Empson

I've grown much more comfortable with Empson. I've always been amazed at his work (and his poetry, for that matter, of which I always want to read more), and liked it a lot, but have also been a little hedgy about his larger views of things mostly because I see him so pigeonholed in theoretical circles, and these views so distorted in relation to Richards especially:

[For Richards,] poetic language is purely affective and, therefore, can never lead to cognition, since it has no verifiable referential value in reference to an external object. [... (Nothing in this last statement is true, by the way--MJ) ...] The route may be different, but the starting point is the same as Roland Barthes. [...] By bringing down poetic language to the level of the language of communication, and in its steadfast refusal to grant aesthetic experience any difference from other human experiences, [Richards' view] is opposed to any attempt to confer upon poetry an excessively exalted function, while still preserving for it the freshness and originality of invention.

But what happens when one studies poetry a little closer following these instructions? A surprising answer is to be found in the work of William Empson, a brilliant student of Richards. [Empson says what] metaphor does is [...] instead of setting up an adequation between two experiences and thereby fixing the mind on the repose of an established equation, it deploys the initial experience into an infinity of associated experiences that spring from it. In the manner of a vibration spreading in infinitude from its center, metaphor is endowed with the capacity to situate the experience at the heart of a universe that it generates. [...] Far from referring to an object that would be its cause, the poetic sign sets in motion an imaging activity that refers to no object in particular. The "meaning" of the metaphor is that it does not "mean" in any definite manner.

[It is an "ambiguity," of course...]

In the seventh and last type of ambiguity [that Empson classifies in Seven Types], the form blows up under our very eyes. This occurs when the text implies not merely distinct significations but significations that, against the will of their author, are mutually exclusive. And here Empson's advance beyond the teachings of his master becomes apparent. For under the outward appearance of a simple list classifying randome examples, chapter seven develops a thought Richards never wanted to consider: true poetic ambiguity proceeds from the deep division of Being itself, and poetry does no more than state and repeat this division. Richards did recognize the existence of conflicts, but he invoked Coleridge, not without some simplification, to the appeal to the reassuring notion of art as the reconciliation of opposites. Empson's less serene mind is not content with this formula.
-Paul de Man, "The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism," 233-237 in Blindness and Insight.

I quote so much from de Man's bizarrely skewed introduction to the American formalist tradition for people on the Continent, not at all in order to imply that everyone (or even anyone) thinks about Empson along these lines. In fact, most people who appreciate him (like those who appreciate Barthes) really don't distort him at all, because Empson works so intuitively. But when it comes time to express themselves more abstractly about this appreciation, it usually is with some hesitation or at the expense of Richards that they do so. This is fine, actually, because they also understand Richards practically, and have a sense of the unwieldiness of his system (along with a sense that it's benefits are not chiefly in removing reference--which it does not do in Richards--or dethroning poetry, which could only really be the concerns of a de Man). And most of the time, this ends up only in a comment about the brilliance and general rightness of his larger views on his subject matter: Elizabethan drama, or Milton--or Pastoral, which de Man notably has to completely dismiss as unimportant or inessential, even "deceitful":

What is the pastoral convention, then, if not the eternal separation between the mind that distinguishes, negates, legislates, and the originary simplicity of the natural? [...]There is no doubt that the pastoral theme is, in fact, the only poetic theme, that it is poetry itself. Under the deceitful title of a genre study, Empson has actually written an ontology of the poetic, but wrapped it, as is his wont, in some extraneous matter that may well conceal the essential.
-"The Dead-End of Formalist Criticism," 239.

Someone, somewhere, is still thinking that this is a brilliant "reading" of Empson's Some Versions of Pastoral, precisely because it has such astounding antipathy towards what is actually meaningful for a real literary critic: if you can regard what Empson says about pastoral as a genre as "extraneous matter," you really have to have given up on "the poetic" (and poetry) a long time ago. Empson in that book actually articulates what his "versions" (something already more subtle than the caricature of "genre" into which de Man collapses them, the better to make his misreading convincing--it's the same move he makes everywhere) have to do with the possibility and future of poetry.

This is only to say that while the practical users of Empson know what he is up to, there is a theoretical context that takes advantage of this. So the (correct) championing of Empson gets slightly twisted into a ineffective attack of the formalist tradition (when Empson is actually a much more effective attacker than this), usually via a theoretical overemphasis on his types of "ambiguity." Empson is aligned with the close-readers, and then falls in slowly with the textualists, and then with the underminers of meaning. De Man here, as he always does, motivates all these unfortunate misapprehensions into a full-blown lie, and so I present it as a caricature, really, more than anything actually believed by anyone with any shred of practical knowledge about literary criticism and figures involved who is also interested in theory (no one except de Man really thinks Empson is a deconstructionist).

I also quote it because you can see some of the feelings that get used in this process: de Man (as John Guillory points out) was adept at collecting them and using them to cultivate resentment, so it's no surprise we find this work here. "Here Empson's advance beyond the teachings of his master becomes apparent," and Richard's apparent "appeal to the reassuring notion" are caricatures still, but unlike the actual theory they are a little closer to how we feel (they have to be, in order for them to shore up such a joke of a narrative), and are a little closer to what allows a theoretical pigeonholing of Empson and Richards to take place. The whole thing is not unlike Dryden and Pope, which is a notoriously one-sided comparison to begin with: the invocation of the master-student relationship ("master"! how overblown!) is serves this purpose most of the time.

But to the point: the key is "ambiguity," misunderstood by de Man as a non-referential play of language, stemming from a (de Man would put a "no doubt," or "necessarily" here) metonymic relationship between tenor and vehicle at the heart of metaphor. This is so off-the-wall that we just have to dismiss it to get anywhere: it patently ignores anything in the later work, and especially the doctrine of Mutual Metaphor, outlined in The Structure of Complex Words (a doctrine which actually makes allegory a species of metaphor, completely at cross-purposes with the anti-mimetic doctrine de Man is trying to push it towards). It also ignores anything hinting towards this doctrine in Seven Types itself (de Man calls everything but the seventh type of ambiguity "pseudo-types" of ambiguity, which should alert us that this claim itself is just an outright falsehood). But my point is that de Man is operating at the same sites that the theorizers of Empson's undermining of language do: the emphasis on ambiguity takes away from the bounds set to the ambiguity--not by the types themselves, but by the work of words, of language. This does not proceed in a Richards-like way, but--and here's my point--with an eye to what we do when we use language and begin to analyze it:

Much of our thinking has to be done in a summary practical way, trusting to a general sense of the whole situation in the background; we get a feeling that the rest of the situation is within call, so that we can concentrate our attention on one aspect, and this feeling is often trustworthy.
-The Structure of Complex Words, 1

This is an argument for the deeper consideration of the feelings themselves Complex Words will accomplish, and so the "often" is not meant to qualify the trustworthiness of the whole practical procedure. It is meant to stake out an area where we need closer attention to what we're doing beyond the practical, with a knowledge that "much of our thinking has to be done in a summary practical way." This general opinion of Empson is what the practical people appreciate in him, but which is hard itself to understand theoretically in an environment that likes to think generalization is impossible (and that also is willing to let such generalizations pass as "[for Richards] poetic language is purely affective," which is again a gross simplification and distortion of everything interesting and, wrong, yes, but also complex in Richards' understanding of poetry as "pseudo-statement"--I'll speak more of this next time, but now the name with its emphasis on "statement" should be enough to show you how stupid it is to equate Richards remarks with the "purely affective": indeed Empson in Complex Words shows how stupid it is himself, and how it ignores the real problems!). In the absence of this, we say the level at which Empson outlines the workings of language has to be undermining any generalization it could possibly make, and here we go wrong. I'll comment more on exactly what Empson is doing in another post. For now, I'll just leave this as an outline of where the problems in understanding him and his relation to Richards actually are.

Simile

Just ran across one of my favorite similes from Virgil, at the beginning of Book VIII of the Aeneid. But I should say something about similes in general first, because they are very strange things. This is especially true when they take the extended "epic" form, which I actually think is the purest. Now, there are a lot of reasons to think otherwise: the epic simile provides a comparison which does not so much compare as narrate another story in miniature, and when they are not annoying for taking us away from the action, they vex our attempts to make sense of them, as they force even best interpretations to turn towards the awkwardness of allegory.

But many of these reasons come from a sense of the rhetorical canon (it doesn't have to be even an explicit rhetoric) that subordinates the simile to metaphor. Never mind the fact that this tendency often comes from the modern sense of metaphor as a function rather than a--for lack of a better word (the traditional "trope" having been coopted by de Man et. al.) I'll just say an artifice--which tends to justify itself with references the psyche empirically understood. Whether these take place in studies that present the empirical psyche straightforwardly as such (in a marriage of psychology and poetics that begins with I.A. Richards), or studies that veil it in a pseudo-phenomenological garb of anxiety and trauma (in a deconstructivism or late-Lacanianism), such view is problematic--not because empiricism provides its foundation, or because the reference is too psychological, but because such it sees the place where the psyche meets rhetoric as language, which is thereby both kept obscure and granted too much power (it becomes Language). This, by the way, is why this sense of metaphor as a function is really only helpful in structuralist poetics, which interprets the psyche psychoanalytically (as in Barthes) or with a genuine phenomenological intent (Ricoeur often, or the more un-de-Manian aspects of Derrida). Situating the link in a linguistic system which, made up as it is of signs, is able to be studied (that is, neither undifferentiated or wrapped in the mystery of infinite differentiation), these stay true to the real aim of the functional sense of metaphor, best outlined by Jakobson: to recover rhetoric by recovering its explanatory power, which means making it more economical (two tropes, which are brought into closer relationship to schemes) so as to restore some sense of the urgency of debates over typology (it will matter again whether the instance in question is an instance of metaphor or not).

But never mind all that: the point is that everything that makes us subordinate simile to a metaphoric function doesn't help us when it comes time to actually get a sense of the purpose of the simile. Here, it is more helpful to turn things around and say as Pope once did that a metaphor is really just a little simile: this junks all the deeper things we have learned about metaphor, and reduces them to the comparative purpose of the simile, but it gives us a perspective that doesn't take this comparative purpose for granted. More significantly, it changes the relationship between metaphor and simile from one of explicitness (when we think of simile subordinated, we often say that it is just a more explicit metaphor: we are apt to explain it as a metaphor that just "has" like or as) to one of size: we thereby understand the comparison accomplished by the "littler" simile as something more like a short illustration, and the comparison of the actual simile as something elaboration. There is something disgusting to modern ears in this, because it comes close to the late-19th century finishing-school sense of such tropes as ornaments that make everyday speech more noble, decorated, and serve to puff it up. But comparison as elaboration is something different than comparison as ornamentation, and it gives us some sense of the essential role that earlier generations felt such tropes played. For they did not have such a disgusting sense that proper speech should be utterly unornamented, devoid of anything but the most rudimentary grammatical connections and the plainest, most dumbed-down meaning: they did not have the sense that meaning was utterly opposed to the means that expressed it (a sense which is only exacerbated by weak attempts to dissolve this opposition and make everything "linguistic," like those of the empirical/postmodern theories I mentioned above--which is why I complain about them).

If we view the simile then in this light, we understand more its relationship to narrative. Perhaps we even see it see it as a modification of the storytelling impulse itself, a modification which seeks to put the fictional aspect of stories to good use: it seeks to find what in fiction compares or elaborates reality, and uses it to work up a fiction already being elaborated. Such a role might actually bring it more in line with a different, lyric impulse, which does not oppose fiction and reality but sets them side by side: the simile might be lyric trying to tell a story, in other words, or narrative trying to return to its similar lyric-like--sorry for the similes--lack of opposition to reality (considered as something different from history, which is mimetically duplicated--more on this in a moment). This view of similes can perhaps most be opposed to view that has to make sense of them as allegory, relating the components together into a hard lump which, in its self-consistency, opposes itself holistically, at one go, to whatever is being compared: maybe it is even the trope that is the very antidote to allegory itself, being always closer (even in its more condensed, illustrative moments) to something like a parable.

Of course, what challenges such a view is the mimetic function that is most explicit in a simile. But what if we rethought mimesis in our rethinking of this very explicitness above, though we did so in a (supposedly--I'd say seemingly but that's what is precisely in question) different connection? Elaboration, like fiction itself, surely involves mimesis, but is not therefore an elaboration of anything that would bring it into opposition to reality, or, as was often said in the height of a celebration of postmodernity, undermine reality (for similar--sorry again--perspectives on check out the writings of Paul Fry and Michael Wood: Fry has been advancing this "realist" view since the 80's). Once we admit the fact that fiction, with mimesis at its center driving it on, is not as opposed to reality as it is to history (the weird internal timeframe of literature, which you can sit down and slip back into at any time, is an index of this--which does not, for all that, make literature itself something ahistorical), we begin to see how tropes that involve it, that mobilize it, might actually be the stuff of literature that is most in connection with the real.

This probably requires a bit more thought (how does literature's non-opposition to the real differ from its elements? how does a novelistic fiction's elaboration of reality differ from lyric's, which is obviously more direct? and how much is rhetoric fictional, especially when it is used in "non-fictional" [a pejorative term, that brings fiction back into opposition with reality qua history] discourses?). But in the meantime, it certainly shows you why I grant the epic simile primacy, as something like the "model" of all similes, and explains as well perhaps the most fascinating thing about epic similes (and perhaps all similes, then): their amazing translatability. Because from a practical perspective they serve to elaborate first and foremost (or tend to open up into something more than illustration), they gain a certain freedom from the selection of words that tends to modify illustrations (metaphors) more. They differ, of course, from translation to translation, but are wonderfully portable.

Perhaps I'll give you an example with the following simile, to which I finally come:

quae Laomedontius heros
cuncta uidens magno curarum fluctuat aestu,
atque animum nunc huc celerem nunc diuidit illuc
in partisque rapit uarias perque omnia uersat,
sicut aquae tremulum labris ubi lumen aenis
sole repercussum aut radiantis imagine lunae
omnia peruolitat late loca, iamque sub auras
erigitur summique ferit laquearia tecti.
-Book VIII.18-25

Meanwhile the heir
of great Laomedon, who knew full well
the whole wide land astir, was vexed and tossed
in troubled seas of care. This way and that
his swift thoughts flew, and scanned with like dismay
each partial peril or the general storm.
Thus the vexed waters at a fountain's brim,
smitten by sunshine or the silver sphere
of a reflected moon, send forth a beam
of flickering light that leaps from wall to wall,
or, skyward lifted in ethereal flight,
glances along some rich-wrought, vaulted dome.
-Theodore Williams' (pretty literal) translation.

While Turnus and th' allies thus urge the war,
The Trojan, floating in a flood of care,
Beholds the tempest which his foes prepare.
This way and that he turns his anxious mind;
Thinks, and rejects the counsels he design'd;
Explores himself in vain, in ev'ry part,
And gives no rest to his distracted heart.
So, when the sun by day, or moon by night,
Strike on the polish'd brass their trembling light,
The glitt'ring species here and there divide,
And cast their dubious beams from side to side;
Now on the walls, now on the pavement play,
And to the ceiling flash the glaring day.
'T was night; and weary nature lull'd asleep
The birds of air, and fishes of the deep,
And beasts, and mortal men.
-Dryden's translation (I include three more lines because I think Dryden is doing a balancing act of some sort between night and day which nicely takes off from Virgil.)

I'll add other translations as I hunt them down.

Style

I think style is extremely useful as a way into a text, and I often take it up instead of form if I want to attune myself to what is going on in a poem or even in critical/expository writing (I don't use it really while reading a novel, and I'd be hard pressed to put it into service even in a modernist text: issues of plot and character are simply more important there). As soon as it becomes the sole thing specified by one's interpretation, though, or the only upshot of the analysis, two problems emerge. Style becomes autonomous, replacing the issue of form, and thereby bolstering the hardness of the text rather than opening it up into language--in short style becomes something of the artifact. Style also can then become a mere informing presence, and remain at the level of the artist/genius who has a particular style, carries himself with a particular style, etc.

In Anglo-American criticism, all this is really confused by the introduction of the issue of form, which tries--despite what those in stylistics will tell you--to be more specific about precisely what is involved in style. It offers this as an alternative to the specification that comes in stylistics proper through linguistics, and I think (insofar as the retreat from linguistic analysis opens the text to practical criticism, as it does) represents an advance. At the same time, this formalist approach seems to suppose that stylistics itself from the beginning is quite crude, proceeding without its own particular act of specification.

This, however, is a minor problem brought up by the intrusion of form. The more significant one is when rhetoric comes back to supplement this formalism. Combined with the formalistic approach, what hasn't been approached in terms of form can be got with rhetoric. This is bad for both stylistics and formalism, since formalism has now merely become the former with its terms reversed: now one starts from minor units of argumentation and moves back only to the level of an informing presence more general and causal than any sort of actual tension in the object (which a stricter formalism would actually provide).

What seems to ameliorate this situation is 1) a general sense that the function of literary language is still communication and experience, however formally intricate it becomes (thus form always has to be subordinated to the task of shoring up language: in other words, one must have a sense that this increasing intricacy actually adds to the communicative ability of literature), and more precisely 2) the introduction of a distinction within style itself on the basis of this communicational thesis about literature--one which William Wimsatt once made in an essay entitled "Verbal Style" (collected in The Verbal Icon). The latter will then have effects on the formal level which will curb the slipshod use of rhetoric we just outlined.

Wimsatt's distinction is between logical and counterlogical stylistic virtues. What he means is basically that there are pieces of language that have a logical structure and pieces that are basically without logic. One just can't explain the latter except in something like associative terms--and in fact one does a disservice to them by reducing them to a logical framework. The greatest example of the logical he has is the parallelism--which he analyzed at length in his amazing early book The Prose Style of Samuel Johnson--and the greatest example he has of the counterlogical is rhyme itself. I quote from another one of Wimsatt's essays because there you see how the counterlogical is rightly described:

The music of the rhyme is mental; it consists in an odd, almost magic, relation of phonetic likeness which encourages us to perceive and believe in a meaning otherwise asserted by the words... The principle is well illustrated in a few of Pope's proper-name rhymes, where we may note an affinity for a certain old-fashioned and childish form of riddle to be found in the pages of The Farmer's Almanac. Why is A like B? Because the name of A or of something connected with A means B or something connected with B. Why is a dog dressed warmer in summer than in winter? Because he wears a fur coat, and in summer he wears a fur coat and pants. Why is a certain poet a dangerous influence upon married women? Because his name sounds like something.

Poor Cornus sees his frantic wife elope,
And curses Wit, and Poetry, and Pope.

Why is a certain scholar a graceless figure? Because his name shows it:

Yet n'er one sprig of laurel graced these ribalds,
From slashing Bentley down to pidling Tibbalds.
-"Rhetoric and Poems: Alexander Pope" in The Verbal Icon

If the sound is an echo to the sense, as Pope himself famously said (in a phrase tirelessly quoted in the 18th century), well the sense here must be nonsense--if we conceive of rhyme from a logical perspective. If we see it from a counterlogical perspective, the thing makes its own sense, because we have not narrowed sense down to simply logic (later de Man would describe all logic in terms of grammar, and this in turn skewed everything Wimsatt is trying to distinguish here--at the same time as making the act of analytic description much easier and indeed logical). Here is Wimsatt on a related phenomenon, the pun:

Puns have been assimilated into recent criticism so often with phrases like "fruitful ambiguity" or "paradoxical tension" that it is easy not to realize just what a curious thing a pun in poetry is.
-"Verbal Style: Logical and Counterlogical," 214

The literary critical tendency to reduce a piece of language to a form in which it is put back into service of the logic of the poem at the same time is a tendency to sever its connection with communication and experience. Or rather it is that formalist tendency (the phrase "fruitful ambiguity" is William Empson's, and the phrase "paradoxical tension" is Cleanth Brooks') to treat the piece of language as an artifact (or indeed a matter of fact). By no longer using "tension" as a heuristic tool (as I think it is often used by the formalists in practice, as I implied above) but as a substitute for rhetorical classification (a slackening formalism that after I.A. Richards--in fact as soon as Empson himself, and perhaps there most egregiously until we come to his later work--we can see growing), it becomes precisely a heuristic tool for producing logic out of the counterlogical, and a sense out of a more lived and experienced (and not artifactual) verbal affinity like a pun (it is experienced as wit, as a tapping of the contingent).

So if we rightly hesitate before thinking that a rhyme will support the meaning of a phrase--something that even now (and indeed perhaps especially now) is not done enough--it is because we are trying to open up analysis again to this more communicative level of language (full of the counterlogical alongside the logical) and in turn something about style: the fact that it remains chained to the twofold problem that I talked about above while also leading one into a poem by pointing to something beyond the form and rhetoric.

Close reading defined

The following is the essential meditation of I.A. Richards upon closeness, and thus shows us something of what it originally meant to call literary critical reading "close reading," as he famously did. It is taken from Interpretation in Teaching, which was both an extension of the empirical tests in Practical Criticism to the reading of prose composition (and with students not in Cambridge but in New York), together with a more wide-ranging set of recommendations for the restructuring of humanities education around an updated trivium. Thus, Richards is talking about closeness as it relates to the methods of education in general:

The way in from remoteness to closeness is certainly the secret and Royal Road to intelligence, understanding, sagacity, insight, and all the useful and creditable modes of learning. What the difference is, or rather upon what it depends in a given case, and why it should vary from one minute to the next, and how ability to approach can be increased, are the key-problems of all education.

The best way to help our pupils is to make them more aware of and more reflective about this difference between closeness and remoteness. I have insisted already--and may again--that it is not any mere correction of their mistakes which releives them, but an understanding of how they came into error. Methods to facilitate such understanding work through heightening this sense of the difference between being close to a question and being at a distance from it. Their virtue will be in the cunning by which they provide suitable opportunities for the mind to ask itself "What have I been doing?" "Am I near or far from the real problem?" An excellent way is to show them other minds at work from different distances, and the results--leaving them to draw their own morals in act rather than in words.
-Interpretation in Teaching, 106

You will notice two things: first, closeness is not a pure term, a quality, but rather is defined by degree, and thus is placed on a continuum the other pole of which is distance--a sense of closeness that I have recommended resurrecting. Second, closeness has a primarily functional sense, which makes it not only a matter of degree, but negative when indeed taken by itself. Extrapolating from the quote above and applying it to reading, closeness denotes the level at which one’s approach to the text could, not make meanings appear more clearly, but eliminate other less relevant levels which might bear upon the act of construing a meaning.

We see then that only subsequently (in America) would the term carry the ethical significance it now has, and which shapes the character of the practice itself--a significance Richards never could really bring himself to charge it with: the sense that if one read closely, one read slowly, with skill, with effort, bringing out the difficult and latent (that is, fully present but hidden) meanings with care. While Richards does charge closeness with an intensely moral role--in that from it one can judge the intelligence of the practicioner and, by modifying reading, alter this intelligence--the connection here between reading and morals is extremely dubious (inferring intelligence from reading, as Richards does, is a lot like practicing phrenology) and extremely utopian (reading and composition would and should be the most ideal test of competence).

Thus closeness has to become a positive, nonfunctional quality of reading in order to become so intertwined with notions of rigor and responsibility--to the extent that it could become synonymous, for Derrida and Derridians in particular, with reading itself, and make possible the oft-repeated, highly moralistic charge, "you simply have not read me." Of course, an entire conceptualization of textuality is also implied in this (quite melodramatic, no?) accusation, but in America (though I can imagine how one can, with some modifications, apply this to France) it also cashes in on this nonfunctional extension of closeness to become a gross overgeneralization. Or, to perhaps put it in a better way, the conception of reading becomes powerless to address the actual case where reading did not occur--as no doubt the people who make the charge can feel--except by heightening the invective, and being even more vague about what reading or reading closely might have actually produced.

Distant reading, again

Franco Moretti is, as I've said before here, the most virulent of the increasing number of opponents to close reading in American literary criticism. He coins the term “distant reading” in order to suggest how his method of using abstract models for literary history--graphs, maps, and trees--actually makes sense of texts. I want to go over that once more.

Quite simply, distant reading makes sense of texts through the process of gathering immense amounts of empirical data about literary works—the presence or absence of various traits, noted by collaborative efforts considering texts in dozens of languages—and organizing it all into various systems or wholes that seek to make sense of their distribution—projecting representations of the evolution of a genre, say, and its spread across Europe as it becomes more or less viable in various markets. Such effort is continually motivated by astonishment at the “minimal fraction of the literary field we work on,” given that the empirical amount of literary works produced in a span of time often dwarfs even the most expansive canon of that period that we indeed study (one of his favorite observations is that even a canon of two hundred nineteenth century novels would be still less then one percent of what was then produced ), and because these works continually overflow the national and linguistic borders within which literary research often moves.

Against this, then, attempts to expand the canon over the years to include alternative literatures meet something like their limit case, but so too does close reading. For it is the organization of canons—or attempts to expand them—around the latter that makes the study of the actual, empirically existing literary field impossible: as Moretti says, “a field this large cannot be understood by stitching together separate bits of knowledge about individual cases.” This study is only possible if we begin to plot what we have not looked at closely in order to extrapolate tendencies that we cannot actually observe at all. The entire project of literary studies suddenly becomes not one of avoiding paraphrase in the sense of avoiding reduction--which, I’d suggest, is the most fundamental motivation of close reading--but what literary structuralists like Propp, Greimas, Genette and Todorov long ago discovered could constitute a powerful poetics: negotiating reduction, simplifying, and then working off of these reduced systems.

Lest Moretti's study of these particular systems of distribution sound too much like work on the economics of literature, however, which has sometimes been treated very extensively in literary study, Moretti assures us that the effort is ultimately directed to the study of where and when formal innovations in literature--the province once proper to close reading—occur, since the traits that will be noted and plotted on graphs, maps and trees will indeed be formal ones: the presence or absence of clues in the evolving genre of the mystery, for example, which is then able to be represented in tree form. This has significantly led Jonathan Arac to call Moretti’s work “formalism without close reading,” an appellation Moretti himself says defines his work perfectly.

But if Moretti can actually affirm his work’s formalism, he still cannot give us much sense of what the close reading to which it is opposed actually involves. “At bottom,” he says, “it’s a theological exercise--very solemn treatment of very few texts taken very seriously--whereas what we really need is a little pact with the devil: we know how to read texts, now let’s learn how not to read them.” Such vagueness is typical of many recent critics who seek to turn away from close reading or, indeed, find new ways for critique in general to proceed. For specificity is not, ultimately, necessary: “close reading” can remain a label for the most tenacious of our basic critical dependencies—in Moretti’s case, at most it is the sort of scrutiny or attention that denies us access to the wide distribution of world literature that “distant reading” considers fundamental. “It’s a theological exercise,” in other words, only hints at what we need to make explicit in order for any widespread resistance to close reading to take place, and not collapse, as it sometimes does in Moretti, into the mere belief that anything different is better than what we have. In this respect, what is also necessary is a sense that distant reading is not only a name for Moretti’s work with models, but something like one pole at the end of a wide continuum whose opposite, while indeed being close reading, is only so if we cross many intervening levels of reading, from the more to the less distant over to the less and the more close. Looking for other distant readers than Moretti (I'd suggest Raymond Williams is such a reader), is then one step in both refining what we mean by close reading and showing how we can be lead out of it and brought towards something more distant, precisely by refusing to set up distant reading as some homogenous space outside of which, immediately, we fall into the close. Such a maneuver in fact capitalizes on what Moretti’s and other such attacks, in their vagueness, actually restore to close reading: its functional aspect, which ties it to methodological decisions that have alternatives.

Richards himself used the term “close” primarily in this functional sense, in order to denote the level at which one’s approach to the text in reading could, not make meanings appear, but eliminate other less relevant levels which might bear upon the act of construing a meaning. Only subsequently in America would the term carry the ethical significance it now has, and which the practical Richards never could really bring himself to charge it with except by becoming Utopian: the sense that if one read closely, one read slowly, with skill, with effort, bringing out the difficult and latent meanings with care. If the term and the practice have been able to remain less questioned, it is perhaps because its functions have become so intertwined with notions of virtue that, in the days of deconstruction, the cry “you have not read me closely,” could become not just a description but an accusation of irresponsibility in the widest sense--something like literary critical immorality, whatever that would be. And since it had become an empty term for, at bottom, interpretive work in general and what it does well, it is no surprise that “closeness” can veer round in Moretti to become an empty term for all that is bad.

On tenor and vehicle

I wonder whether our discussions of metaphor have become a bit sloppy. When we find metaphor being treated merely like logic, as in the work of Paul de Man, something has gone wrong. We then take the metaphor as a unit, and, if we don't completely overlook its internal complexities (treating it as rhetoric in the abstract), open the door for all sorts of mistakes in actually determining how the figure is working (accepting any grammatical work at all as metaphoric). This probably extends to how de Man treats all figures, but I'd like to stick to metaphor, because so many others tend to treat it in his fashion.

Of course, I can say that things have become sloppy because we literary critics once (in our readings) had a very precise way of talking about the internal aspects of metaphor: through the distinction between tenor and vehicle. And while this famous formulation of I.A. Richards presented in The Philosophy of Rhetoric ends up being put to ends much too formalist and too psychological, one has to recognize that it seems sophisticated in comparison to how de Man talks about the figure (for example, in his analysis of passages of Proust in Allegories of Reading, or even his strained reading of the word "translucent" in the famous essay "The Rhetoric of Temporality").

So what are the tenor and vehicle? They are the elements of the metaphor, its two components. This is the first and most fundamental point which must be understood: the metaphor is the name for the copresence of the two elements in the form of the two sets of ideas being related, and never is reducible to either one. For it is still (still!) common to say that the figure itself is the second element, the vehicle.

Let me use an example: when I say that my love is a red red rose (to modify Burns a bit), taking the metaphor as the vehicle would mean saying that the red rose is the only thing in the sentence that is metaphoric. Richards' real innovation is to understand that this requires my love to be unmetaphoric, or the literal, plain meaning which the rose simply embellishes.

Now, this might seem exactly right with the use of a simile: what is the rose here doing except embellishing, coloring the woman, my love? But extend it to any more complicated (and normal) form of a metaphor and you immediately get confusion: when I talk about how the morning sun kisses the mountainside (as Shakespeare does in his 33rd sonnet), or even how my dessert is kissed with honey, we're not using using kiss to embellish some plain meaning.

Yes, we could explain what we mean otherwise--a small amount of honey is delicately added to my dessert--and thereby act as if the plain meaning is being added to by some fancy-schmancy language. But to do this, look at what is necessary: an expansion of the vehicle, not explaining the plain meaning which this vehicle supposedly embellishes, the tenor. In other words, we have moved over to what we're calling metaphor itself (and what is really the vehicle) in order to retain some notion that there is a sense (a tenor) which is unmetaphoric. We have made precisely what we called metaphoric (and is really the vehicle) into something other than a metaphor in order to explain how it (the vehicle) is metaphoric (as a mere embellishment)!

It makes sense, then, to change this situation and say that what we're calling metaphoric is only one part of the metaphor: the vehicle. For once we do this, in explaining the vehicle we can still say that we are explaining a metaphor--we don't have to literalize what is metaphoric in order to prove its metaphoricity. This is the brilliance of Richards' distinction: it recognizes the way we are looking at the problem in the process of our reading and, by giving us a clearer terminology, actually allows us to continue what we're doing, but much more precisely. He calls this a process of translating our skill into observation and theory, by which he means making our skill in reading and deciphering the problem explicit so as to refine it. And this is an alternative to what people still do when unable to articulate how their precise readerly observations come from more than just mere insight: fetishize the skill, turn it into the mysteious capacity that only a few distinguished individuals possess. Richards, yes, came up with the phrase "close reading," but he uses it in the exact opposite way of those who talk about Derrida, for example, as an "extremely close reader."

If we say that the metaphor involves the copresence of the tenor and the vehicle, then, we can begin to investigate the different ways this copresence takes place. We can talk about the different interactions of the tenor and vehicle, and see that embellishment is only one possible relation between the two. We can even begin to make sense of what at first appear like limit cases, because, with a recognition of the vehicle as vehicle, the tenor becomes much more expansive than "plain meaning." No longer identified with such meaning, it can become even something as generally unmeaningful as the excuse for merely using a vehicle.

In Shelley (I'm thinking of Epipsychidion especially) we have a lot of the this latter phenomenon, along with the layering of metaphors (the use of a vehicle as a tenor for another vehicle) which Richards' vocabulary also allows us to explain. However, Richards' example is John Denham's description of the Thames in what is usually called the first locodescriptive poem, "Cooper's Hill" (1642)--an example which Samuel Johnson, in his Life of the poet, praises:

O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great exemplar as it is my theme!
Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full.

No doubt Johnson had other reasons for liking this (its intense reliance on parallelism, that great mechanism of Johnsonian thinking), but he says that it is good because "the particulars of the resemblance are so perspicaciously collected." We'll come back to this in a moment, but for now, let us see how Richards explains what is really the tenuousness of the relationship between the tenor ("I," or, as Richards says, the poet's mind) and the vehicle (the river) in the last lines and its development of what at first appears to be "a limit case" of metaphor:

The more carefully and attentively we go over the senses and implications of deep, clear, gentle, strong and full as they apply to a stream and to a mind [...] the more will the vehicle, the river, come to seem an excuse for saying about the mind something which could not be said about the river. Take deep. Its main implications as regards a river are, "not easily crossed, dangerous, navigable, and suitable for swimming, perhaps." As applied to a mind, it suggests "mysterious, a lot going on, rich in knowledge and power, not easily accounted for, acting from serious and important reasons." What the lines say of the mind is something that does not come from the river. But the river is not a mere excuse, or a decoration only, a gilding of the moral pill. The vehicle is still controlling the mode in which the tenor forms. That appears at once if we try replacing the river with, say, a cup of tea!
-The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 122-23

Richards then quotes again the last two lines just to show you:

Though deep, yet clear; though gentle, yet not dull;
Strong without rage; without o'erflowing, full.

If the vehicle used here was tea, and not a river, the lines obviously become ridiculous: while a tea can be strong, and while a cup of tea can deep and full (without overflowing, or rather spilling!), no one would say it is "strong without rage" unless they were using the vehicle to give us a better sense of how a mind works. Thus, we can see that a river is a better vehicle than a cup of tea. That is, the vehicle is still related to the tenor, developing it, even if it has come so far away from the tenor that "what the lines say of the mind is something that does not come from the river." The tenor, then, is no longer a sort of pure meaning which the vehicle modifies, but something which, precisely "forms" as the vehicle "controls" it.

Thus the relationship between the tenor and vehicle can modulate to accommodate, on the one hand, a situation where the vehicle merely develops what is already pretty apparent in the tenor, and, at the other, a situation (this one here) where the vehicle takes up senses that do not resemble the tenor at all but which still lend it a more powerful meaning.

And with this we can turn back to Johnson. The vehicle we see, doesn't have to have any "perspicaciously" achieved "resemblance" to the tenor at all: Richards takes up this example to show that what Johnson praises about the relationship between tenor and vehicle ultimately would have to make the vehicle still embellish the tenor, and restrict the tenor only to something like the plain meaning underlying the vehicle. Rather, resemblance is only one way in which the tenor and vehicle can be achieved, just as embellishment is only one way in which the tenor and vehicle can relate. More often, there will be a process where the vehicle simply modifies or qualifies the tenor in the way that the vehicle of the river does here.

To describe this relation more adequately, Richards begins to supplement his original schema.  At present, we have simply the following:

metaphor:

tenor + vehicle

Now, Richards introduces another concept, the "ground" of the metaphor. Most accounts of Richards' distinction leave this out, though it only describes more clearly what we have been talking about concerning the resemblance of the vehicle to the tenor. The ground of the metaphor is merely the presence of a tenor-vehicle relation, which is most "solid" (or the least "recondite," as Richards will say, 117) in the form of resemblance. Thus, where we have a vehicle that relates to the tenor in the form of resemblance, the metaphor has a ground. And where we have a metaphor where the vehicle is controlling the mode in which the tenor forms, but not by bringing out something that resembles the tenor, the metaphor has less ground (i.e. the metaphor is more ungrounded). A particularly common form of metaphor where there is less ground is found in instances where we call someone a "pig," for example, if we are disgusted by them. There is no relationship of resemblance, but there is a sort of commonality between the tenor and vehicle here which ultimately is the function of the ground: it is the common characteristic that sets up a relation between tenor and vehicle. However, this commonality is not in directly mimetic terms, so there seems to be less ground. Instead, there is only a commonality in terms of how we feel about the person and how we feel about pigs.

So, to reiterate, where the relation of the tenor to the vehicle is one of resemblance, there is ground. Where there is less of this type of relation, there is less ground--though the ground still hasn't disappeared. However, we see now that in neither case are we talking about the relation of the tenor and vehicle solely in terms of each other, so we can easily admit what we previously had to talk about as "limit cases" as what they really are: basically normal metaphors. The "limit cases" are normalized, not in order to disturb our assumption that we talk in plain language most of the time (though this view of metaphor will allow us to see "most sentences in free or fluid discourse turn out to be metaphoric," and that "literal language is rare," 120), but to be truer to the way metaphor is used, which is often not at all like a simile--that is, as an embellishment. So, let's modify the schema, incorporating Richards' changes:

metaphor:

tenor ↔ vehicle
------ground------

With this fully developed model, Richards is in fact able to tackle the famous table leg. Leg of a table is generally recognized to be not really a good, pure metaphor, but a catachresis. However, as the catachresis is usually defined as a failed metaphor, we have to actually explain on what basis we would call the leg of a table a leg. No one, however, ever explains this, except by saying that the metaphor is a dead one (which doesn't tell us much)... no doubt because it is simply easier to say why the leg fails as a metaphor (tables aren't human!). Richards, however, with his more developed schema, is able to explain why it is a metaphor quite clearly:

Let me begin now with the simplest, most familiar case of verbal metaphor--the leg of a table for example. We call it dead but it comes to life very readily. Now how does it differ from a plain or literal use of the word, in the leg of a horse, say? The obvious difference is that the leg of a table has only some of the characteristics of the leg of the horse. A table does not walk with its legs; they only hold it up and so on. In such a case we call the common characteristics the ground of the metaphor. Here we can easily find the ground, but very often we cannot. A metaphor may work admirably without oru being able with any confidence to say how it works...
-The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 117

Thus while the leg of the table has less ground than, say, the example of the river, there is still a commonality, still some form of ground between a tenor and vehicle, and so it is indeed metaphoric. For--as we said above concerning the normalization of "limit cases"--what Richards is trying to admit through this notion of ground is the case where,

the peculiar modification of the tenor which the vehicle brings about is even more the work of [the tenor and vehicle's] unlikenesses than of their likenesses.
-The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 127.

So while a leg only shares one real commonality as a vehicle (in the action of holding up), it is still part of a metaphor and should be recognized as such, precisely because there could be cases where the lack of resemblance will (unlike here) make a better metaphor. These instances aren't an instance of the paradoxical good catachresis, but simply metaphors.

This is also because is on this new basis of ground that Richards distinguishes between metaphoric language and non-metaphoric language: we can say that what goes beyond our "limit cases"--a metaphor completely without ground and a metaphor where there is too much ground such that the vehicle and tenor are identical--will not be a metaphor. Why? Because no relation will be there between a tenor and a vehicle, such that we can distinguish between them and relate them:

If we cannot distinguish tenor from vehicle then we may provisionally take the word to be literal; if we can distinguish at least two co-operating uses, then we have metaphor.
-The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 119

I put this in terms of ground because while Richards is emphasizing here how one idea described by the same idea is not metaphoric, we can also stress (perhaps against Richards' tendency to psychologize) how the opposite case also holds: when we relate two things without any commonality whatsoever, this is a literal relation.

One final point. I stressed the presence of ground, and the possibility of the metaphor that still works quite well when it is less grounded, because Richards introduces one more concept immediately after talking about the table leg--that of the shift between tenor and vehicle across the ground:

...A table does not walk with its legs; they only hold it up and so on. In such a case we call the common characteristics the ground of the metaphor. Here [in the case of the table leg] we can easily find the ground, but very often we cannot. A metaphor may work admirably without our being able with any confidence to say how it works or what is the ground of the shift.
-The Philosophy of Rhetoric, 117

Now I call the "shift" another concept, but what is really the case--and should be clear from the entire exposition here, and which, even more strikingly than the lack of talk about ground, I have also never seen elaborated--is that all of the terms which Richards introduces to explain metaphor are also metaphors: tenor, vehicle, ground, and now shift. I bring this up now because this metaphor of the shift allows us to describe metaphor completely metaphorically, but also more accurately, because all the other terms are able to give a fuller sense to as well as explain metaphor. For indeed, when we only use "tenor" and "vehicle," which is what happens when (rarely, as we noted) such terms are brought up, we do only the latter--and such explanation tends to make the terms into what they were meant to replace. We can complete our diagram, then, as follows:

metaphor:

tenor             
shift→
             |vehicle|
------ground------

Richards is comparing metaphor itself, in other words, to something like a car, such that we don't even have to talk abstractly about the relation of the tenor to the vehicle. Rather, the vehicle brings the tenor along, and shifts it across a ground. The tenor gets in the vehicle, and the vehicle shifts it. Thus we see why Richards chose "vehicle" and talked about how the vehicle modifies the process of the tenor's formation: the vehicle takes over the movement of the tenor. Furthermore, because we stressed the possibility of the attitudinal nature of the commonality or ground, we see also why Richards chose "tenor" for the name of the first element in the metaphor: the tenor is like tone--it isn't what the message means, but it is what sets the message in a particular direction (tone being the attitude of the speaker to the listener), allowing it to develop (here) by other means (the vehicle, with which it can share a common attitudinal relationship). In other words it is as much of a mistake to see the meaning of the metaphor within its first element (the tenor) as it is to see the meaning of a word solely in how it is delivered, in its tone: how the message is delivered isn't the same thing as its meaning, and by emphasizing how what we normally think of as the meaning could really only be attitudinal, our mode of trying to talk about the metaphor in terms of its literal beginnings is hindered. Nevertheless, while tone or how the message is delivered isn't the same thing as meaning, it certainly allows the message to develop: the metaphor is where such a message in a word is developing in a complex way through another word.

In short, all the metaphors explain and modify each other in this new structure, which the final diagram above can only somewhat adequately explain (to be more accurate, we would have to act more as if the tenor is moving over the ground by way of the vehicle and through the shift--thus the shift should also be represented more as the shift of the tenor and vehicle over the ground). Nevertheless, if you begin to use all these metaphors, you have a sense for how complicated and rich the internal complexities of metaphor become.

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.

Giving up deconstruction

When I said (albeit rather quickly as I was growing tired that night) de Man puts forth the notion that literature is singular, unique, privileged, irreducible in order to understand its relation to society as mediated, complex, rather than immediate and representative--when I said this, I might have also stressed that de Man's view constitutes more of a caution against the immediate than a definite, positive account of mediation. In other words, de Man's goal is not so much to outline exactly what the artwork qua singular is, as to use this definition of the artwork in order to make us resist that jump from the work to society. De Man is giving us a caution rather than some positive notion, resting in the supposed fact of literature's irreducibility.

To understand this in more detail, one only has to follow Frances Ferguson (in Solitude and the Sublime and in her numerous essays) and look at how de Man would view multiple interpretations of a literary work. When we have more than one interpretation, we have an instance where mediation and immediacy are able to be confused: we might take the multiplicity of interpretations as somehow indicative of the way society at large interprets simply because where there is more than one interpretation, you might have some sort of sociality taking place (as reader-response critics do). The legitimate question would then emerge of how such a social work is still singular, or implies certain processes of production.

But de Man, because he would rather caution us than provide us with positive notions, condemns such an approach as immediacy (or phenomenalism: see his essay on Iser, "Reading and History"). But this still leaves open the question of what to do with multiple interpretations. De Man therefore takes the opposite tack. That is, he considers the multiplicity of interpretations as a fact, before it considers it as an indicator that there may thereby be a sociality established by virtue of this multiplicity. It is, indeed, a fact of language itself--which I touched at in my previous post in the remarks on privileged language: each word has an indeterminate multiplicity of significations. It will of itself produce differing interpretations. In the text itself there are already multiple readers.

In other words, de Man rightly sees that there is a difference between more than one interpretation and a social consensus of some sort. In fact, this difference makes possible the thought that the multiplicity of interpretations might at times oppose sociality, might make sociality in certain situations impossible. This is nothing less than the New Critical innovation of I.A. Richards, who grasps that a certain lack of consensus in the way meaning is understood entails a completely different literary text gets perceived than the one we might presuppose is there: the difference between the two then becomes a limited indicator of how perception involves culture, and the text itself on the page becomes something that is, as text, not fixed. This, in other words, is something coming very close to that socially indicative, and yet singular, text that we were saying a positive account might imply. Ferguson points out (see "On the Number of Romanticisms," ELH 58 (1991)) that as New Criticism evolves (helped along primarily by Empson and Leavis) it becomes more and more willing to just insist on the difference between sociality and multiplicity in order to say that certain types of multiplicity, usually virtuous people or people with common sense, create good types of sociality (this is what, in Fish and also Iser, reader response criticism also moves towards). What started as an exception becomes an argument for exceptionalism. Now, de Manian deconstruction takes this exception and makes it the rule: the notion that multiple interpretations might in fact oppose the formation of some sociality or consensus becomes the notion that multiplicity never entails sociality. Multiplicity is, rather, a fact of language which the social must confront. Or, better put, multiplicity is that which must always be reduced in order to talk about the social, for multiplicity has become precisely singularity.

This is why Ferguson sees deconstruction as an empiricist or materialist skepticism: to talk about anything that we can derive from the multiplicity of interpretations is to remove ourselves from its being a fact, from the dispersed and material process of its production, and therefore to erase its singularity.

This might be enough for now, but I'd like to actually consider the larger implications of this view.

For to understand deconstruction as empiricist/materialist skepticism is to change the terms by which people often disagree with it--before or after becoming enormously frustrated with it. In short, it makes it possible to see that retreating from deconstruction is not a retreat.

Often people see that deconstruction lacks something, but instead of seeing that this lack is really not enough of a lack, as Ferguson suggests, they see it as the limit, the bottom, if we can make this even more of a spatial metaphor. I choose this language because many use it: "deconstruction gives us nothing positive, in the end," is a common way to put it. I myself have just used the language in talking about de Man. But the question arises, why are we supposing that all alternatives are positive, are plenitudes? Why do we think that alternatives do deconstruction get us moving again, but in the wrong direction, the direction of positivity? To give up deconstruction on this view is seen as a return to normalcy, say, rather than what Ferguson suggests it might be: a furthering of, a fidelity to deconstruction.

But we've skipped over what this lack exactly is. What do people see that it lacks? Put as clearly as such a limited space as this can allow, deconstruction lacks a more concrete focus on the creation of rules, principles, or classifications--in short provisional regulations--which, to use two such concepts or regulations created by Derrida (see his Rogues: Two Essays on Reason), would help distinguish unconditionality from sovereignty. This would relate (by separating them more) this act of distinguishing (what we awkwardly call deconstruction "in practice") to what the distinction names, but cannot bring about: the unconditional renunciation of sovereignty (which is "real" deconstruction, which of course no longer is simply deconstruction).

Here, I'd like to make an important distinction: these regulations are quite different than what de Man imputes to language. On this basis, I think one can differentiate between Derridian deconstruction and de Manian deconstruction (as one can also distinguish Jean-Luc Nancy's deconstruction from Derrida's). It's not a matter of style or even of approach, but of the status each give to the concepts they are dealing with. De Man's are distinct from Derrida's in two ways: 1) they aren't provisional, and 2) they aren't rules or regulations, but rather names (or, sometimes, classifications). And while Derrida uses names, these names at bottom function to regulate. In de Man they refer and disrupt reference, generating a particular type of performance. As is obvious from much of what I have written on the subject, I find the Derridian status (and excuse me for this inaccurate, but convenient, word) much more rigorous, and ultimately much more useful--not to mention clearer and more honest. But there are huge benefits to what de Man does as well.

The point, however, is that both these regulations seem to come out of nowhere. We lack, in other words, some stable way of creating them. This is what makes both Derrida and de Man seem extraordinarily subjective to people--and thereby what makes them say (despite Derrida's continual statements to the contrary) that deconstruction is a form of criticism or critique (in short, that it is destruction, in not even a Heideggerian sense).

Giving up deconstruction, then, is seen as a way to return to a space where rules can be created out in the open. But to see deconstruction as Ferguson sees it--and I have continually thought this important since I began to read her work some years ago--is begin to see this openness within deconstruction itself. This does not mean that deconstruction is thereby saved. It just makes deconstruction able to be furthered in some larger project.

More precisely, seeing deconstruction as empiricism or materialism places it on a sort of continuum where all the alternatives to it don't become different in kind--as is the case with the language of lack and plenitude--and thereby seem like they are retreating from anything. We don't have to give up deconstruction by focusing on the creation of rules. We just have to bring it to the other side of the continuum (or bring what in it is more on this other side, like certain aspects of the status, I think, that Derrida gives his regulations). As Ferguson says, that other side is, of course, formal idealism.

Demystifying literature: de Man and the singular

You all know I'm skeptical of de Man: I think that through equivocation on crucial issues he mislead theorists so much they are only now beginning to realize the extent of the damage. But this doesn't mean he wasn't also brilliant, or that his works aren't extremely useful. In other words de Man's power to mislead only came with a certain type of earned authority. It's just that his words require you to never let your guard down.

This is even more important to remember when these words are strung together in the witty remark, the teachable fragment, the slogan, the aphorism--I'm not sure what exactly to call these particular segments in de Man's corpus. These remarks--like "the resistance to theory is itself theoretical," or "scholarship has, in principle, to be eminently teachable," or "it is better to fail in teaching what should not be taught than to succeed in teaching what is not true" (all three taken only from "The Resistance to Theory")--remain influential even today: though it is important to keep in mind the limits of de Man's influence (as is only appropriate when such an uncritical notion as influence is used), which to this day has not been sufficiently mapped out, such phrases still guide our attempts to articulate what, at bottom, we're doing.

Such a delicate, yet dangerous string of words I want to look at right now:

When modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are in fact being demystified by it.
-"Criticism and Crisis" (1967, updated in 1970), in Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism, 3-19, 18

As you can see, this is not only highly polemical, but is also conveniently short, pithy, repeatable. One can imagine many theorists picking it up and using it in all sorts of situations. But it would be a mistake to see it merely as a general statement just about anyone. Like most de Manian formulations, it is very precise. The task, then, is not to pull apart what is actually being said here from the sweeping, polemical force of the statement. Instead, it is to see that specificity alone gives such theoretical statements power. The trick of de Man's aphoristic formulation (and it is indeed a dirty one) is to let you think that theory must become less polemical as it gets more specific. Or (and this is oddly more likely), if it does allow you think otherwise, if it allows you to see polemic and precision's incompatability as superficial, it becomes your responsibility to assert this (which makes the trick even dirtier). But we'll try and get specific while also not taking over all the responsibility: we will remain critical of de Man insofar as he engages in a ruse that turns us all into his interpreters--or, better, his "demystifiers."

But, as we were saying, it isn't enough to see de Man's statement as just applying to anyone: we have to ask, first, who these "modern critics" that "demystify" actually are. Ironically, after all we just said, de Man isn't as specific as he should be about this: his answer is, the New Criticism and structuralism, or, rather, the New Critical tendency in American criticism (we can call it by its much misunderstood name: "practical criticism") as it is affected by structuralism coming from France. That's a lot of criticism, enough to seem like the most significant criticism in America and abroad (in other words, another trick involving sweeping generalizations). But it isn't enough to exhaust the totality of the field--not nearly enough, if we have the right view of things.

Why, then, this general practical criticism/structuralist poetics nexus, and not something else? Here de Man is most precise. Both, he says,

consist of showing that certain claims to authenticity attributed to literature are in fact expressions of a desire that, like all desires, falls prey to the duplicities of expression.
-"Criticism and Crisis," 12

This is what he calls "demystifying" literature. Let's be clear about what this process of demystification entails, according to de Man, for the above definition remains only a sliver of what he has to say about it. De Man goes on to say that the authenticity attributed to literature is in fact reducible to the notion--popular before the New Critics and before the advent of structural linguistics--that literary language was of a different nature than the system of language we normally use. (This, by the way, leads to the notion that the experience of this language is of a different order than everyday experience, or what I.A. Richards called, quite accurately, "the phantom aesthetic state:" the two notions imply each other and Richards, in the opening of his Principles of Literary Criticism, moved from this phantom state to this phantom literary language.) The process of demystification then would involve showing that a normal language system could serve as an adaquate basis for interpreting literature. One can see the task that the structuralist poeticians and practical critics, then, oddly have in common--and why de Man rightly groups them together: in the case of practical criticism, the task is to show that normal usage, or in fact everyday usage, provides us with enough meanings that we can outline possible interpretations of what the poem or prose work may be saying; in the case of structuralist poetics (which has a bit more complications I might get into below), the task is to outline how the system of signifiers that linguistics has studied can account for the work in question. Everyday language and the linguists' language both rid us of the need for any priveliged sort of literary language, which would be different in essence.

The larger meaning of de Man's statement becomes more and more obvious: both of these modes, in trying to undo the privilege accorded to literature, fall prey to its privilege. The implications are clear too: de Man is arguing for the restoration of a notion that literary language is different than the system of language we use everyday.

But before we outline what this really means, I would like to return to de Man's quote above regarding demystification. For while demystification involves a certain notion of literary language, it also proceeds in a certain manner which the quote makes clear: armed with her notion that the privelige accorded to literature can be accounted for by everyday language or the structure of language, the demystifying critic shows that the privelige is merely the expression of a desire. This shall remain even more important for us, for it means that demystification involves, prior to the critic's having any very clear notion about the proper sphere of literary language, a certain operation, a method, a "strategy" as de Man indeed calls it (13). Demystification is first and foremost the process of asserting that what is there can be the expression of something the critic, but not you, can see: a desire that is not fully apparent, that is duplicitous, and that needs the critic in order to make its full manifestation. Literature for the demystifier would then lack its "priveliged" or "authentic" status for another reason: literature could not be something impenetrable to the critic's process of making the work fully manifest, and in this respect could not be of a different nature than the critic's language. This, I claim, is the deeper reason behind de Man's notion that demystification involves dissolving literary language into everyday language: it is what in other essays he calls the critic's belief in the phenomenality of literature, the notion that it is something that can be made manifest and, moreover, can, eventually, be made fully manifest. One can also see that it involves a certain notion of the literary object requiring a consciousness that can judge it: in this respect the belief in the phenomenality of the literary work is also a belief in its fundamentally aesthetic nature--the work is there to produce judgments (Kant, of course, gave this view its most concentrated expression). We can also emphasize that it is aestheticism in a different, more perjorative sense: the critic, in this view, is the only one who can complete the artwork by mastering its duplicities, which makes her of the same nature as the artist, and their criticism, in turn, something participating in the art.

But, back to the point: if demystification involves asserting that there is more to the work, in the sense that there is something about it which is not as it seems and can eventually be made clear, when modern critics think they are demystifying literature, they are demystified by it means that they are only making more explicit their inability to see that literature may perhaps not be something that manifests itself.

Now, there are two ways to justify this particular assertion. De Man's way, in the essay in question, is by stressing the fictionality of literature. What he says prior to his little aphorism makes this clear enough:

It [fiction] is demystified from the start.
-"Criticism and Crisis," 18

That is, demystifying a literary text makes nothing in it manifest. This is not because criticism is powerless when confronted by it, but rather because the text's nature qua fictional is to disturb manifestation itself. This is a point not stressed enough--we overlook it constantly in talking about characters, say--but it perhaps lays too much stress on fictionality: de Man could be challenged by bringing up testimony, for example (Derrida, for one, does not evade this: his reading of Blanchot's "The Instant of My Death" in the slim but profound Demeure precisely investigates the possible weave between these two).

I will take the other route and justify the notion that literature does not manifest itself by talking more about what the demystifier supposes literature actually does. The easiest case would be a practical critic, who tries ultimately to establish a meaning for the text. Jonathan Culler shows why this is questionable. Instead, a better case for now would be the structuralist poetician. I'll take Roland Barthes, with his powerful notion of codes in S/Z.

The five codes Barthes considers are extremely useful. They aren't ultimately very rigorous tools to use, but they are so handy and so intuitive: Barthes constructs them in such a way that to an experienced critic they fit like a glove--only allowing actual reflection on the manipulation ultimately produced. In short, in the codes Barthes makes explicit something the critic has for a long, long time engaged in, but never reflected on at such length (this is why they are not to be unreflectively used like any old tools, as Kaja Silverman does in The Subject of Semiotics). This is pointing out the saturation of the text with a certain type of non-literal language which is, unless we want to stretch the word, nevertheless not figurative. He opens up a domain in which a certain understanding of the message is brought about which nevertheless does not have to deal with meaning (that is, literal or figurative, strictly speaking). The code remains the way that parts of the text (and remember this remains pertinent only for a classic text, which is not stressed enough) try to be received in a certain way: as such it is like innuendo, except with the final meaning subtracted, as it were, or made unncessary to grasp.

The cultural codes are, in particular, the most intuitive to the critic (they are also the most boring of the codes: the proairetic and hermeneutic are much more interesting and indeed useful). One understands, in other words, a character has a certain status by the mention of what he wears. Or one understands a fragment of a sentence about abstruse academics, say, not because of the meaning but because of the cultural doxa, which states that academics have no connection to the real world.

The critic then goes through the text and points out these codes: it is what we do especially when watching TV, say, and noting how a certain type of character is stereotypically treated. What is one doing in such an instance? What de Man would say is, precisely, that one is trying to manifest something in the work. Even though the code isn't dealing with meaning, it is nevertheless there to bring something to the fore. It is, in fact doing something even more than that: it is allowing a secure transit between the work, on the one hand, and culture on the other. By pointing out doxa in literature or other, similar artforms, what we are doing is supposing an almost immediate link between the forces which construct the code and the code itself as we find it in a particular message. In pointing it out, we believe we are directly in connection with those societal forces, on some level, and transform them in the act. Why? Because we suppose that the message is not already demystified--to use the quote above--or in other words we overlook the fact that there there may be nothing to manifest in the message except the cultural forces which produce it.

To be clearer, manifestation may not be necessary because the literary work is singular. That means it does not express or represent those cultural and societal forces, but merely is a product of them--indeed, uniquely, irreducibly so (the reduction, in other words, would be to representation). Or, to put it another way, manifestation may not be necessary because the link between a the coded literature and culture is never immediate: it is always and only a set of productive relays which may indeed make manifestation possible, but never necessary for the work to be both extant and also (this is the tough part) able to be criticized.

With this made clear, we now understand how de Man proposes to restore the difference between literary language and ordinary language: it is not by giving literary language an essence, but rather by subtracting it. Literary language is singular, irreducible. And this does not mean the literary work is thereby shut off in any way from ordinary language, culture, or society, but is indeed precisely produced by them--since the connection is not presumed to be simply, unproblematically, indeed naively immediate. It is, in other words, produced in a way that cannot be reduced to the production of something destined to be manifest, and therefore demystified. I'll stop here, but it now should be somewhat clearer why modern critics are being demystified by such a singular literature in demystifying it.