New Perspectives on Poetry

 

The Oxford Concise Dictionary raises the issue immediately. Literature, says the dictionary, is writing whose value lies in beauty of form or emotional effect. Nothing about truth or social value. Nothing about how such beauty or emotional effect is to be judged. In its early day as an academic subject, English Literature was little more than connoisseurship: genial essays that offered rational enthusiasm for certain authors and their works. Of course it was impressionistic, and under the influence of New Criticism, the study of literature passed from a recreation to a profession and finally to an industry.

A reaction was inevitable once the postwar education boom came to an end. Did the study of English Literature make the world today a more fascinating, meaningful and morally accountable place? Did it help students to write better themselves, and give them the tolerance and flexibility needed in a changing world? Did it enable them to see through the coercions of authority, and the blandishments of politicians and advertisers? Very few argued so.

What had academics been producing? Increasingly they wrote analyses for other academics in a style that bore no relation to the works studied. Their language passed insensibly from the technical to a metalanguage that only fellow specialists could understand. Eventually the style turned in on itself. The more radical critics asserted that nothing of any finality or objectivity could be said in any language whatsoever. If previous criticism was dull, it was generally clear, but the new radical criticism took pleasure in illustrating and exaggerating the very opacities claimed to be present in all language.

But the strategy was not entirely nihilistic, nor seeking to strengthen their tenure prospects. However negatively, it did raise the difficulties of truth and meaning in literature, and suggested that what was said was contingent on how it was said. A standard English was a fabrication, existing by virtue of social agreements, the work of grammarians and compilers of dictionaries. Rationalists who employ Chomskian deep grammar approaches to establish a "basic meaning" overlooked the features of language encountered by Anglo-American schools of philosophy — its polymorphous, creative and ad-hoc nature, the way we continually paraphrase across individual usages.

Hermeneutics

Hermeneutics stresses the continual adjustment we make in interpretation, how each sentence must be assembled to make a coherent whole, and the assembly then checked against the constituent parts. Such a procedure, which we follow in bridging social usages, takes into account not only abstract meaning, but an individual's experiences, affections, character, social and historical setting. Gadamer talks of the dialogue between old traditions and present needs. Habermas criticizes the grey language of science, which alienates man from his better nature. Truth is not grounded in evidence but consensus, and languages are shared ways in which societies understand themselves. Is there no one correct interpretation of some act of speech or writing? Clearly not, though Ingarden suggests we examine literary texts for the acts of consciousness that they preserve, which we must partly reanimate in reading.

Brain Functioning

Advances in computers, communications and experimental psychology have naturally focused interest on the brain. Its activity is astonishingly varied, employing physical, chemical and electromagnetic processes. Far from inert, the brain is an active and developing organ, repairing damage, growing new functions as the need arises. Moreover, its memory is phenomenal, though much is not immediate accessible, or well explained by present theories.

Given this, the brain could not escape behaving in a complicated manner. Mental activity need not mimic brain structure, of course, any more than a computer program faithfully follows the hardware layout. Furthermore, if sensory perception and understanding are not only interrelated but have developed piecemeal in answer to biological needs (as seems only too likely), then we have possible reasons for gaps and inconsistencies in our modes of understanding.

Metaphor Theory

But the larger suggestion, obvious but consistently overlooked, is that aesthetic language is not simply beautiful and affective, but the language closest to our human functioning. It is the most authentic, most expressive, most precise, most — if truth be returned from its abstract sense — truthful. The reductive approaches of the sciences employed in linguistics, for example, are not more precise for being more abstract and general: they are simply more abstract and general. Indeed they are not even more general: results have been as varied as the theories employed — more so, in fact, as schools of practitioners have split over interpretation differences.

The literary world is complex: a network of alliances and understandings continually in search of reputation in the cannon's mouth. But even established poets — those winning literary competitions and promoted by leading publishers — often express an ambivalent attitude to the rules of their exclusive club. They pay lip service to the tenets of Postmodernism, but can also be found expressing views not out of place in the eighteenth century. Sometimes it must seem that Modernism and Postmodernism have been largely negative in their effects — that its writers, critics, academics and journalists are setting up obstacles to what is a demanding but natural activity, creating an orthodoxy as ill-founded and stultifying as that of the medieval Church. It need not be so. Poetry is not an arbitrary, solipsist, individual creation, but a way of more fully understanding ourselves and the world around.

A much fuller account, with references, can be found on TextEtc.

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Poetry: New Perspectives

 

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