The Fourth Dimension of a Poem

by M H Abrams

  Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?

  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—

  While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

  Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

  Among the river sallows, borne aloft

  Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

  And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

  The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

  And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

  Since we are celebrating the two hundredth birthday of Keats, it seems appropriate to end this essay by situating his poem in the context of his life. “To Autumn” was the last work of artistic consequence that Keats completed. His letters and verses show that he achieved this celebratory poem, with its calm acquiescence to time, transience, and mortality, at a time when he was possessed by a premonition, little short of a conviction, that he had himself less than two years to live.18 As it turned out, Keats died of tuberculosis only a year and five months after he composed his terminal ode. He was twenty-five years old. His career as a poet between his first successful poem, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” October 1816, and “To Autumn,” September 1819, was limited to a span of thirty-five months.

  NOTES

  1. Douglas Vincent Bush, “Keats and His Ideas,” English Romantic Poets: Modern Essays in Criticism, edited by M. H. Abrams (New York, 1960).

  2. All quotations of Keats’ poetry are from The Poems of John Keats, edited by Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, Mass., 1978).

  3. Robert Frost, lecture on the bicentennial of Wordsworth’s death (April 1950); transcribed from the tape recording in The Cornell Library Journal II (Spring 1970): 97–98.

  4. The Letters of John Keats: 1814–1821, edited by Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge, Mass., 1958), vol. 2, p. 106. Quotations of Keats’ letters are from this edition, abbreviated L in the text; volume and page numbers are given in parentheses in the text.

  5. Gerard Manley Hopkins, “Spring and Fall,” in Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Robert Bridges and W. H. Gardner, 3d ed. (Oxford, 1948), p. 8.

  6. I take “I shall certainly breed” to signify Keats’ awareness that this kind of sense experience was effective in the poetry he composed.

  7. Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism,” edition 2, line 365.

  8. Christopher Ricks, Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford, 1974), pp. 104–5.

  9. Stuart M. Sperry, Keats the Poet (Princeton, 1973), chap. 2. For a detailed treatment of Keats’ medical training and its role in his poetry, see Donald C. Goellnicht, The Poet-Physician: Keats and Medical Science (Pittsburgh, 1984).

  10. Sperry, Keats the Poet, p. 45.

  11. Keats’ use of “intensity” as the measure of the degree of heat in a process of evaporation is especially clear in his oft-quoted statement that “the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate” (L1:192).

  12. Donald C. Goellnicht, “Keats’s Chemical Composition,” in Critical Essays on John Keats, edited by Hermione de Almeida (Boston, 1990), p. 155.

  13. Bush, “Keats and His Ideas,” p. 337.

  14. Collins’ vowel play brings to mind Benjamin Bailey’s testimony that one of Keats’ “favorite topics of discourse was the principle of melody in Verse . . . particularly in the management of open and close vowels. . . . Keats’s theory was that the vowels . . . should be interchanged, like differing notes of music to prevent monotony” (The Keats Circle, edited by Hyder E. Rollins [Cambridge, Mass., 1948], vol. 2, p. 277).

  15. In Keats’ draft of “To Autumn,” a canceled line adds a barn to the cottage setting, after line 15: “While bright the Sun slants through the husky barn” (Stillinger, The Poems of John Keats, p. 477). The sacramental aura with which Keats invests the rich yields of the harvest season is suggestive of the rural scenes that Samuel Palmer was to paint some six years later, in the mid-1820s.

  16. Although the punctuation varies in the various manuscripts of “To Autumn,” the preceding line ends with a semicolon in the printed text of 1820, which Keats oversaw and for which he may have written out a printer’s copy-manuscript. (For this matter, and for the variations between “gathered” and “gathering swallows” below, I am indebted to Jack Stillinger’s annotations in The Poems of John Keats and to his analysis of the facts in a letter to me dated May 19, 1997.)

  17. In this passage Keats very probably recalled the lines in James Thomson’s Seasons: “Warned of approaching Winter, gathered, play / The swallow-people. . . . They twitter cheerful” (“Autumn” [pp. 836–38, 846], see The Poems of John Keats, edited by Miriam Allott [London, 1970], pp. 654–55). Keats after some vacillation between “gathered” and “gathering,” fixed on the latter form in the printing of 1820. It is notable that Thomson makes explicit the “approaching Winter,” whereas Keats, although he names the spring, summer, and autumn, only implies the coming of the fourth season.

  18. Aileen Ward, John Keats: The Making of a Poet, rev. ed. (New York, 1986), pp. 185, 431 n. 4; and 199–200, 432 n. 13b.

  What Is a Humanistic Criticism?*

  Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie

  Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.

  —Mephistopheles,

  in Goethe’s Faust, Part 1

  (Grey, dear friend, is all theory

  And green the golden tree of life.)

  I HAVE BEEN ASKED to present the opening paper for this symposium entitled “Critiquing Critical Theory.” The term “theory” comprehends the innovative types of literary criticism, each based on a radical reconsideration of language and discourse, that since about 1960 have emerged in an accelerating sequence. The theories range from structuralism, through deconstruction and other poststructural schemes and interpretive practices, to some modes of the current New Historicism. And the term “critiquing” is used to signify a scrutiny by scholars and literary critics who have serious reservations about the assumptions and sweeping conclusion of these theories, at least in their extreme forms.

  A critique is not a polemic. Many of the exchanges hitherto on these issues have been in a heated rhetoric of charges and countercharges that clashes with the ideals of reasonableness and civility that one would like to profess in humane studies. I want instead to open this symposium with a brief overview of some recent critical theories in the spirit that John Stuart Mill, in his great essays comparing Bentham to Coleridge, attributed to Coleridge. Bentham asked of any doctrine “Is it true?” then judged it to be true only if it accorded with his prior opinions, and when it did not, attributed the doctrine to selfish interests or dubious purposes. My intention is to try, as Mill said of Coleridge, to look at some critical theories “from within,” to ask what features and considerations have made them seem not only credible but compelling to intelligent and knowledgeable proponents, and to indicate the kinds of insights such theories have achieved that those of us who take an alternative intellectual stand would do well to heed. But I shall also indicate why, nonetheless, current theories, as applied in literary criticism, seem to me inadequate for the literature they undertake to explain and often distortive in the modes of reading they exemplify and recommend.

  I. Opposing Paradigms of Language and Literature

  Whatever their divergence, and their sometimes bitter internal quarrels, modern theorists coincide in a strenuous antihumanism and in discrediting or dismantling the interrelated concepts of “humanity,” “human,” “man,” “the subject,” “subjectivity,” “the person,” and “the self.” Claude Lévi-Strauss in fact redefined the aim of the human sciences as the deletion of the human—“the ultimate goal of the human sciences is not to constit
ute man but to dissolve him”; and he and other radical structuralists represented the human subject as a product of systemic functions and therefore, Eugenio Donato declared, “empty, uninhabited by consciousness, emotion, affectivity, and so forth.” As Roland Barthes put it, “Don’t I know that in the field of the subject, there is no referent?” for “the subject is no more than an effect of language.” In his influential essay of 1970 announcing the decentering of structuralism, Jacques Derrida described his deconstructive mode of interpretation, more guardedly, as one which “tries to pass beyond man and humanism”; elsewhere he adverted to his aim as “an entire deconstruction of onto-theological humanism (including that of Heidegger).” Earlier still, in The Order of Things (1966), Michel Foucault, decrying “the chimeras of the new humanism,” announced in an oft-quoted passage that it is “a source of profound relief to think that man is . . . a figure not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge, and that he will disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.” And of what Foucault described as the “warped and twisted forms of reflection” that even in this day wish to take man “as their starting point in their attempts to reach the truth,” he remarked contemptuously that “we can answer only with a philosophical laugh.”1

  In much of our current cultural discourse, the effect of this sustained onslaught has been to invert the emotional charge of the terms “humanity” and “humanism” to a negative value and to establish the presumption that any surviving humanist is someone who, out of nostalgia or timidity or self-interest, clings to an exploded mythology. And some writers who adapt poststructural theory to a radical politics replace capitalism by humanism as the root cause of social and political evils. A recent instance, William Spanos’ The End of Education: Toward Posthumanism (1993), charges humanism and its “commitment to the sovereign individual” with the major responsibility for the diverse forms of injustice and oppression, from imperialism and consumerism to the imposition of a core curriculum in liberal arts colleges.2

  Current antihumanisms are usually underwritten by the claim that in Western thought and culture, appeals to the essential and universal nature of mankind have in fact served to empower, while masking, all modes of social, racial, and sexual repression. My concern is not with the validity of this historical claim about the normative and coercive uses of the term “human,” except to note in passing that appeals to our common humanity have also served, historically, to ground the concepts of human rights and human values that enable antihumanists, no less than humanists, to identify the inequities and oppressions they oppose. Instead, my concern is to examine what an antihumanist stance comes down to, in the intellectual procedures of theorists who profess this point of view; and that is, the undertaking to dispense with any operative reference to human beings—conceived as purposeful agents capable of initiative, design, intention, and choice—in dealing with all linguistic utterances, discourses, and productions, including works of literature. How has this conceptual innovation been achieved?

  The initiating move is a drastic change in the perspectival location, and the consequent frame of reference, for considering the use and products of language. From classical antiquity to the recent past, the reigning though often implicit locus for such theory had been that which in one form is exemplified here and now, where I as a speaker, standing in this room, address you as auditors. As a result, the traditional explanatory paradigm has been that of language-in-use: it posits language as the medium of a communicative transaction between human beings in a circumambient world. From this location and viewpoint, the understanding of a written product such as a work of literature is ultimately explicable by recourse to the same model as a spoken utterance—the model of a verbal transaction with a human being at each end; the difference is that the writing is usually done with the expectation of a reader rather than in the presence of an auditor, establishes a durable written correlate of a spoken utterance, and awaits the advent of a reader in order to complete the communicative transaction. Structural and poststructural theorists, on the other hand—and this is their novelty in the philosophy of language and literature—position their inquiry not in the human world of language-in-use, but in the abstract realm of language-in-general, or of discourse-as-such, or else in a text that is taken to exemplify such already constituted and intrasystemic workings of language or of discourse. Viewed from inside this paradigm, what had been the human agents in a verbal interchange are seen, and redescribed, as entities generated by the functioning of the language system itself, or else by the forces and configurations immanent in the discourse of a particular era.

  Within the humanistic paradigm a work of literature, like any linguistic utterance or product, is conceived to be intermediary in a communicative transaction. Representative recent versions of this traditional conception of literature can be sketched, roughly, as follows: typically, an author initiates and composes a work that makes use of the resources afforded by the conventions and norms of a language to signify his or her intentional references to (for the most part fictive) people, actions, and states of affairs, in a way that will be intelligible to, and evoke responses from, a reader who shares a competence in the requisite linguistic conventions and norms.

  What happens when the site of literary criticism is shifted from an interpersonal transaction to the process (in Paul de Man’s phrase) of “language considered by and in itself”?3 We find that the three traditional components of author, work, and reader survive, but in a severely attenuated state of being.

  1. The author. Current theorists don’t deny that a human individual is an indispensable factor in bringing about a literary product, but this is an author who, stripped of any design or intention that is effective in the product, is reduced to what Roland Barthes calls a “scriptor.”4 To radical structuralists, the author is merely a space in which the conventions, codes, and formal patternings of a langue precipitate into a parole. To radical poststructuralists, the author tends to become an agency through which the differential play of language-in-general instances itself in a text, or else (in Foucault and his followers) the author is a site or crossroad traversed by the constructs and configurations of power and knowledge that make up the discourse of an era. The traditional role of a supervisory and intentional “subject” is relegated to the status of a linguistic or discursive “function” or “effect.” Jacques Derrida, for example, grants that “at a certain level” of experience and discourse, the subject as center “is absolutely indispensable”; but this is “a function, not a being—a reality, but a function.” Or put otherwise: “There is no subject who is agent, author, and master of différance. . . . Subjectivity—like objectivity—is an effect of différance.” And since “the names of authors . . . have here no substantial value” and “indicate neither identities nor causes,” Derrida sometimes qualifies his “provisional” use of the name of an author by quotation marks, or else strikes a line through it, in order to identify whose (or rather what) text he is writing about while encoding the fact that he is not denoting a human author but indicating a textual effect.5

  2. Radical theorists avoid using the traditional term “work” for a literary or other written entity, since the term suggests that the document has been accomplished by a purposive human producer. What had been a “work” is usually denominated a “text” or is still further depersonalized into an instance of écriture, writing-in-general. And in a literary or other text, what had traditionally been its crucial aspect of referring to a world, whether actual or fictional, of persons, actions, things, and events is reconceived as a play of intratextual and intertextual significations. “What goes on in a narrative,” Barthes wrote, “is, from the referential (real) point of view, strictly nothing. What does ‘happen’ is language per se, the adventure of language.” And in default of any possible intervention by an author-subject, a text is in fact an intertext, “a tissue of quotations,” a “multi-dimensional space in which
a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” Derrida recognizes in the reading of a text the occurrence of “effects” of “signification, or meaning, and of reference” as well as of other standard aspects of “semantic communication”; but from the standpoint of “a general writing,” he says, this system of communication is revealed to be “only an effect, and should be analyzed as such.”6

  3. In the lack of an efficacious author or subject, one might expect that the reader would become the prime agent in effecting meaning; and indeed, some poststructural critics celebrate a reader’s freedom in “creating” what a text is taken to signify. But it usually turns out that this reader is no more an effective, purposeful subject than is the author. Structuralist theory, as Jonathan Culler described it, “promotes analyses of the reader’s role in producing meaning,” but this is “the reader not as a person or a subjectivity but as a role: the embodiment of the codes that permit reading.”7 In poststructural theory, the human reader dwindles into lecture, an impersonal reading-process, or else, like the author, is evacuated into a textual effect. For a reader “to be fooled by a text,” Barbara Johnson declares, “implies that the text is not constative but performative, and that the reader is in fact one of its effects.”8 And in theorists of various persuasions, the reader is represented in a doubly passive role, as constituted by, but also as the conduit of, the functionings of linguistic différance, or of the ideology and cultural formations in the reigning discourse, or (in the theory of Stanley Fish) of the shared beliefs, categories, and reading process of a particular “interpretive community.”

  It should be noted that a traditional analyst of language recognizes that when a reader confronts a written or printed text, it is typically in the absence both of its author and of that to which a text refers; for the traditionalist, therefore, as well as for the poststructuralist, intentionality and reference are indubitably “effects” of the text. The difference is that poststructural theorists focus on language or discourse in being, in which all functions and effects are “always already” operative. To the traditionalist, however, a text’s author-effect, intention-effect, reference-effect—and for that matter, its effect of being a set of signs instead of a mere sequence of blacks on blanks—are not attributable to the inner workings of a general writing, or of language as such, but have been constituted by the way human beings, in interpersonal dealings, have in fact learned to understand and to use language. In the view from the human paradigm, a text is cognizable as a set of verbal signs, and is invested with the effects of intentionality and reference that constitute its intelligibility, only to a reader who brings to the text foreknowledge, presuppositions, and skills acquired by prior experiences with the shared human practice of a language in a shared environing world.