Cumulation, Revolution, and Progress

expressionism, pop art, op art, abstract geometry . . . Perhaps painting in each of these paradigms (if we may call them that) achieves progress by cumulation, but painting does not. As Kuhn points out,7 painting was once the model of progress by cumulation. Any good history of the subject records how, just as a science increases its explanatory and predictive power, painting increased its representational: by the invention of perspective technique, for instance, and of impressionist. But progress in painting did not survive the revolution that overthrew the representational paradigm. For this revolution did not replace the old paradigm with a new one, as any scientific revolution does, but retained the old one while taking on a multitude of new ones rivaling the old and one another. Perhaps each of these achieves progress by cumulation, but painting does not. Or think of religion. There was always a multitude of religions: Shintoism, Judaism, Islam, Eastern Orthodoxy, Roman Catholicism, and so on. Until fairly recent times, however, there seem not to have been rival religions, religions competing in the same market or for the same audience. Doubtless there was, by criterion of progress, progress by cumulation in Roman Catholicism. But the Reformation, like the revolution that overthrew the representational paradigm in painting, retained the old paradigm while taking on new ones rivaling it and one another. Sectarian progress is still possible, but not religious. Perhaps literary criticism achieved progress by cumulation through the eighteenth century. The concept of literature as imitation was at least a germ of a paradigm, and in one way or another most critics developed it until well into that century. In using it to discrimi7 Structure, pp. 161-62. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 04:58:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CUMULATION, REVOLUTION, AND PROGRESS 481 nate genres, Aristotle achieved progress over Plato, for example; and, in taking imitation as a means to an end (arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish its catharsis of such emotions), he began a line of development that was to assimilate the Horatian paradigm of dulce et utile. Like representational painting and Roman Catholicism, imitation has survived revolutions. Among its rivals-notably the romantic or expressive paradigm (relating literature to writers' genius, intentions, imaginations, feelings, emotions, minds, sincerity, and so forth) and the objective (the autonomous work) 8-imitation lives on and, as we shall see, not just in the pages of book-review supplements. With literary criticism as with painting and religion, the existence of rival paradigms precludes progress in the activity as a whole whether by cumulation or by cumulation and revolution. Some of the rival paradigms, however, look like paradigms in normal science, and in them there is something that looks like progress by cumulation in normal science. The New Criticism (the one christened by Ransom, not by Spingarn), for example, has of the marks of a scientific paradigm. It has a theory or family of theories: that literature is autonomous (hence the intentional and the affective fallacies), that the essence of literature is linguistic (there is a language of poetry), that literature is organic (hence the inseparability of form and content, and the heresy of paraphrase), that every work is symbolic (has a dramatized, not stated, theme), and so on. It has a procedure for application of the theory: close reading or explication of texts. And critics working in the paradigm learn the theory and the procedure less by studying statements of them than by imitating examples of application of the theory. What is more, they constitute a mystery of professors and students who are the sole arbiters of one another's work and (apart from unpledged undergraduates on their way to law, business, medicine, or home economics) the sole audience for it. They achieve progress by cumulation through applying the theory to particular works: first to the more amenable (metaphysical and modern poetry), then to the recalcitrant (medieval, eighteenth-century, and Victorian poetry; drama; prose fiction). The fruit of these applications is usually new readings or revaluations. There are, however, significant differences between this criticism and normal science. For one thing, the New Criticism has no single aim. If this criticism were normal science, the critic would ask himself what phenomena 8 For an account of these paradigms, see M. H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp (New York, 1953), Ch. i. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 04:58:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 482 NEW LITERARY HISTORY need explanation (what puzzles need solving) and how the theory might explain them. Composing, interpreting, and evaluating literature are, he would doubtless note, human activities, a special case of composing, interpreting, and evaluating discourse; and these activities need explanation. How do people compose poems? Interpret them? Evaluate them? Why? What, if anything, must they know to do these things? How does literature differ from other discourse? New Critics do, indeed, ask questions of this kind, but often they confound them with questions of kinds that a scientist would not ask. Normative questions: How ought people interpret poems? Evaluate them? How does good literature differ from bad? Technological, pedagogical, or political questions: How can interpretative skill be fostered? How can humane studies be revived? How can the tide of relativism be stemmed? In this respect, the New Criticism is not unlike such sciences manque as sociology and political science. Lacking a single aim, they lack a single criterion of progress. A related difference between the New Criticism and normal science is in what constitutes application of a theory-indeed, in what constitutes a theory. In normal science, a theory presupposes the existence of phenomena to be explained; and application of the theory consists in testing it by elaborating and refining it to explain a widening range of related kinds of phenomena and thus realizing its explanatory potential. This is the way that normal science achieves progress by cumulation. In the New Criticism, however, the purpose of application of the theory to particular works is not only or even chiefly to test the theory against a widening range of kinds of literature (as in Brooks's The Well-Wrought Urn) but also either (I) to explain or (2) to interpret or evaluate particular works of literature. Doing (I) consists in showing that a work has the properties that the theory predicts: irony, for example, or a dramatized theme. It is a bit like a physicist's going to a parking lot in subzero weather and inspecting the radiator of a particular car, not to show that water freezes at temperatures below 32 0 F. (testing the theory), but to show that water in that particular radiator has frozen. Doing (2) consists in using the theory to interpret (a new reading) or evaluate (a revaluation) a work. So used, a theory does not presuppose the existence of phenomena to be explained (interpretations, evaluations); the phenomena presuppose the existence of the theory. No theory, no interpretation or evaluation. The assumption is that, to interpret or evaluate a work correctly, a reader needs a theory or, as William Empson puts it, some machinery This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Tue, 30 Aug 2016 04:58:53 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms CUMULATION, REVOLUTION, AND PROGRESS 483 for analysis.9 This is comparable to a linguist's assuming that, to understand what English sentences mean, a native speaker needs a semantic theory of English. Though progress by cumulation is possible by doing either (I) or (2), it is not the kind of progress found in normal science.10 Perhaps the most important difference between the New Criticism and normal science is that the former lacks criteria for judging applications of the theory--for deciding between rival readings or evaluations of a given work, for instance. For criteria to exist, the key terms of a theory must be made precise and unambiguous enough that criteria can be invoked. All theories are, as we have seen, vague; and progress by cumulation in normal science depends upon their vagueness: elaborating and refining a scientific theory and thus realizing its explanatory potential is largely a matter of reducing vagueness or eliminating ambiguity. But, as we have also seen, the New Criticism does not often achieve its progress in this way. Left vague or ambiguous, a theory predicts such a diversity of phenomena that it is virtually

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• From Procrustean Criticism to Process Hermeneutics

  Leonard Orr•SubStance•1979

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