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.

Wordsworth and tautology

Lyrical Ballads exploits the tendency for repetition dominating the ballad’s form, or what we might call the ballad's easy lapse back into refrain. This repetition does not necessarily have to happen in a chorus: it is something that we can find even in the middle of stanzas, like the “(an’) a’ that” in Robert Burns’ “Is there for honest poverty:”

Is there for honest poverty
That hings his head, an’ a’ that?
The coward slave, we pass him by—
We dare be poor for a’ that!
For a’ that , an’ a’ that,
Our toils obscure, an’ a’ that,
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp,
The man’s the gowd for a’ that.

In "The Thorn," Wordsworth is picking up this tendency and playing with its effects on time (through speed, as we’ll see). He tends to take this tendency and make it into one of narrative (or descriptive) dilation, as Walter Scott somewhat does in his ballads--“Lord Randal” for instance. Take these lines from the first and second stanza of "The Thorn," describing the thorn:

I
There is a thorn; it looks so old,
In truth you’d find it hard to say,
how it could ever have been so young,
It looks so old and grey.
Not higher than a two-years’ child,
It stands erect this aged thorn;
It is a mass of knotted joints,
A wretched thing forlorn.
It stands erect, and like a stone
With lichens it is overgrown.

II
Like rock or stone, it is o’ergrown
With lichens to the very top…

"It stands erect," comes up twice, as well as the simile "like a stone / With lichens… overgrown,” with that nice inversion at the beginning of the second stanza. There are other instances, of course, of varying importance. In some cases it seems to be the very slight act of versification whereby the line is filled out with another syllable under the aegis of emphasis (“A cruel, cruel fire, they say” (129)). In other cases, it is more like the refrain, and takes up a large space (the cry of the Martha: “‘Oh misery! oh misery! / Oh woe is me! oh misery!’” (65-66)). I think that all these actions can be seen as part of what Wordsworth is doing, such that they become functions of the tendency in ballad that he is exploiting (rather than the other way around: that is, it is not the case that the ballad here is a function of the regular acts of versification).

What Wordsworth is doing, then, is taking the sort of dilating function of the balladic refrain and distributing it around the poem, so that the unfolding of the poem is caused by this function and less by other traditional poetic devices. The meter, for example, gets taken up into this much larger rhythmic work of the poem: that is partially why, in the line “A cruel, cruel fire…” it does not matter as much what the metric stress, in itself, isolated from what I am calling this rhythmic work, actually is (despite what prosodists might say); while in Elizabethan poetry or even Pope, perhaps, this might be less common (there it is not isolated either, of course, but connects rhetorically with a syntactic, not rhythmic work). What this means is not that form is done away with, but that something formal (refrain) is elevated beyond the sphere in which it perhaps normally worked in earlier poetry, such that it becomes one of the motors of the poem.

This is still a bit abstract and hazy in my head, but I am getting it all from what Wordsworth says in his crucial note to the poem:

It was necessary that the Poem, to be natural, should in reality move slowly; yet I hoped, that, by the aid of the metre, to those who should at all enter into the spirit of the Poem, it would appear to move quickly.

In other words, Wordsworth sees two things at work in the poem’s movement or what I am calling (and I’m not sure this is totally synonymous) its unfolding. First, the work of the meter, which is “Lyrical and rapid,” as he says right before the above quote (400). Second, the slow work of the natural voice of the speaker or narrator (or, as we said above, describer: this is a an elegy, a story, and a locodescriptive poem all wrapped in one, so unfortunately I can’t be as precise as I should be about this). This speaker is, as Wordsworth says, one who is “credulous and talkative” has “slow faculties and deep feelings,” and it is the aim of the poem to represent this passion in him. So meter speeds the speaker up and the speaker slows the meter down. Or rather, meter works with and against the speaker: it might be more accurate to say that we just have two different speeds at work, each of which only indirectly effect each other by the fact of their occurring simultaneously (there is a complex experiment in time going on here, I think—that’s the ultimate thing Wordsworth seems to be playing with). And on the side of the speaker (this is what I’m claiming in the paragraphs above) we have the dilation that his voice produces as he loquaciously but passionately tells the story—a dilation that has its origin in the rhythms or particular rhythmic tendencies of ballads. The work of the ballad is the slow work, the passionate work aligned with the voice. And (Wordsworth seems to claim) we cannot understand the meter and in fact the work of versification in general without this passion and voice—unlike in earlier poetry, perhaps.

This is why he then makes the odd turn in the note towards defending repetition, and tying this repetition together with the essential function of poetry, which is to be passion (“poetry is passion,” Wordsworth says here, reiterating the claims of his famous Preface). If we see repetition as a certain rhythmic aspect of the ballad, a certain tendency to slip into refrain, as well as being the mere repetition of a set of words, then we can defend it when it occurs in our poetry—for it is then not words that get repeated so much as passions or feelings of a (perhaps talkative) speaker which get represented:

There is a numerous class of readers who imagine that the same words cannot be repeated without tautology: this is a great error: virtual tautology is much oftener produced by using different words when the meaning is exactly the same. Words, a Poet’s words more particularly, ought to be weighed in the balance of feeling [...] For the Reader cannot be too often reminded that Poetry is passion…

The meaning of the words emerges not out of each word’s individual work (and their individual stress or lack of stress, say, as might be more the case in Elizabethan and Early Modern verse (according to Wordsworth): a lack of stress is, by itself and insofar as it is disconnected from a passionate voice, less likely for Wordsworth to be something that signals how the word should be interpreted), but out of their connection to a feeling, to a passionate speaker. What this means is that when a word is repeated, it might have more meaning and in fact a different meaning than if it had only appeared once. Thus, for Wordsworth, it is through repetition that tautology is avoided--a conclusion that might seem paradoxical at first.

Moreover, this is how tautology is defended in the cases in which it actually applies—that is, in cases where “different words” mean “exactly the same,” which is in fact the precise classical rhetorical definition of tautology, or tautologia. Wordsworth might here be a defender of classical rhetoric, in other words, which would only strengthen the case I’m making: that he retains form as he elevates some formal elements into something like principles of composition, thus enlarging our idea of form while transforming it.

All this, of course, connects with what he says in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads about rhythm allowing us to endure pain and redirect it towards an experience of pleasure. It might also connect to the title of the collection, as "Lyrical Ballads" is a famously huge oxymoron: a ballad is a communal or folk tale, while a lyric is an individual song. At the heart of this might be a paradox concerning the relation of the poet to the community not unrelated to this one concerning repetition and tautology--especially if repetition is seen as a quality particular to the ballad.

Best of... Freud and psychoanalysis

So I have been trying to collect together a few sets or series of posts that I have done on this blog around various topics or themes that have come up. A "Best of" collection. So far, I we have Derrida and Heidegger. Today, Freud and Psychoanalysis. In the future, we'll probably have Merleau-Ponty and Phenomenology. Look for them on the sidebar, where I'll put a more permanent link to the sets. Now, on to Freud:

Freud, philology, associations: I try to read an interesting remark in The Joke and its Relation to the Unconscious, and reflect on the difference between psychoanalysis and philology.

Anticipated normal path of development: I look closely at a crucial passage in the Schreber case that has been misread, making Freud's theories of development much more normative (in one respect) than they really are. Such cheap points against Freud usually are trying to push you into a false choice: either Freud is normative or he isn't. If you want to defend Freud against the sciolism (to borrow a great word of Coleridge's), you have to prove the impossible. For of course Freud is going to give you some sort of normativity. The real issue is where exactly he is normative--and it usually isn't where you expect.

Vicissitudes: A little reflection on this interesting Freudian (or, rather, Stracheyian) word.

Drives and primal repression: My attempt to work through the two theoretical essays "Instincts and the Vicissitudes" and "Repression."

Looking at drives: Basically, how drives work. I should say, though, Freudian drives, which are odd things.

Lacan and repetition: My reading of Lacan's "Tuchê and automaton."

Place, or/of the fetish: the beginning of a paper on "Fetishism," the splitting of the ego, and place in Freud and psychoanalysis.