by M H Abrams
What I have said about humanistic language and rationality does not entail a radical skepticism or relativism, but it does, I think, entail a very different thing: an essential pluralism in the humanistic pursuits. All nondogmatic humanists recognize in experience (and in practice, if not in theory, they make constant allowance for these things) profound differences in the elected cognitive perspectives, favored frames of reference, distinctive kinds of reasoning, and individual forms of sensibility in their fellow humanists. These differences permit individual inquirers, by diversely coherent and rational procedures, to produce sound but divergent conclusions about the matter in hand, whether it is Hamlet or the Poetics or the French Revolution or the nature of justice. And what each perspective does—if its application through the medium of an individual sensibility is rational—is to bring out different aspects of a subject, to locate it in a different context of relevant considerations, and to force us to see it in a way we have not seen it before.
I am as little disposed as Himmelfarb to surrender the term “truth” and to yield it up for the exclusive use of the logician and the scientist. But it is important to keep in mind that, as the kind of certainty is the kind of language game, so the kind of truth is the kind of language game too. And the truth that each of us, as individuals engaged in a common humanistic enterprise, ought to claim is not the final truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth; for that is to convert our disciplines into dogmas. The superposition of multiple, coherent, and rationally exploited perspectives yields a vision in depth; and this multidimensional knowledge constitutes what is the distinctive humanistic truth about a subject. If this claim implies that the humanistic search for truth is always in process and is never finished, I find nothing dismaying in such a conclusion. It is, in fact, precisely this feature that gives to our group of disciplines their importance and indispensability in the energetic intellectual life of a vital culture.
II
And now a few words about my second topic: the role of method as against personal example in teaching the humanities. I spend much of my own time in teaching method—that is, the forms of sound reasoning in a humanistic discipline, the kinds of questions that are relevant, and the nature and weight of the evidence for and against answers to these questions. This kind of teaching is essential in the academy and, I agree with Olafson, has been injuriously neglected in recent years. But here too it is important to remember that rational procedure in many humanistic areas can be identified and loosely described, but not codified; that it is thus (in the traditional distinction) an art rather than a science; and that to attempt to rigidly define and regulate what is by its nature and aim necessarily a flexible and elusive way of proceeding is to transform a humanistic process of reasoning into a calculus that systematically leaves out of account everything that really matters.
Because normative procedures in the humanities are variable and much easier to recognize than to categorize precisely, teaching by force of example is much more important than it is in logic or the sciences. Judging by my own experience as a student rather than as a teacher, I find that what has counted most has been a model of the humanist as a normative personage, who instantiates a humanity that becomes representative of what the humanities are. This model, ideally, is a composite of the stance and procedure of one’s own teachers and of the great humanists of the past, who have projected their individual ethos in almost every page of the documents they have bequeathed to us. These humanists have managed to deal extraordinarily well with areas of experience in which rationality is essential but certainty is impossible, meeting concern with concern, yet maintaining an equilibrium between dogmatism and skepticism.
The tide most threatening to the traditional stance of the humanist in our own time, as Olafson has pointed out, is a reaction against skepticism by a kind of dogmatism that speaks in the vatic voice of the prophet and the visionary. The truth is that when you go to the liberal humanists, hot for certainties, you get what seem to be very dusty answers. As a result, some of our students turn increasingly to such prophets of the past as Nietzsche, or much worse, to some of the small and seedy prophets of our own day. The world of the prophet is a hot, intense world of total assurance that you have the humanistic truth, that you know what we must do to be saved—and as such, it has great contemporary appeal. In comparison with the hot world of prophecy, the world of the liberal humanist is a cool world. What we need to get our students to recognize is that the stance of the liberal humanist is a very difficult one, which takes poise and courage to maintain. It takes a secure balance and a firm will to conduct, rationally, a discipline in which many of the premises, procedures, and conclusions are essentially contestable, without surrendering either to an all-dissolving skepticism or to the inviting dogmatism of the visionary and the fanatic. Our aim, by example as well as precept, must be to show the dignity, as well as the comfort, of maintaining the humanistic poise, of searching for answers to our inescapable human problems, answers that are neither ultimate nor absolutely certain, but are the best and most rational ones we are capable of formulating.
The normative personages of the humanistic tradition, from Socrates to Solzhenitsyn, offer instances of ways to cope with the human predicament, while steering between the rocks of nihilism and the whirlpool of fanaticism. I have the hunch—I certainly have the hope—that the instinct for survival in civilized humanity is great enough to ensure the persistence of the humanistic stance which these models, each in a diverse and distinctive way, represent to us.
III
I was certain that, in the brevity and omissiveness with which I had to present my views, I would evoke counterclaims, and also that I would agree with a number of these counterclaims. Thus, I consent to the assertion that, in the humanistic disciplines, we are justified in rejecting some interpretations and arguments and conclusions out of hand. A large fraction of humanistic problems are factual, or close to factual (though these are often preparatory to the enterprise of interpretation and explanation), and here we often find ourselves capable of denying the factual claims or producing counterfacts or falsifying the hypotheses. And though the modes of humanistic rationality are diverse, we are able to recognize and reject patent irrationality, as well as overt dogma. Certainly, also, within the domain of interpretation itself we are often readily able to identify an impossible, inept, radically inadequate, or outrageously implausible interpretation. In fact, our jobs as teachers confront us again and again with such patent errors by students (not to speak of fellow critics and scholars); it is incumbent upon us to reject them and to identify the criteria by which we judge them unacceptable.
My emphasis in these remarks, however, has been on that area of interpretation that involves central principles of organization, of theme, structure, characterization, and authorial intentions (to use literature as an example). And here we find contestable conclusions, in the sense that expert, knowledgeable, sensitive, and reasonable critics come out with very different results. Take Shakespeare, for example. In our own century the interpretations of Shakespeare’s plays—and the kinds of evaluation dependent on particular interpretations—have multiplied remarkably. We have eliminated very few of the alternative interpretations of earlier centuries, while adding many others. And some of the newer interpretations yield valuable insights, bringing into our ken aspects that enrich our ability to experience Shakespeare’s plays in ways outside the range of even such great critics of the past as Johnson or Coleridge. Each validly innovative critic who exploits, rationally and responsibly, his distinctive perspective and frame of reference (whether Marxist, Freudian, New Critical, structuralist, or whatnot) adds depth to our perception of one or another of Shakespeare’s plays; and I would not hesitate to say that each adds to our knowledge of the truth about that play.
This also bears on another question that has been raised. Given what I have said about the absence of criteria of certainty in some central huma
nistic enterprises—hence our frequent inability to resolve with finality differences in critical judgments and conclusions—how are we to distinguish between greater and lesser works of art? And on the pedagogical level, how are we to decide what works to teach our students?
I think it is only when we are theorizing about the humanities rather than practicing a humane discipline—only when we are writing metacriticism rather than criticism—that we are dismayed about the lack of anything approximating logical or scientific certainty in our elected province. What it comes to is this: To demand certainty in the humanities is in fact to ask for a set of codified rules and criteria such that when, say, a work of literature is presented to any expert critical intelligence, it will process the work and come out with a precise meaning and a fixed grade of value that will coincide with the meaning and evaluation arrived at by any other critical intelligence. When a humanist really faces up to these consequences of his demand for certainty, he finds such a mechanical process to be disquieting and repulsive—and with good reason, because in fact it is approximated only under an authoritarian cultural regime in which the codified rules and universal criteria are not discovered in the language and practice of individual critics but are established by edict. In our free humanistic activities, we all take for granted the human predicament that the humanities both deal with and express, and we manage as a matter of course, and quite well, to cope with a situation in which tenable perspectives are diverse, individual sensibilities and proclivities are distinctive, many judgments are contestable, and few basic disagreements are in any final way resolvable. The nature of that human predicament, in fact, is what makes the free humanistic enterprise an indispensable, difficult, and deeply and endlessly interesting pursuit.
As a matter of everyday practice, however, we in fact possess various ways for checking our individual judgments and for establishing the difference between the better and the worse, the greater and the lesser, by criteria that transcend our personal predilections and judgments. Chief among these is a revised form of what used to be called the consensus gentium, which was considered the ultimate criterion of humanistic truth, goodness, and beauty. In the revised form, we can state the principle in this way: Agreement among diverse humanists as to the importance and value of a work at any one time, and still more, the survival value of a work—general agreement as to its importance and value over an extended period of time—serves as a sound way to distinguish the better from the worse and to identify which work is a classic. The consensus that emerges when an imaginative work is viewed from a diversity of critical perspectives and through a diversity of sensibilities—and especially a consensus that emerges despite radical cultural changes over many centuries—is a reliable index to the fact that the work is central in its human concerns, broad in its imaginative appeal, and rich in its inherent aesthetic and other values.
As humane critics and teachers, we in fact employ such criteria as a matter of course. Thereby, we are certain that Hamlet and Twelfth Night are greater and more worthy of attention than The Spanish Tragedy or Gammer Gurton’s Needle; as teachers, we may for good reasons decide to teach the second two plays, but we do not make the mistake of letting them displace the plays of Shakespeare. But of course, expert critical consensus and survival value are no more than a prima facie index to a classic work. What matters to us as individuals is what has been called our “participation” in the work—our full intellectual, imaginative, and emotional engagement—as well as our response with concern to the author’s concern, and our consent to the consent of the ages because we feel the greatness of the work up on our own pulses.
NOTES
1. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, translated by G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, 1953), p. 224e.
How to Prove an Interpretation*
CLAIMS ABOUT THE meaning of a poem which, a few decades ago, would have been regarded as brittle paradoxes have become serious commonplaces in critical theories. These theories are diverse in their principles and procedures, but all issue in the claim that it is necessarily the case that a poem cannot have a determinate meaning, and that no reading of a poem can be a correct reading.
I remind you of the prevalence of this view by some quotations. Harold Bloom: “Every act of reading . . . makes of interpretation a necessary misprision . . . or misreading.” “There are no right readings.” Stanley Fish: “Any procedure that attempts to determine which of a number of readings is correct will necessarily fail.” Jacques Derrida: “In any text, the inescapable absence of a transcendental signified extends the . . . play of signification to infinity.” Paul de Man: “We no longer take for granted that a literary text can be reduced to a finite meaning or set of meanings, but see the act of reading as an endless process in which truth and falsehood are inextricably intertwined.” And J. Hillis Miller denies that “any work has a fixed, identifiable meaning. . . . Any reading can be shown to be a misreading on evidence drawn from the text itself.”
It will surprise no one to hear that my position on this matter is the traditional one. I retain, that is, a stubborn predilection for finding out what a poem determinately means. I hold the view that, although the language of a poem may permit a considerable degree of interpretive freedom, we are usually able to achieve an interpretation that approximates the central or core meanings that the sentences of a poem were formed to convey. I believe also that we can adduce valid reasons which support such an interpretation against a proposed alternative. My critical interest, then, is in a correct reading rather than a misreading, or with a misreading as something to be detected and then discarded.
To support these claims, I shall examine a poem in order to isolate essential features of its meaning that have been disputed by competent readers, and then to identify the procedures for resolving the dispute which are available to traditional criticism. I choose this poem for several reasons: it is only eight lines long; it was introduced in a graduate seminar on philosophy and literature that the distinguished philosopher Max Black and I taught jointly at Cornell in 1972; and it has been subjected to diverse interpretations by a number of literary critics. The poem is a familiar one by William Wordsworth:
A slumber did my spirit seal;
I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force;
She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
With rocks, and stones, and trees.
E. D. Hirsch, in his influential book Validity in Interpretation (1967), raised the issue of interpretive disagreement by reprinting excerpts from two commentaries on the second stanza of Wordsworth’s poem. The first, by Cleanth Brooks, asserts that the “poet attempts to suggest something of the lover’s agonized shock at the loved one’s present lack of motion—of his response to her utter and horrible inertness.” The second commentary, by F. W. Bateson, instead finds a “pantheistic magnificence” in the last two lines, for the dead Lucy “has become involved in the sublime processes of nature.” This is a clear case of critical disagreement about an important feature of the poem, and it has often been discussed since Hirsch pointed it out. But notice that the divergence of these interpretations overlies an essential agreement. Brooks and Bateson disagree about the emotive state of mind, the attitudes and feelings, that the lyric speaker implies by his description of the situation in the second stanza. Both, however, agree that the speaker’s emotive state of mind is in response to the same state of affairs: a girl who was alive in stanza 1 is dead in stanza 2.
That was also the way that just about all the critics who commented on “A Slumber” read the poem until 1965, when Hugh Sykes Davies published an essay, “Another New Poem by Wordsworth.” This new poem is the old text of “A Slumber,” interpreted in a radically new way. The subject of the poem, Davie
s proposes, is not a girl at all; instead, the subject is the poet’s own spirit, identified in line 1—“A slumber did my spirit seal”—and the two stanzas describe a “trance-like state” of the poet’s spirit—a state in which, at the close of the poem, the poet feels himself to be, in spirit, joined with the earth, and “identified with its diurnal motion.”1
My initial response was that Davies proposes a blatant misreading of Wordsworth’s poem. But as I went on, I found that Davies goes on to present detailed reasons that tell against what, following Davies, I shall call “the standard reading” of the poem (that it is about a girl who dies), and other reasons that tell in favor of his “new reading” of the poem (that it is about a trancelike state of the poet’s own spirit). Davies argues modestly, and very well. Many of his reasons strike me as sound reasons, and force me to entertain seriously an interpretation I had rejected out of hand.
Let me say at once that Davies’ reasons strike me as sound reasons because, as traditional readers, he and I share a frame of reference—a tacit set of principles and procedures—that we automatically put into play in making sense of the text of “A Slumber.” We bring to the text, for example, the presumption that the two sentences constituting the poem are the written version of a parole, a poetic speech-act, composed by a particular author during a specific span of time. In this instance we have solid grounds for identifying the author as William Wordsworth, and the span of time at which the composition was undertaken and completed as 1798–99. We bring to our reading also the presumption that Wordsworth undertook to compose a text that would be determinately interpretable by qualified readers of English poetry. He did so by deploying his expertise in the practice of the English language—an ongoing practice which he had inherited, and had learned to employ from early infancy—as well as his expertise in the linguistic conventions specific to lyric poems. We also presuppose that we, as qualified readers, will be able to understand Wordsworth’s text, by deploying our expertise in the practice of interpreting the English language—a continuing practice that we, like Wordsworth, have inherited, and that we share with him; except for slight changes, over the course of two intervening centuries, which are identifiable, and so can be taken into account.
