SOURCE: Gerhard, Patricia. “The New Criticism as an Aesthetic Theory.” Western Humanities Review 17, no. 1 (winter 1963): 155-60.

[In the following essay, Gerhard defines the function and place of the aesthetic object, namely the poem, in the context of New Criticism and its theories, writing that according to the New Critics, the poem or work of art must be treated as an object complete in itself. Although knowledge about both the artist and the historical circumstances under which the piece was created may aid in the understanding of a poem, these criteria do not belong in the realm of true critical inquiry.]

Not only do the individual works of art of the twentieth century reflect our highly specialized and fragmented world, but also the interpretation and criticism of these works mirror our world as well. Each field has tended to develop a technical and esoteric language of criticism to explain the new forms which have been produced. Yet even the briefest acquaintanceship with these forms—the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright, the paintings of Franz Kline, the quartets of Bartok, or the poems of Auden, for example—indicates a basic similarity in their essential spirit. This congruity of expression in the arts should make possible a criticism which could be equally applicable to all of the creative arts of the twentieth century.

To adapt to all art a statement made for poetry by one of the new critics, Eliseo Vivas, a work of art is an artifact whose function is to organize the primary data of experience that can be exhibited in and through a specific medium. A poem organizes that element of man's experiences which can be expressed through the pattern of words; a painting accomplishes the same thing through its language of space manipulation within the confines of a two-dimensional surface; while architecture employs a space language which can be experienced both visually and tactilely (embracing man's whole feeling of space as he exists in it); and finally music employs the formal organization of sounds.

There is a tendency to categorize as formal that literary criticism and aesthetic theory that seeks to so organize man's experiences. There can be no question that the great interest of the contemporary poet, the painter, or the musician is to achieve such an ordering. The use of the term formal is then a justifiable adjective within this framework. Yet, it will be seen in the later discussion that the forms of contemporary art convey through their own language meanings and contents which the mind grasps, but which cannot or need not be verbalized to be understood.

The language difficulties encountered in the arts of the present day could in part be avoided by the artist's ordering of experience through past modes of expression. Why not a sonnet or a lyric with meter and rhyme? Why not a painting with recognizable subject matter, or a building with a colonial design, or a symphony in sonata form?

The first reason and perhaps the most telling is the character of our world. The twentieth century is too complex to easily be expressed through the forms of yesterday, no matter how apparently comprehensible they seem to be to great numbers of people. Another reason for the need of different languages is man's desire for the new. Man takes a new primitive form, develops it to perfection, uses it in many variations and then in spite of its refinement rejects it for something new.

Having presented an explanation for the function of art in our present day let us turn to the nature of the aesthetic object. For the new critics of literature, the aesthetic object—the poem—is in itself a consistent autonomous whole. Thus they concern themselves with poems rather than poets. For them, the psychology of the poet is not important for the evaluation and understanding of the poem. The amateur evaluator more often falls into the trap of judging the work of art on the basis of the life and personality of the artists: consider the adverse criticism of Dylan Thomas because of the type of life he led, or of Frank Lloyd Wright because of some episodes of his life or his autocratic personality.

In all fields of art the critics demand that the work of art be treated as an aesthetic object, not as diagnostic of the artist or even of the culture that produced it. The knowledge of both the life of the artist and the milieu of a time may help in understanding a work of art, but they are in the realm of cultural history, not criticism per se.

For the new critics the poem has a life of its own. This life is the inner structure of the poem and in the end its total meaning. This total meaning is the single context in which the individual words and phrases have their meanings. This assumption of a total context for the poem has earned the new criticism the adjective contextual, which has been used by others with both praise and blame.

The architectural thinkers of the early twentieth century such as Wright and Sullivan were particularly insistent on a similar organic approach to the work of art. For them, a work of architecture was like a plant with root, stem, and flower. With its organic being, a building was more than the sum total of its parts, for each building had a total meaning of three-dimensional form in which each individual form had its meaning.

Viewing the work of art as a total organic unity can prove a valuable point of view in assaying the comparative worth of aesthetic objects. A qualitative judgment can be made by determining whether the elements of a work of art have been fused into a unity which is a total meaning, rather than a collection of ideas.

The organic view of the poem or other art forms mitigates against paraphrase. The poet does not have an idea which he translates into poetic language. The idea is integral with the means in the poem. For this reason an idea cannot be abstracted from the poem afterwards as a paraphrase. To be meaningful any paraphrase would be simply a rewriting of the poem itself in exactly the same words.

When we turn to the visual arts, it is even more difficult to attempt a paraphrase, for not only is there a nontranslatable whole, but added to this is the difficulty of explaining a work of art in one language (that of shapes) in another, the conceptual language of words.

There are painters (e.g., Ben Shahn) who work with themes which can be conceptualized. To a certain degree their work is like program music which needs program notes for the full knowledge of the artist's theme. Other contemporary painters are so alienated from the possibility of using a theme that when they have been approached by the Container Corporation to produce a painting in their series “Great Ideas of Western Man,” they find it impossible to produce in this manner. For some non-objective painters the verbal explanation is especially ludicrous because the meaning of their painting is developed in the very act of painting it.

Because of the new critics' view of the function of poetry and the nature of the aesthetic object, they give their prime attention to a close analysis of the text of a poem. By examining the means that the poet has used they hope to add to the understanding and enjoyment of the work. The new critic focuses his attention on the formal means of the poem and more particularly on the way in which words and their meanings work in a specific syntax to create the poem's total meaning.

The new critics note that words have both denotations and connotations: words both point to things and give implications over and above the direct reference to things. The language of science seeks to limit words to their denotative use in contrast to the poet's extolling of their connotative possibilities. By their very nature words can bring to a poem all their acquired meaning and emotional attachments. Their meaning within the poem is controlled by the poet through their relation to other words in the poem and through their position in the total context of the poem. These critics admire a poem which can encompass within its structural context the widest numbers of possible meanings. With broad connotation in its words, a poem can best convey the complexity of the world, and if successful it can offer a valuable ordering of experience.

The poetic means are employed by the present-day writer in order to make possible the widest connotations. Metaphors are used to be understood literally as well as metaphorically. Ironies—as with metaphors—are to be taken at face value as well as ironically. Words with double meanings or words which are intentionally ambiguous increase the range of the total experience in the poem. Not only does the poet widen the context of his poem by these poetic means, but he also forceably gives new meanings to words through their place in the overall structure of his poem. Both architecture and painting in their languages make statements which are roughly equal to the ironies, paradoxes, ambiguities and neologisms of contemporary poetry.

The language of the three-dimensional arts is employed in much the same way as the language of poetry to give a multiple meaning. By eliminating highly denotative and referential forms, the non-objective painter is able to present a wider range of visual experience and to imbue his forms with a more complex emotional statement of the world. In appreciating a painting as a painting it has always been the visual experience which is aesthetically transmitted, and only incidentally the represented subject. Thus the painting transmits its meaning through man's perceptual faculties, rather than his conceptual cognitive processes.

The language of painting is the interrelated means of expression, space, and color. Space is conceived by the painter either two-dimensionally or three-dimensionally. In representing space two-dimensionally his spatial relationships are confined to the surface of the canvas. Even on the two-dimensional surface ambiguities in spatial relationships can be achieved, as can be seen in the two-dimensional organization of Mondrian's compositions in lines and rectangles. Even in an extremely two-dimensional painting an ambiguity of space results from the interreaction of the form (or forms) and the canvas itself. In a characteristic painting of Franz Kline the spaces in white can be viewed as figures placed on a black ground just as they are viewed as background for the slashes of black.

With the representation of three dimensions on a two-dimensional surface greater and more complex variations in the reading of spatial relationships are made possible. Reference to the trick representation of a group of cubes can indicate how ambiguous spatial relationships can be developed. When the observer is asked to count the number of blocks in a group he answers three; upon being told to turn the figure upside down he discovers that, magically, there are now five cubes instead of the original three.

Multiple spatial connotations are found in the paintings of Willem de Koonig, Hans Hofmann, or Arshile Gorky. In the work of these painters there is a constant shifting of spatial relationships between the flat surface pattern and the thrusts into or out of the surface (or technically the picture plane). Individual areas of a particular painting have an interplay of relationships which have further relations with other parts within the total concept of the painting.

Color is inescapably tied to the meaning of space in a painting as well as being an expressive language in its own right. Color works with space because of its inherent qualities in advancing and receding. Also color expresses its own language in terms of relationships. In fact some painters say there are no colors, only relationships. A shade of red may appear very red if placed next to a green area. In placing it next to a blue area it might read as orange.

Color has greater emotive content than have shapes, making possible a wider range of emotive connotations. Contemporary paintings which make a minimal spatial statement such as those of Rothko and Clifford Still rely on color in reflecting the contemporary world. Philip Guston is virtually neologistic in his use of color as an expressive means.

The language of architecture is experienced spatially from multiple viewpoints—from near or far, from the exterior, or from moving about within. The interplay of voids and solids in a building as defined by its structure must make a unified expression to these multiple viewpoints. In achieving this unity the architect makes use of the same types of ambiguities and paradoxes as found in painting and poetry.

Perhaps the most frequent paradox of contemporary architecture is the structural supporting of a multistory building on seemingly insignificant posts, and the use of the curtain wall which is hung on the exterior of the building and does not even support itself.

Ambiguities of direction and spaces and voids have been expressed in Wright's Price Tower in Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Horizontal forms are given vertical emphasis, and expectations for solids are resolved with voids. The open plan as developed by Wright and others creates an organic spatial unity which serves a variety of purposes and gives a complexity of aesthetic experiences.

Because the contemporary architect considers the total organization of the space of his building, he mingles his exterior and interior space. Having designed his buildings as a part of the whole space of his site, the architect carries his design a step further and considers it in relation to the immediate area, in relation to greater and greater wholes. Thus it is only natural that city planning becomes one of the major concerns of the contemporary architect in his effort to order the experience of modern man.

As one would expect, music as well as painting and architecture has developed its own language to reflect the diversity of the twentieth century. The contemporary composer has found it impossible to express his world through the forms and language of the past. This has led to a partial rejection of nineteenth-century symphonic sonata form and in its place a partial substitution of certain contrapuntal elements of the seventeenth century as organizational means.

Counterpart, the art of plural melody, has made possible the organic combination of elements which are independent in their rhythm, tonality and sequence, but yet work together in a total musical meaning.

It has been in the area of musical tonality that the contemporary composer has been able to create the greatest richness of texture. He has employed tonality in several ways: as a plurality of tonalities both in the whole composition and in a distribution to the melodic lines; and as a completely new tonal system such as the whole-tone scale or the twelve-tone system.

The languages of the arts in the twentieth century are completely different; yet, as has been indicated, their basic syntax and structure are similar enough to allow for the application of one theoretical criterion. The literary theory of the new critics provides this means for examining the syntax and structure of the various arts. In defining a poem as the organization of man's experiences into an autonomous whole, the new criticism presents the possibility of evaluating the other arts in terms of the same type of organic whole. When used in these ways, the new criticism has become an aesthetic theory to aid in the understanding and enjoyment of all the arts.