[In the following essay, Graff traces various academic interpretations of New Criticism, proposing that in order to fully understand the theories espoused by New Critics, it is absolutely necessary to understand the complex cultural, educational, and historical considerations that led to the creation of this mode of literary interpretation.]

Not so very many years ago, the New Critics were academic radicals challenging the hegemony of the philological scholars, the literary and intellectual historians, and the literary biographers in the domain of literary studies. Then, after a period of theoretical polemics and departmental infighting, the New Criticism won its battle for academic respectability. But scarcely had it done so than the New Criticism began to be attacked from other quarters. Some members of a new generation of teachers and scholars saw in New Criticism the epitome of all that was constricting and deadening about the academic study of literature. The New Critics, it was charged, had trivialized literature and literary study by turning critical interpretation into an overintellectualized game whose object was the solution of interpretive puzzles. This way of viewing literature tended to ignore or destroy the moral, political, and personal impact that literature might possess. No idea of the New Critics seemed to inspire more protest than their assumption of the “objective” nature of the literary text, their view that a poem was an object whose meaning could be analyzed by the detached, disinterested critic. This assumption, predicated on T. S. Eliot's doctrine of the “impersonality” of the literary work, seemed to many to represent a failure of nerve on the part of humanists in the face of the prestige of science and technology. The political conservatism of many of the leading New Critics seemed to reinforce this charge. The New Critics' attempt to emulate the empirical scientists by employing an objective, analytic method for literary texts was judged as one more symptom of the university's capitulation to the capitalist-military-industrial-technological complex.

For numerous critics on the current American cultural Left, New Critical-style interpretation has borne roughly the same relation to literature and creative sensibility as the urban police bear to oppressed minorities, or American military technology bears to Third-World Liberation movements. Susan Sontag, in “Against Interpretation,” says that in present-day culture, “whose already classic dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capacity,” interpretation is “reactionary, impertinent, cowardly, stifling.”¹ Richard Poirier, in The Performing Self, sees “repressive analysis” as destructive to literature, which he defines as “a form of energy not accountable to the orderings anyone makes of it,” an energy which “cannot arrange itself within the existing order of things.”² These critics and others have viewed objective literary interpretation as a natural extension of the technological imperialism of American society, presupposing the same subject-object dichotomy of scientific empiricism which has led to the spiritual alienation and fragmentation of Western civilization.

But current attacks on New Critical objectivity do not necessarily express a political point of view. Throughout the period of its ascendancy, the New Criticism had been repeatedly attacked by those advocates of a personal view of literature—literature as an expression of the personality of the author—whom it had done so much to antagonize. The complaint that New Critical interpretation divested literary communication of personal feeling was expressed early by critics such as John Middleton Murry and Herbert Read and somewhat later by Leslie Fiedler. This complaint has been revived recently—in ways that do not always add anything appreciable to its content. A more sophisticated form of this “personalist” objection to the New Criticism, however, has been formulated by recent phenomenological critics, who attack New Critical objectivity and impersonality as an instance of the Cartesian subject-object model of epistemology. For these phenomenologists, this “naive realism” can be remedied only by a phenomenological hermeneutics, which views literature as a revelation of the unified, organic stream of “Being” in which reader, writer, and work are embedded. The subject-object gulf between reader and work is thus “transcended.” This phenomenological view is capable of formulation in political terms: the subject-object dualism is identified with the ruthless, dehumanizing manipulations of the rationalized, technological state, and the unified realm of poetic transcendence is identified with radical resistance to or revolutionary subversion of this state.

Richard Palmer's Hermeneutics, a book which summarizes the general phenomenological approach to literature and interpretation, draws together many of the typical phenomenological arguments against New Critical objectivity and impersonality. Palmer asserts at the outset that the great weakness of “literary interpretation in England and America” is that it “operates, philosophically speaking, largely in the framework of realism.”³ This type of interpretation

tends to presuppose, for instance, that the literary work is simply “out there” in the world, essentially independent of its perceivers. One's perception of the work is considered to be separate from the work itself, and the task of literary interpretation is to speak about the “work itself.” The author's intentions, too, are held rigidly separate from the work; the work is a “being” in itself, a being with its own powers and dynamics. A typical modern interpreter generally defends the “autonomy of being” of the literary work, and sees his task as that of penetrating this being through textual analysis. The preliminary separation of subject and object, so axiomatic in realism, becomes the philosophical foundation and framework of literary interpretation. The consequences of this way of interpreting literature is a kind of depersonalization and dehumanization of the experience of reading. The image of a scientist taking an object apart to see how it is made has become the prevailing model of the art of interpretation. Students in literature classes are sometimes even told that their personal experience of a work is some kind of fallacy irrelevant to the analysis of a work.”⁴

Palmer sums up his criticism as follows:

“Science manipulates things and gives up living in them,” the late French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty tells us. This, in one sentence, is what has happened to American literary interpretation. We have forgotten that the literary work is not a manipulable object completely at our disposal; it is a human voice out of the past, a voice which must somehow be brought to life. Dialogue, not dissection, opens up the world of a literary work. Disinterested objectivity is not appropriate to the understanding of a literary work.⁵

Later, Palmer uses even stronger language in attacking disinterested objectivity. Such objectivity, he suggests, is “a forceable seizure, a ‘rape’ of the text,” whereas interpretation ought to be “a loving union” between the text and the interpreter.⁶ Objective theories of interpretation are thus “rape theories of interpretation,”⁷ producing “cold analyses of structure and pattern.”⁸ These theories derive from “the modern technological way of thinking and the will-to-power that lies at its root,” and thus express a ruthless quest for “mastery of the subject.”⁹ That the New Criticism is for Palmer not merely an example of such misguided technological thinking in literary criticism but the most influential expression of it is clearly indicated throughout the book. For example, at one point Palmer asserts that for the New Critic, “the text becomes an object and explication a conceptual exercise which works solely within the ‘given,’ accepting the restrictions of scientific objectivity.”¹⁰ Palmer does at several points suggest that the matter may actually be somewhat more complicated than such a statement suggests, especially when he acknowledges the existence of contradictory tendencies in New Critical theory. “The philosophical base of New Criticism was always shaky and uncertain,” Palmer says, “vacillating between realism and idealism.”¹¹

But whenever he discusses New Critical objectivity, Palmer disregards this complication and assumes that the roots of this objectivity are to be found in scientific empiricism, in an attempt to emulate the scientific posture of observational neutrality. This assumption has become a commonplace in polemics against the New Criticism, whether, like that of Palmer, they remain within the sphere of education and literary theory, or extend beyond into social and political criticism. Thus Richard Coe, in a recent paper which typifies the arguments against New Criticism of the cultural left with its vision of an apocalyptic revolution in consciousness, says that New Critical “intrinsic” criticism was “so close to a myth of empiricism” as to argue either “influence or a common ancestor.”¹² “The ‘intrinsic’ critic,” Coe adds, “seeks an absolute basis in ‘scientific’ empiricism.”¹³

In my view, there is little basis for the assumption that New Critical objectivity was grounded in scientific empiricism. At the very least, this view gravely oversimplifies and distorts the intentions of most of the New Critics, with the possible exception of I. A. Richards, a somewhat special case.¹⁴ The common error of those who harbor this assumption is their separation of the New Critics' methodology of textual interpretation from the larger context of the New Critics' organicist theory of literature and from the even larger context of cultural and disciplinary pressures which conditioned New Critical theory and practice.

When people speak casually of “New Criticism” today, they think primarily of a particular, isolated aspect of this critical tendency, the interpretive method of detailed rhetorical analysis—the celebrated technique of “close-reading” which revolutionized the study of literature. But to identify New Criticism with close textual interpretation is potentially misleading, for it tends to divorce this method of interpretation from the theory of the nature of poetry which gave rise to it. Critics who think they detect in the practice of close reading a presupposition on the part of the New Critics that literature is a didactic mode of discourse, a mere “statement” of conceptual propositions, turn the intent of these critics inside-out. It was precisely to demonstrate that a poem was too complex, ambiguous, and dynamic to be summed up in any conceptual proposition that New Critical close reading was frequently undertaken. One cannot hope to understand the New Critical method of interpretation without examining the complicated cultural, educational, and polemical considerations which caused this method to come into being in the particular period of history in which it did. Examined apart from these contexts, it is true that the New Critical method of interpretation begins to look very much like a form of scientism, an attempt to imitate the empirical scientist dissecting specimens and examining them under a microscope in his laboratory. The fact that the rise of New Critical objective interpretation coincides historically with the development of objective methodologies in other disciplines seems to confirm this view. But to view New Critical interpretation as analogous to empirical-scientific method is a misrepresentation, based on stereotyped prejudices about the nature of objectivity and a failure to examine what the New Critics actually said and why they said it.

For one thing, to view New Criticism as a form of scientism is to have no way of accounting for the persistent condemnations of science, often couched in vituperative language, running throughout New Critical writing. Indeed, Palmer, for example, in castigating the New Critics for employing “rape theories of interpretation” allegedly deriving from “the modern technological way of thinking,” only echoes the complaints (and the language) of many New Critics from T. S. Eliot through John Crowe Ransom to Cleanth Brooks against just this modern technological way of thinking, which they saw as destructive of literature and spiritual culture. Ransom, one of the most aggressive and influential advocates of a scrupulously objective, disinterested, and impersonal method of interpretation, argued that scientific abstraction committed a kind of cold-blooded murder upon the rich, contingent particularity of “the world's body.” The kind of objective interpretation Ransom sought to apply to literature was antithetical to scientific abstraction and categorization; literary interpretation, Ransom thought, was properly “disinterested,” whereas scientific abstraction necessarily involved the pursuit of practical, utilitarian interests. Science, Ransom wrote, is always “committed to a special interest,” for which it abstracts from the particulars of nature. By means of such abstraction, “science destroys the image,” the perceptual realm of poetry.

People who are engrossed with their pet “values” [Ransom adds] become habitual killers. Their game is the images, or the things, and they acquire the ability to shoot them as far off as they can be seen, and do. It is thus that we lose the power of imagination, or whatever faculty it is by which we are able to contemplate things as they are in their rich, contingent materiality.¹⁵

We love to view the world under universal or scientific ideas to which we give the name truth; and this is because the ideas seem to make not for righteousness but for mastery. The Platonic view of the world is ultimately the predatory, for it reduces to the scientific. …¹⁶

Such statements could be almost infinitely multiplied by quotations from Brooks, Allen Tate, R. P. Blackmur, W. K. Wimsatt, Robert Penn Warren, Robert Heilman, and others. Disinterested interpretive objectivity was for Ransom and these other New Critics an antidote for scientific objectivity, just as literature and art themselves were seen as an antidote for “interested” science: “As science more and more reduces the world to its types and forms,” Ransom says, “art, replying, must invest it again with body.”¹⁷ Richard Palmer's view that the interpreter should strive for a “loving union” with the text is echoed in Ransom's injunction that the critic “approach the object as such, and in humility.”¹⁸ Both notions, the one descending from Heideggerian phenomenology, the other from Kant, are motivated by an impulse to subvert the scientific-technological “use” or “manipulation” of nature.

To explain fully why the objective and impersonal attitude became a New Critical trademark is a complicated matter, involving influences inside and outside the sphere of literary criticism proper. Perhaps the single most significant factor, for most of the New Critics, is their attraction to the Christian doctrine of Original Sin. This doctrine implied that the “personality” of the natural man was inherently corrupt and unreliable. Given such a conception of personality, it is not surprising that critics such as Eliot, T. E. Hulme, Ransom, and Tate, among the founders of New Critical theory, sought to discourage the intrusion of personality into the processes of poetic composition and interpretation. Present-day critics of New Critical impersonality may find the appeal to Original Sin and the doctrine of innate corruption not a whit more palatable than the emulation of empirical science as a ground for the theory of interpretation. But these critics ought at least recognize that the grounds, in the two instances, are antithetical. Like romantic thinkers such as Coleridge, Chateaubriand, and Carlyle, New Critics such as Eliot, Hulme, and Ransom, and a bit later Brooks, Tate, Warren, and Wimsatt saw scientific objectivity as a threat to the religious attitude, with which they connected the literary imagination. Scientific objectivity for these critics was associated with the arrogant secularism and egotistical commercial utilitarianism of industrial society, and with this society's naive faith in progress and in the natural goodness of man. In this respect, scientific objectivity was an expression of that decadent “humanism” for which Hulme proposed “the religious attitude” and a resurrected poetic and critical “classicism” as remedies. This religious classicism, though founded on the dogma of Original Sin, was supposed to be entertained as an unconscious attitude rather than as conscious assent to doctrinal beliefs.

Like contemporary opponents of the New Criticism who espouse the viewpoint of phenomenological hermeneutics, the New Critics sought to preserve or restore the sense of religious reverence, as distinct from the doctrinal or theological basis of religion, in a world threatened by rationalism, secularism, and materialistic self-interest. Identifying the “personal” with the spiritual and social anarchy they believed had been caused by Western liberal individualism—that is, with that “dissociation of sensibility” which seemed endemic to industrial society—they attempted to banish it as much as possible from poetic creation and interpretation. Indeed, the “personal” signified for the New Critics just that ruthless technological will-to-power which advocates of phenomenological hermeneutics and other enemies of the objective attitude erroneously attribute to New Critical impersonality itself. New Critical impersonality was grounded in the very same type of protest against acquisitive self-interest which has inspired current attacks on technological objectivity. By viewing the text in an objective manner, the critic was to achieve that “surrender” of his private personality to a larger “tradition” in terms of which Eliot had described the creative process. The assumptions of impersonal criticism in this respect were not altogether remote from the view expressed by C. G. Jung that the artist “is objective and impersonal—even inhuman—for as an artist he is his work and not a human being.”¹⁹ Every great work, Jung says, is a surrender of the individual with his private will and reason to that unconscious “matrix of life in which all men are embedded.” Thus it follows that “every great work of art is objective and impersonal, but none the less profoundly moves us each and all.”²⁰

The goal of New Critical impersonal criticism was often precisely that transcendence of the subject-object model of rationalist epistemology with the consequent attainment of “unity of being” which is the aim of phenomenological hermeneutics as well as of a host of contemporary forms of apocalyptic anti-rationalism. Though New Critical impersonality ostensibly conflicts with the personalist tendency of the recently ascendant New Sensibility, a tendency exemplified in Richard Poirier's celebration of the literature of “the performing self,” to cite but a single example, its historical roots are identical. Both New Critical impersonality and New Sensibility personalism derived from a reaction against acquisitive technological reason, the one identifying personal self-expression with technological reason, the other seeing it as subversive of technological reason.

It is fatal to ignore the polemical contexts which shaped the New Critics' ideas of objectivity and impersonality. On the one hand, New Critical objective interpretation was a reaction against two doctrines—themselves mutually antagonistic—which had lingered on in criticism as legacies of the Victorian and Edwardian periods: hedonistic impressionism and genteel moralism. On the other hand, objective interpretation was equally a reaction against the reductive consequences the New Critics detected in the assumptions about literature held by the philological scholars, the literary and intellectual historians, and the biographers, as well as by Marxist and sociological critics. And as if this were not sufficient, the New Critics found themselves in the position of defending the humanities against the denigrations of logical positivists and “hard-boiled naturalists,” as Cleanth Brooks termed them,²¹ who saw literature as a vestige of obsolete superstitions and magic, who reduced its content to non-cognitive “pseudo-statement,” and refused to accord it any status as genuine knowledge. In general, the method of close reading was instrumental in the effort to rescue literature from the cultural triviality and marginality to which it appeared to be reduced, deliberately or unwittingly, by those who dismissed literature as a frivolous activity or else defended it in terms which seemed to demean or denature it.

Close textual analysis, producing proofs of the “richness” and multivalent complexity of the literary text simultaneously answered the hedonistic impressionist, who saw the text as a mere occasion for his pleasurable excitation and thus ignored the seriousness of its meaning, and the moralist or the Marxist, who in their eagerness to extract a morally or socially uplifting message from the text tended to reduce it to a simple-minded form of preaching or propaganda. But close analyses of structure and texture could also demonstrate to the philologists, historians, and biographers that the text possessed an independent richness of its own, apart from what it might secondarily illustrate about the history of language, literature, ideas, or social institutions, or about the life and character of the author, proving that the value of literature did not rest in its usefulness as an index to the subject-matter of other intellectual disciplines. Finally, for the positivist who saw in poetry little more than an emotive display, close reading could demonstrate the profound knowledge of human experience poetry embodied. Here, once again, objective analysis was not an attempt to emulate the positivist's neutral method of observation, but rather to refute his charge that poetry has no serious substance. In this connection, New Critical analytic method had closer ties with the romantic defense of poetry as a substitute or support for religious values than with the positivistic view of experience.

The New Critics were forced to fight battles on so wide a variety of fronts—ranging from neo-classical or positivistic intellectualism to romantic and Victorian emotionalism—that their formulations often seemed bewilderingly contradictory. New Critical impersonality was proposed as a remedy for so diverse an array of ailments that the concept itself could not help becoming ambiguous.

On the one hand, the post-Victorian message-hunters, the Marxists, and the academic historians of ideas had all dealt with literature in such a way as to suggest that literary works are no more than the sum of the ideas contained in them. These critics seemed to assume that literary meanings are intellectual propositions capable of restatement in critical language without serious loss. In the face of such assumptions, the New Critics asserted doctrines such as “a poem should not mean but be” and “the heresy of paraphrase.” The first of these asserted that the meaning of a literary work differed from that of a scientific, discursive, or practical statement, that it had no meaning at all in the sense of a separable conceptual content, that what meaning it had was embedded in the self-sufficient “being” of the literary structure itself and thus made no reference outward to the world outside the poem. The second doctrine held that, on account of this unique characteristic of literary meaning, no literary work could be paraphrased or described in critical language without serious distortion. The invocation of formulas like “a poem should not mean but be” and “the heresy of paraphrase” proved a useful strategy against those who seemed too eager to identify the poem itself with a paraphrastic reduction of it. To speak of a poem as an “objective” entity in this context was to talk of its absolute self-sufficiency, its irreducibility to any other terms but itself, its “imperviousness” in Ortega y Gasset's term, to all external considerations, and even its refusal to refer to the external, “objective” world.

But in the face of another set of opponents—those like the impressionists or the positivists, who tended to deny that poetry possessed any serious meaning at all—it was necessary for the New Critics to suspend for the moment their insistence that the poem was “objective” in the sense which suggested it had no correspondence with the external world. In order to exalt the high humanistic function of literature, it was necessary to emphasize its moral seriousness and intellectual complexity, its far-ranging depth of meaning. To emphasize the “objectivity” of the poem in this context was to define poetry as something just the opposite of some self-contained, non-referential object. The objectivity of poetry had to reside in its referential truth to something outside itself—to “the facts of experience,” as Cleanth Brooks put it.²²

Because the New Critics had constantly to vacillate between arguments designed to refute antithetical positions, it was often unclear to those who tried to understand them whether they represented an Arnoldian humanism embracing a conception of literature as a “criticism of life,” or a post-Symbolist formalism based on the view that literature is “about” nothing but the perfection of its intrinsic form. Critics like Brooks might in one breath warn that poems are “autonomous” entities without any “truth of correspondence” and in the next declare that poems yield profound truths about “the complexity of experience,” embracing one or the other thesis by turns as the polemical situation dictated. The referential meanings which the New Critics ascribed to literature in order to defend it against the positivist denigration had to be eliminated from literature in order to correct the heavy-handed paraphrasing of the Marxists, the moralists, and the historians of ideas. Whereas New Critical textual explication endowed poems with the most complex of meanings, New Critical theoretical arguments frequently called into question the idea that a poem can even possess anything so didactic as a meaning.

Poetic “objectivity,” then, was an ambiguous concept insofar as it sought to define a relationship between the poem and the external world and clarify the nature of poetic “meaning.” The New Critics sought to resolve this theoretical ambiguity through critical formulations like “embodied” or “organic” or “dramatic” truth and meaning, according to which a poem was somehow, perhaps only to the eye of the creative imagination itself, which transcends logic and the law of contradiction, simultaneously referential and non-referential. Such formulations were themselves ambiguous, however, as were the terms which denoted poetic subject matter. Terms like “experience,” “ambiguity,” and “complexity of experience” are all ambiguous in New Critical parlance, failing to make clear whether they denote a purely intrinsic, non-referential property of the poem (or a subjective or psychological drama the poem is to represent) or a property of reality existing outside and prior to the poem. The ambiguity of key New Critical theoretical concepts gave them a peculiar polemical flexibility, but at the expense of clarity and consistency.

Thus it is ironic that the group of critics who did more than anyone to popularize the method of verbal explication, minute analysis, and paraphrase, is also the group that formulated the classic arguments against such analytical methods, arguments which would soon be turned against these critics. The chief propositions which inform the charges hurled against the New Critics today—the nondiscursive, “organic” nature of poetic and literary discourses and the limits of critical paraphrase and interpretation—were simply the basic lessons which New Criticism taught. Those like Susan Sontag who write “against interpretation” and the overintellectualization of aesthetic experience that results from academic analysis merely rehearse all the arguments the New Critics had developed against the heresy of paraphrase. The present-day attack on the New Critics for sponsoring an over-rationalistic theory of poetry ignores the frequency with which these critics protested against defining poetry as propositional statement and deplored any reading which stops at the poem's ideas. Cleanth Brooks, citing Allen Tate, wrote as follows:

Tate, rejecting [Yvor] Winters' conception of a poem as a statement about something, would define it as an action rendered in its totality. This action is not prescriptive of means (as science is) nor of ends (as religion is.) The reader is left to draw his own conclusions: (“… the vision of the whole,” as Tate says, “is not susceptible of logical demonstration.”). There can be no external verification: the reader grasps it by an act of imagination or not at all. …²³

This characteristic statement of the New Critical position illustrates not only the standard repudiation of the discursive, but the corollary that an “imaginative” rather than a scientifically neutral response to literature is the desirable one. So intensely did New Critics like Tate and Brooks proscribe “external verification” and stress the imaginative as opposed to conceptual and rational nature of the reader's experience of the literary work that it was often difficult to see what differentiated New Critical theory from radical subjectivism and relativism. Brooks adds after the foregoing statement that “Tate will not allow that the poem is a whimsical, subjective projection.” But if external verification and rational categorization of the poem are forbidden, it is not clear on what basis the poem can be said to transcend whimsical, subjective projection. Nor is it clear on these conditions how the objectivity of the reader's response to and interpretation of the text can be tested.

According to the theory of creative imagination which the New Critics took over and adapted largely from Coleridge, literature was a vehicle by which distinctions between opposites were transcended and the logical, analytical view of the world overcome. This philosophical monism at the center of organicist poetics was necessarily fatal to the New Critical attempt to establish the objectivity either of textual interpretation or of the literary work's reference to the outer world, since it collapsed the distinctions between the reader and the text and between the internal poetic “reality” of the work and external reality. Even I. A. Richards, the most hospitable of any of the New Critics toward scientific empiricism, held that only the factual observation-statements of science had scientific validity, and that the broader metaphysical overview which underlay science—the materialist thesis of the reality of the external world—was a “myth,” a fiction no more susceptible of empirical verification itself than the “pseudo-statements” of poetry and theology. Scientific materialism, Richards argued, was a myth of exactly the same order as romantic idealism, and he regarded his own materialist leanings as no more than a matter of personal temperament.²⁴ Statements positing an independent “reality” in nature were myths, unverifiable in scientific terms, and thus were of the same order as statements which denied an independent reality apart from consciousness. Richards' defense of poetry in Coleridge on Imagination rested on the logical conclusion that “if we grant that all is myth,” that is, scientific as well as poetic beliefs, then it follows that “poetry, as the myth making which most brings ‘the whole soul of man into activity’ … becomes the necessary channel for the reconstitution of order” in minds disoriented by modern fragmentation and chaos.²⁵

Although they rarely held to it unequivocally, the New Critics' definition of poetry suggested that the creative imagination represents a special way of viewing the world in which the distinction between self and reality is suspended, at least momentarily, and all contraries are merged into an undifferentiated state of unity. Such, at any rate, appeared to be the import of statements like that of Cleanth Brooks that the “fusion” which “the creative imagination itself effects … is not logical; it apparently violates science and common sense.”²⁶ Some such monistic fusion or trans-rational “unity of being” repeatedly turned out to be at the core of the literary works which the New Critics analyzed, works in which dualities coalesced in the image of a well-wrought urn, a great rooted blossomer, or a Grecian urn.

To be sure, the monistic unity of being which New Critical analysis turned up in these poems was precarious. It was always found to be “qualified” or “undercut” by the counterthrust of some irony or tension. Nevertheless the monistic impulse in New Criticism could not help vitiating, to a greater or lesser degree, New Critical appeals to objectivity. It has been argued recently that in trying to emulate scientific empiricism the New Critics were harboring a conception of science that was outmoded even when they took it up. For it is pointed out that philosophers of science long ago abandoned the “myth of objectivity” which had sustained nineteenth-century empiricism and recognized the “creative,” “personal,” even mythical and poetic nature of scientific observation, hypothesis, and discovery. Thus Richard Coe, whom I have quoted earlier, finds it ironic that we humanists, following in the wake of New Critical “intrinsic” analysis, have yet to “become as humanistic as the scientists whose empiricism we thought we were imitating.”²⁷ It is true enough that when the New Critics spoke of “science,” they usually referred to some form of nineteenth-century materialism and ignored more recent idealist conceptions of science. But if anything, New Critical poetics resembles rather than differs from the idealist, post-empiricist conception of scientific discovery. Others have pointed out the similarity between the modernist theory of poetry as an autonomous entity created not by the fixed preconceptions of the author, but emerging from a struggle with the unpredictable and refractory elements of language and experience and the Principle of Uncertainty in modern physics, which holds that the observational position of the researcher conditions the results of the observation. And there is a striking correspondence between the theory of the independence of poetry from empirical criteria of truth and falsity, the theory that poetic truth is “truth of coherence,” not “truth of correspondence,” and the view of recent idealist philosophers of science that “reality itself is made by the scientist rather than discovered by him”²⁸ and as a result subject only to “coherence” tests of truth. In some of their moods, at least, the New Critics deserve mention along with the new philosophers of science among those who have contributed to the modern revolt against objectivity and against traditional realist-models of experience.

E. D. Hirsch's study, Validity in Interpretation challenges the genuineness of a theoretical idea of objective interpretation proposed by New Criticism in a way that may support my above remarks.²⁹ Hirsch argues that the New Critics failed to fulfill their own demands for objectivity in interpretation because the conditions for achieving such objectivity—the self-consistency, repeatability, and public sharability of the meaning of the text—are subverted by the New Critical refusal to admit the relevance of authorial intention. Hirsch might well have added that these conditions of interpretive objectivity are further undermined by New Critical presuppositions of the “intrinsic,” non-referential character of poetic meaning, which renders the concept of “meaning” itself ambiguous by excluding as inadmissible some of the external contexts—social, moral, behavioral—in terms of which meaning is determined. Hirsch does not look into the origins of the New Critics' theory of interpretation in their larger view of poetry as non-referential, organic discourse. However, he is able to demonstrate with sufficient force that New Critical claims of interpretive objectivity are belied by New Critical presuppositions of the fluid, open-ended, ambiguous nature of textual meaning. Defined in so volatile a fashion, and unchecked by any appeal to the author's probable intention, the meaning of the text becomes unable to protect itself against interpretive relativism and irresponsibility.

Significantly, with respect to my argument, Hirsch couples the inadequacies of New Critical objective interpretation with those of phenomenological hermeneutics. Whereas phenomenologists in the Heideggerian tradition such as Richard Palmer, whom I quoted earlier, condemn New Criticism for its objective posture, Hirsch shows that New Critical objective interpretation and phenomenological hermeneutics both tend toward a common interpretive subjectivism. Hirsch's sub-suming of these antagonists under a single head ought not to be startling, for a small amount of historical investigation is enough to establish that both New Critical organicist poetics and the Heideggerian tradition of phenomenological hermeneutics derive from common origins in German romantic philosophy and aesthetics. New Critical poetics, with its stress on creative imagination as a means of restoring the unity of sensibility allegedly fractured by the rise of science and rationalism, expresses the same drive toward monistic transcendence that is found in phenomenological hermeneutics. And both are plagued by a similar inability to overcome obscurantist or solipsistic irresponsibility in interpretation. As Hirsch demonstrates, both New Critical “objective interpretation” and phenomenological hermeneutics end up calling the objectivity of textual interpretation into question and thus disestablishing the integrity of textual meaning.

Unlike the hermeneutics, however, the New Critics at least sought an objective basis for interpretation and also, some of the time, for the referential truth of literature. To this extent, and setting aside the fact that their organicist assumptions frustrated their attempts to establish this objective basis, the aims of the New Critics were in my view admirable. These critics were willing to face up to the fact that without objective criteria for correctness in interpretation, the reader's experience of a literary work is subject to trivialization by an unchecked relativism in which all readings, however distorted, are equally “correct.” Unless we know how to check our readings against a standard of adequacy, they become a far more frivolous form of self-indulgence than the solving of minor interpretative puzzles.

Moreover, the New Critical concept of objectivity was not an attempt to emulate the value-free neutrality of logical positivism, but rather to rescue the concept of objectivity from the narrowed, neutralized definition of the concept which logical positivism had popularized. Though some New Critics (Ransom in particular) at times questioned the propriety of bringing emotional attitudes into an interpreter's account of his response to a poem, most of the New Critics sought to incorporate emotive and attitudinal aspects of response into their notion of properly objective interpretation, cautioning only that such response should not be so idiosyncratic as to fail to conform to the emotions actually dramatized in the poetic text. From Eliot's theory of the objective correlative onward, it was assumed in New Critical argument that emotion played a legitimate part in the reader's response to a poem, though it was important to distinguish between irrelevant private emotions and “impersonal” emotions which conformed to those emotions actually objectified in the images of the poem. In this effort to broaden the concept of objective response beyond the limits of the narrow concept of neutral objectivity set by positivism, the New Critics were attempting to perform a needed task—the redemption of “objectivity” from the cold, value-free attitude which positivism has taught us to associate with it by showing that objective disinterestedness is compatible with value-judgments and commitments. This attempt is also seen in the New Critics' attempts, unfortunately not fully sustained, to see poetry and literature as yielding objective knowledge of the external world. It is certainly unfair to label these passionate defenders of literature's moral and humane force as desiccated contrivers of “cold analyses of structure and pattern.”

The fallacious assumption that an objective attitude toward an object necessarily precludes an emotional or evaluative response to it is behind most varieties of modern anti-intellectualism and prompts the many philosophical attempts to “transcend” the subject-object distinction. We do not need to “transcend” the subject-object distinction, a goal which is impossible and which merely invites semantic muddles, but rather to demonstrate philosophically how the subject manages to apprehend the object as it really is while both maintain their independence. Subjectivity cannot be totally “fused” with the object without destroying thinking. It is stultifying to think that when one apprehends a poem objectively one cannot simultaneously make a fitting emotional response to it, one that forces one to “risk” one's own personal horizon by freely “opening” oneself to the horizon of the poet, as the phenomenologists put it. Indeed, it makes little sense to speak of risking or opening oneself to the horizon of the poem or the poet unless one can depend on there being some object there to open oneself to. The notion that the objective attitude entails a cold-blooded refusal to risk one's response or a need to manipulate, conquer, or “rape” the world is a vulgar misconception. To accept it is to make Ethan Brand or Doctor Strangelove the epitome of the objective thinker.

In rounding out this discussion, it is necessary to acknowledge one link between science and New Criticism. In a chapter on “Technology and the Avant-Garde” in his Theory of the Avant-Garde, Renato Poggioli discusses the ambivalent fascination of avant-garde literary culture for certain aspects of science. Poggioli observes that “the avant-garde thinker or artist is … particularly susceptible to the scientific myth.”³⁰ This susceptibility is seen, first of all, in the tendency of avant-garde thought to define art by means of analogies with physical or electrical dynamisms, with kinetic “energy,” and secondly, to conceive the process of artistic creativity as a form of “experiment.” Thirdly, this analogy between the creative process and scientific experimentation is often accompanied by a conception of the process as an experiment, as Poggioli puts it, in “the terra incognita of the unconscious, the unexplored territory of the soul,”³¹ similar to the scientist's explorations on the frontiers of knowledge. Fourthly, the modernist cult of aesthetic technique, as Poggioli suggests, is closer to a form of “technicism” than to the revival of classical ideas of technique for which it is sometimes mistaken.³² The significance Poggioli draws from these parallels, however, is not that art and art theory have sought to emulate science, but rather that they have converted certain concepts of science into aspects of an artistic mythology, the mythology of avant-garde modernism with its respect for dynamism and “permanent revolution.” As Poggioli says,

Avant-garde scientificism remains a significant phenomenon even when one realizes that only a purely allegorical and emblematic use of the expression “scientific” is involved. Besides, this symbolic use is made possible by a view of the world that reduces all powers and faculties, even spiritual ones, to the lowest common denominator of the scientific concept of energy. This means that avant-garde scientificism is the particular expression not only of the cult of technique, but also of that general dynamism which is one of the idols of modern culture and was elaborated into a cosmic myth by romantic philosophers.³³

This statement applies much more accurately to the aesthetics of groups such as the Cubists or the Italian Futurists or the English Vorticists than to the New Critics, who made relatively small use of scientific analogies like energy and dynamism in discussing poetry. In the main, New Critical metaphor for poetry tended toward the static—e.g., well wrought urns, verbal icons, “structures,” etc.—and toward the atemporal, motionless fixity of “spatial form.”³⁴ Yet through such influences as Pound and the Bergsonian tendencies of Hulme, an element of romantic dynamism entered into the New Critical poetic.

The emphasis on the “dramatic” character of poetry, which sees a poem as a clash between opposed forces, and the view, mentioned above, that poems are not predetermined by a chain of deliberate logical steps but grow out of the process of creation and discovery itself, that is, out of the poet's struggle with the contingencies of his medium and his experience, suggest a more dynamic, open-ended conception of poetry. Eliot and other early modernists recognized that any poetry which sought to go beyond a frigid classicism would have to confront the chaos and fragmentation of technological society and of the modern scientific implication that history is a perpetual, meaningless flux. This recognition, so central to the modernist revolution in poetry, ensured that the modernist poetic would embrace some element of process, movement, and dynamism, if only as the raw subject-matter which it was the poem's obligation to subdue into form. Clearly, this sense in which New Critical poetics sought to reflect scientific thinking is distinct from, and probably the very opposite of, any mere capitulation to the dry detachment of scientific empiricism.

The view that New Criticism was a form of scientism is often expressed as part of a more general misconception about the nature of literary modernism itself, of which New Criticism may legitimately be seen as one of the chief theoretical arms. Through imprecise use of terms and concepts, it has lately been widely taken for granted that modernism was predominantly a rationalistic movement, at least in its conservative Eliot-Stevens-Valéry-Gide-James branch. Fallacies long ago exploded by scholars concerning the “classical” and “traditional” character of modernist writing have been recently given a new lease on life, usually in order that certain critics may have a dialectical foil for the alleged breakthrough of a New Sensibility.³⁵ If modernists like Eliot and Stevens can be made out to have been classical or scientific rationalists, then the New Sensibility, with its celebration of myth, fantasy, and “post-rational” consciousness can be trumpeted as revolutionary. Thus Leslie Fiedler, in an essay which says Yes in Thunder to the New Sensibility, writes as follows:

The age of T. S. Eliot, after all, was the age of a literature essentially self-aware, a literature dedicated to analysis, rationality, anti-romantic dialectic—and, consequently, aimed at respectability, gentility, even academicism.³⁶

Connoisseurs of intellectual confusion may relish the grand chain of non-sequiturs in this statement, couched in a tone which would lead one to suppose they are all common knowledge. Since Eliot and his age were self-aware, they were analytic; since analytic, rational; since rational, anti-romantic; since self-aware and anti-romantic, respectable, genteel, and academic. Fiedler does not pause to explain how it is that genteel, academic respectability has come to be highly “self-aware.” Nor does he say in what sense acute self-awareness is antithetical to romanticism. Nor in what sense “rationality” is used. His statement is reminiscent of old-fashioned interpretations of Edgar Allan Poe which classified him as a rationalist and a counter-romantic because he subscribed to a methodical idea of the creative process. Superficial considerations of tone and manners are permitted to determine categories and definitions, and the underlying spirit of the ideas and sensibility of the writer are ignored or oversimplified. It is almost as if Fiedler assumed that one cannot be an anti-rationalist or a romantic if one speaks correct English and wears a coat and tie.

This kind of vulgarized use of terms, categories, and definitions is one product of the recent politicization and factionalization of academic and literary culture, in which “radicals” and “conservatives,” “post-modernists” and “traditionalists,” take sides against one another. The combat more and more takes on the air of a kind of mutual shadow-boxing in that the labels employed by both sides have less and less relation to any historical reality. It is such confused employment of the terms of intellectual and literary history that permits the mistaken identification of New Criticism as a form of scientism. New Critical terms such as “objectivity,” “impersonality,” “affective fallacy,” “structure,” and others are lifted from the polemical contexts in which they arose and reassembled in a caricature or straw man which is then rapidly demolished. Fake radicalism dances on the corpse of a fake traditionalism which it has invented.

Notes

1. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Delta Books, 1967), p. 7.

2. Richard Poirier, The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. xv. See also, Louis Kampf, who argues for a “humane anarchism” in humanistic culture and describes New Criticism as the tool of an “educational bureaucracy fathered by advanced industrial capitalism.” (“Culture without Criticism,” Massachusetts Review, XI, 4 (Autumn, 1970), p. 638.)

3. Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969).

4. Palmer, pp. 5-6.

5. Ibid., p. 7.

6. Ibid., p. 244.

7. Ibid., p. 247.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., p. 159.

11. Ibid., p. 225.

12. Richard Coe, “Contemporary Critical Method, Science, Ideology, and Reality,” paper delivered at the meeting of the Midwest Modern Language Association, November, 1973, p. 2.

13. Ibid., p. 3.

14. See discussion of Richards below, and note 24.

15. John Crowe Ransom, The World's Body (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1938), pp. 115-16.

16. Ibid., p. 122.

17. Ibid., p. 198, n. 1.

18. Ibid., p. 124.

19. C. G. Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, trans. W. S. Dell and Cary F. Raynes (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1933), p. 168.

20. Ibid., p. 122.

21. Cleanth Brooks, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harvest Books, 1947), p. 211.

22. Well Wrought Urn, p. 255. The phrase in this context was originally Eliot's. Brooks says the critic ought to “regard as acceptable any poem whose unifying attitude is one which really achieves unity (‘coherence’), but which unifies not by ignoring but by taking into account the complexities and apparent contradictions of the situation concerned (‘mature’ and ‘founded on the facts of experience’).” Brooks goes on to claim that such a test does not force the critic “to go outside the poem to find some criterion external to it,” a claim that is manifestly untrue and an illustration of the sort of contradiction I am talking about above. I have discussed this and other Brooksian contradictions in Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1970), pp. 87-111. This book contains much further documentation for the thesis of the present essay.

23. Cleanth Brooks and W. K. Wimsatt, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Random House, 1957), p. 677.

24. I. A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), p. 19.

25. Ibid., p. 228. Allen Tate and others took such statements as signs of a dramatic reversal of the “later Richards” (i.e., after 1934, when Coleridge on Imagination was first published) from his earlier theories. I have refuted this thesis in Poetic Statement and Critical Dogma, and shown how the scientific methodology of Richards' criticism was compatible with a romantic, anti-intellectualist theory of poetry. (See pp. 46-61.)

26. Well Wrought Urn, p. 211.

27. Richard Coe, “Contemporary Critical Method, Science, Ideology, and Reality,” p. 5.

28. This description is quoted from Israel Scheffler, Science and Subjectivity (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), p. 19. This work is a powerful defense of objectivist philosophy in the sciences and a refutation of the idealistic theories of such philosophers as Thomas S. Kuhn, Michael Polanyi, and Norwood R. Hanson.

29. E. D. Hirsch, Validity in Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).

30. Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), p. 138.

31. Ibid., p. 137.

32. Ibid., p. 138.

33. Ibid., p. 139.

34. See Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” in Mark Schorer, Josephine Miles, Gordon McKenzie, eds·, Criticism: the Foundations of Modern Literary Judgment, Revised ed. (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958), pp. 379-92.

35. The term “post-modernism” seems to me valid, but most “breakthrough” theories have failed to acknowledge the continuity between modernist and post-modernist assumptions. For a discussion of this problem, see my essay, “The Myth of the Postmodernist Breakthrough,” TriQuarterly, 26 (Winter, 1973), 383-417.

36. Leslie Fiedler, “Cross the Border, Close the Gap,” Playboy, 16 (December, 1969), p. 230.