of a process which methodizes research into the meaning of the text. As such, it situates the text in relationship to the critical approach which intends to explain it, and does so explicitly. In this way, we have a better, more accurate version of a connection to society: insofar as society creates certain critical procedures, the text can be explained in terms of them. Ultimately, this is how Richards' continual insistence that rhetoric is a structure of the mind needs to be taken: he is both making an empirical claim, in saying that certain psychological operations correspond to the structure of metaphor, but he is also saying that certain psychological operations have a relationship to constructs that are created by institutions in order to understand texts. Thus he can ask for a revival of metaphor in The Philosophy of Rhetoric, as well as update the trivium in Interpretation in Teaching, and imply that a particular amount of attention which earlier forms of society exhibited with respect to communication will be necessarily brought back. The claims here are much more minimal, of course, but I think they are more solid. I think they are hard to appreciate because they are often explained away in terms of the empirical, or by generalizing about the way language just works--as Empson does. Richards situates himself in between these approaches, and thus makes literature into something that we have to have a method to adequately deal with critically.

If I have explained this last accomplishment of Richards' doctrine less clearly, it is because it is, really, just so hard to articulate. It is easier in a person like Coleridge, for whom these same two points can be seen at work in the notion of the clerisy. With Richards, each of these things is done on the level of a more modern psychology and a more modern empiricism, so it is harder to abstract the second, ideal layer. At the same time, we get a sense of textual concreteness as well as concreteness in method in Richards that is way beyond anything Coleridge had precisely because of this psychology and empiricism.