Cleanth Brooks, Stanley Fish, and the Stability of Texts

The 1947 publication of Brooks’ The Well-Wrought Urn and its

emphasis on text-centered criticism produced a revolution in the

world of literary criticism that lasted until Stanley Fish’s1967

book Surprised by Sin appeared on the scene, the harbinger of a new

era in criticism emphasizing the primacy of the reader. Between

the two the world of literary criticism was turned upside down;

yet as revolutionary as the theories were, the paradigmatic gap

distinguishing these two perspectives was representative a much

older debate.

The point of departure is each critic’s conception of the

relation between the reader and the text. A parallel might be

drawn from 18th century philosophy, which saw the epistemological

world split between the ideas of John Locke and Immanuel Kant.

Locke’s empiricist followers believed that we acquire knowledge

through our interaction with a stable, objective world. The

rationalists on the other hand, adhered to Kant’s claim that

because our experiences are mediated through mental processes,

that direct interaction with the external world is not possible.

Learning therefore, for the rationalists, was necessarily an

individual, subjective experience. The critical theories of

Brooks and Fish carry this epistemological debate into the sphere

of literature: like a good student of Locke, Brooks’ theory is

predicated on the assumption that the text presents a stable,

objective world with a self-contained meaning. Fish takes an

opposing position, citing the Saussurean objection that, as a

synthetic system of signs, language in itself is unable to

produce any meaning whatsoever. Consequently, Fish’s solution is

to confer interpretative authority exclusively upon the reader,

since it is the reader who gives life to an otherwise inert

series of symbols.

In developing his position, Brooks is careful to include the

disclaimer that he does not pretend to offer the last word on

literary criticism. His intention is to establish a method by

which one may evaluate the value of texts as texts. As he frequently

reminds his readers, his theory is simply a tool toward this end;

a particular way of looking among many. Brooks’ utter

reasonableness in this regard is one of the most persuasive

attributes of his theory. He does not discount the validity of

critical perspectives that focus on the intentions of the author

or the reader’s response: in fact he admits flat out that one

would have to be a fool to deny the importance of either (“The

State of Letters” 598). Instead, Brooks characterizes the

difference between his method and other forms of criticism as the

difference between criticism that is intrinsic and extrinsic.

According to Brooks, the deficiency of extrinsic criticism

is its tendency to lead readers away from critical evaluation of

the text into peripheral fields of study. The most prominent

forms of extrinsic criticism were primarily concerned either with

the intentions of the author or the reaction of the reader rather

than with the actual text. According to Brooks, critical

interpretations emphasizing the author’s intention evolve

inevitably into biography, while attempts to evaluate the

reader’s response are more suited to the field of psychology than

to literary criticism (“The State of Letters” 598). In addition

to these intrinsic failures, a second weakness in these

approaches is they are incorrigibly speculative. Author-focused

criticism engages in unqualified speculation as its modus operandi

in determining how biographical details may have impacted the

composition. Reader-response interpretations on the other hand,

equally free of the limitations presented by the text, are

hopelessly relative, capable of producing an unlimited number of

interpretations.

While Brooks maintains that such inquiries are not without

merit, he is unequivocal in declaring them ineffective as means

for determining the value of literary works. He even argues that,

in assuming the guise of criticism, these approaches threaten the

very concept of literature:

The consequence is that the notion of a specifically

literary art has been called into question. Literature,

an entity having a special ontological status and a

special function, is under steady attack. The very

definition of literature has become cloudy an

indeterminate. (“The State of Letters” 598)

Brooks avoids such ambiguities by making the definition of

literature central to his theory. According to Brooks’

definition, a genuine poem offers us a “simulacrum of experience”

which “may be said to imitate experience by being an experience

rather than any mere statement about experience” (“The State of

Letters” 605). Elsewhere, Brooks says that “literature is

ultimately metaphorical and symbolic,” and that in literature

“the general and universal are not seized upon by abstraction but

are got at through the concrete and the particular” (The Critical

Tradition 798). Thus, in Brooks’ definition, a work of literature

is a thing: its being the product of its participation in a

distinct artistic essence. This essence is recognizable by its

function to direct the mind toward wisdom through indirect means,

a unique mode for discovering truth lying in the imagination

rather in the intellect. And this is literature’s distinguishing

mark: its operative principle is inferential; it guides us toward

truth obliquely, through the imagination rather than discursive

reason. As Brooks states in “The Primacy of the Author”:

Literature is a fictional, not a factual, account of

events, and so does not claim to record literal truth;

but it can convey truth about human beings; or perhaps

more accurately, about reality as experienced by human

beings. (163)

Brooks claims that while this has been man’s understanding of art

from ancient times, within the last several centuries this

conception has become obscured due to man’s changing conception

of himself. A significant step in this direction began with

Descartes’ distinction between mind and body. The unintended

result of this, according to Brooks, was that Descartes “slit the

throat of poetry”1; for by showing that man’s inner world was

hopelessly subjective, Descartes subverted the notion of art as a

vehicle to universal truth. Extrinsic criticism in the two forms

mentioned (the two methods were dubbed “the intentional” and

“affective” fallacies by Brooks’ contemporaries W.K Wimsatt and

Monroe Beardsley) is an indirect consequence of this dramatic

conceptual division.

Brooks’ position is based on the Aristotelian assumption

that a work of art is a creation, with its own ontological status:

its meaning determined by what it is. In other words, regardless

of the author’s intention, and how generations of readers have

responded to it, a work of art contains in itself the

characteristics responsible for its enduring status. In his essay

“My Credo: Formalist Criticism,” Brooks includes a list of

aphorisms outlining his formalist philosophy. Most significant to

the present discussion is his statement that “the primary concern

1 (“The Primacy of the Author” 163).

of criticism is with the problem of unity—the kind of whole which

the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation of

various parts to each other in building up the whole” (The Critical

Tradition 798). Thus, in keeping with the idea behind the title of

The Well-Wrought Urn, Brooks presupposes the artifice of works of

art.

Another way of looking at it might be to compare the obvious

differences between an artistic creation such as the pyramids,

and a natural rock formation. One need not enroll in a course on

art appreciation to note the difference. The fact that the

pyramids are the product of art is beyond dispute. In this

example, Brooks would be interested in evaluating the artistic

“facts” present in the pyramids, and determining how those facts

contribute to the effect of the whole. In other words, Brooks’

theory is interested in evaluating the various details of a work

of art based on the evidence present. Once again, Brooks would

not argue that a modern culture’s aesthetic response to the

pyramids is likely different from that of their Egyptian

architects, or of the Israelites who built them. But that fact

does not change what the pyramids are, and how their form

contributes to an effect entirely different from that of a rock

formation of the same material.

Fish’s approach might best be explained by using an example

he gives in his essay “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One.”

In his anecdote, a group of his students make the mistake of

treating a list of names on the blackboard as a poem with the

result that they produce an impressive collection of theories

regarding the religious implications and connections between the

names that are not necessarily present. Fish’s point is that

“acts of recognition, rather than being triggered by formal

characteristics, are their source” (The Critical Tradition 1025). He

claims that by giving life and meaning to an otherwise inert list

of names, the students in his example are functioning in the

capacity of what he terms, an “interpretive community”

Fish would argue that interpretations of actual poems occur

in just the same way. He takes issue with Brooks here, arguing

that a poem in itself does not contain all that is necessary for

a stable interpretation. Although both critics would agree that

the value of a poem exceeds its denotative content, Fish would

argue that since any group of words can produce a potentially

infinite number of meanings (as in the anecdote of his students),

the text in itself is an insufficient basis for interpretation. A

Further example of this objection appears in an essay titled

“What Makes an Interpretation Acceptable?” in which Fish

describes the sprawling divergence of interpretations within a

collection of New Critic essays on William Blake’s “The Tyger.”

Despite the New Critics’ claim that text-centered criticism

grounds interpretations in a stable structure, their disparity of

opinion on Blake’s poem says otherwise. Fish’s point is well made

that the assumption of an “objective” text does not lead one

necessarily to a uniform interpretation. He concludes that:

One cannot appeal to the text, because the text has

become an extension of the interpretive disagreement

that divides them; and in fact, the text as it is

variously characterized is a consequence of the

interpretation for which it is supposedly evidence.

(Fish 340)

Since the same text can offer such a plenitude of possible

interpretations, Fish’s conclusion is that interpretation cannot

be attached to anything so “fixed” as the text. Rather, he

asserts that “[Poetic] objects are made and not found and that

they are made by the interpretive strategies we set in motion”

(The Critical Tradition 1027).

Against the objection that such a theory is sure to reduce

interpretation to the spectral realms of subjectivity, Fish

argues that the social nature of the interpretive process

precludes interpretation from being a purely individual exercise.

He claims that interpretive strategies are the product of the

social conventions which necessarily inhere in our development

and consequently, in the way we interpret literature: “Thus, it

is true to say that we create poetry, we create it through

interpretive strategies that are finally not our own but have

their source in a publicly available system of intelligibility”

(The Critical Tradition 1028). In other words, every interpretation is

the result of processes learned as part of one’s culture and

thus, cannot be completely idiosyncratic. Fish hopes that this

pretty bit of logic will exculpate him from the charge of

relativism.

Obviously, how one views the relation between the text and

the reader will determine how the reading activity is performed.

As you might expect, Brooks and Fish are nearly opposite in their

interpretive approach. To demonstrate, imagine how this relation

might influence the reading of a poem. The follower of Brooks,

because he perceives the text as a stable object, regards the

poem spatially: his eyes dart back and forth between words,

images, and structures, gathering a sense of the overall tone

until he can apprehend the poem as a whole, its essence. The

student of Fish however, conceives the poem as an event2 occurring

not on the printed page but in the mind of the reader; he reads

the poem temporally, delighting in the hesitant forward movement

of the poem’s actualizing process, carefully noting the internal

reactions created by each step.

To see how this interpretive difference might look in

practice, let’s imagine how the two strategies might apply to a

tour of Notre Dame Cathedral. As a tourist in our example, Brooks

is interested in the overall effect of the cathedral—its

verticality and symbolic structure—and would thus prefer a view

remote, perhaps from the parvis du Notre Dame or the docks across

the Seine. Conversely, Fish is the tourist who walks right up to

2 Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics (Fish 25)

the friezes and carved figures jutting out from the columns,

preferring to take in the experience piece by piece.

Informed by a “spatial” aesthetic, Brooks conceived the poem

as a hard object which becomes familiar with much handling. He is

like an antiques dealer assessing the value of an heirloom watch;

turning it this way and that, he views it from every angle, yet

conscious all the while of the whole. His interpretation begins

with words, sentences, and images, and evolves into structures

and their interrelation. Final judgment proceeds from the unity

that this hierarchical system of units and relations can be said

to produce or fail to produce3. Conversely, in Fish’s conception

a poem is as untouchable as the colors of the prism, which are

not light, glass, or color, but the convergence of these in a

moment. According to Fish, the poem exists in the mind of the

reader—is actually created in the mind of the reader—as a

consequent of the temporal progression through the text. Thus,

for Fish retrospective analysis is disingenuous, no more related

3 “The primary concern of criticism is with the problem of unity—the kind of whole which the literary work forms or fails to form, and the relation of the various parts to each other in building up the whole” (The Critical Tradition 798).

to the experience of a poem than one’s memory of a tour of Notre

Dame can be said to equal the actual thing.

Brooks’ theory deals in structures and images. His method is

inductive in that it advances from the specific consideration of

concrete details to the more general implications proceeding from

their interrelation. It is humanistic because it seeks a

connection between the particular image and the universal

concept. For however “scientific” the New Critics claimed to be,

the essential requirement to be one is not knowledge, but wisdom.

Despite the New Critics’ desire to disassociate themselves from

their romantic predecessors, one catches a faint whiff of humane

lettres in each of them, from time to time. Brooks is no exception.

This is evident in a passage of his essay “Irony as a Principle

of Structure” wherein he approves Eliot’s test for poetic

statements. Eliot’s test consists of a single question: “does the

statement seem to be that which the mind of the reader can accept

as coherent, mature, and founded on the facts of experience?”4

This test seems to require a judgment based more on a manner of

living than on objective analysis. For this test requires more

4 Eliot, qtd. by Brooks in “Irony as a Principle of Structure” (The Critical Tradition 801).

than the instruments of reason alone, it also requires the

humane attributes of discernment, moral integrity, and insight.

Taken as a general concept, Brooks’ method is an asset to

the English teacher as an exercise in critical thinking; it is an

approach to reading poetry with wisdom. For it takes wisdom to see

beyond concrete details and literal meanings into the secondary

and tertiary implications of words and sentences, and it takes

wisdom to isolate truth in its myriad, abstract forms and to

assign value by evaluating them against the broader context of

life. It is an approach meant to minimize reader-error,

particularly the variety produced by an inability to see beyond

the immediate and proximate. The method mitigates such failings

by requiring the reader to evaluate the poem’s elements against

the larger context of the whole.

We might apply Brooks’ theory to the beloved poem by Robert

Frost, “The Road Not Taken.” This poem is appropriate because it

is so familiar, appearing perennially at graduation ceremonies

where it is a favorite among speech givers as a garnish for their

remarks. In general, these speeches share remarkable uniformity

in their misrepresentation of the poem. It is almost ubiquitously

misread. The popular reading represents the poem as a hortative

argument for individuality, to take the road less traveled:

“Dare are to be different!” he seems to say. Yet this

interpretation is quite mistaken, and reveals a woeful lack of

skill among Frost’s readers.

Brooks would say that such interpretations are the result of

passive reading, a gratuitous sort of reading not unlike reader-

response theory. This species of interpretation are content to

use the reader’s internal impressions as the interpretive basis.

The reader (passively) “accepts” the poem as it unfolds, in

linear progression. He is under no obligation to double back and

test his impressions against the previous structure. This reading

strategy is responsible the general misunderstanding of Frost’s

poem. Readers allow the poem’s final lines to annihilate the

existing structure.

Brooks’ approach is the anodyne for this failure. His method

requires the reader to evaluate the final lines against the

whole, forcing the reader to acknowledge what the rest of the

poem actually reveals; in this case, that the speaker did not take

the road less traveled. The evidence is quite obvious: what else

could we conclude from the speaker’s description that, “the

passing had worn them about the same,” and that both roads

“equally lay in leaves no steps had trodden black”? It becomes

obvious that the poem’s final lines actually undercut everything

previous, throwing the entire structure into ironic contrast.

With this realization, the reader must reevaluate the poem

accordingly: the speaker is either ironic, or deluded, or a liar;

whatever the interpretation, Frost’s poem is not the vapid

affirmation so bandied about at graduations.

While Brooks’ theory encourages critical thinking by

evaluating the poem as a macrocosm consisting of many structures,

Fish’s method equips the student with an understanding of the

syntagmatic functions of language by observing the microcosmic

dimensions of poetry. Though Brooks is not really concerned with

Saussure’s claims about the arbitrary nature of language, Fish

is, deeply. In many ways, the criticism of Fish resembles

linguistic theory. His theory deals in semantic functions and

syntactical relations. Consequently, he does not indulge in

Brooks’ presupposition that poems are self-contained structures

of intelligibility. Words mean what we let them mean might be a

useful dictum here. His theory is interested in what happens in

the mind of the reader as he, to use Fish’s terminology, creates

the poem in his mind. It is important to add that this

progression happens in time. Thus, for Fish interpretation is

interested in the effect each word produces when attached to those

previous as the poem is read linearly.

In the classroom, Fish’s theory might be useful for

educating inexperienced readers on how to read a poem. By

requiring students to look at a poem on the microscopic level,

they will begin to see what happens in a line of poetry. This

method also has value for more advanced students, for the times

when hitting the inevitable roadblock in a difficult section of

poetry requires a different approach. In (necessarily) reduced

form, Fish’s method directs readers to consider seriatim the

function of each word as it appears in the poem, and to note the

internal effects each words produces. Observe how this method

might be helpful for unpacking a particularly difficult section

from Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Going”:

Never to bid good-bye

Or lip me the softest call,

Or utter a wish for a word, while I

Saw morning harden upon the wall,

Unmoved, unknowing

That your great going

Had place that moment, and altered all.

Jumping right in, the first thing to note is that although

the stanza begins with the stunning finality of “never,” what

follows are descriptions of potential actions by means of

infinitives in the present, active indicative which, despite the

prohibition at the beginning, are given life in the mind of the

reader. This is a consequence of the imprecision of the

infinitive construction. The infinitives conjure images in the

reader’s mind that are abstracted, timeless; consequently, the

precluding function of “never” is undermined by the collusion of

these images in the reader’s mind, and ultimately annihilated.

The reader cannot help but imagine distinct images of the wife

performing the following actions: bidding goodbye, calling

softly, asking for a word, even though she is deceased.

A shift occurs in the fourth line, from the lively images of

the deceased wife to the speaker’s self-description through cold,

inactive language. Enigmatically, while the speaker talks about

the unreality of his ceased wife’s actions by means of the

present, active infinitive, he refers to himself in the perfect

tense, denoting completed action. The sentiment he is trying to

express is the impossibility of future interactions with his

wife. Most of us probably would have written the line thus:

“Never to bid goodbye while I see morning”; however, to perform

this formulation would require the speaker to imagine his

continued existence into the future: this he is unable to do. The

effect of the perfect tense verb “saw” in the mind of the reader

is that the speaker’s existence is no longer a present reality.

Add to this is the speaker’s inclusion of the odd detail of what

he saw—he saw morning harden on the wall; the concept this image

generates results in a deepening implication of passivity. The

juxtaposition of “hardening” and “morning” oppresses the reader

with the sense of narrowing of action, a movement from the

hopeful juvescence of morning to an immobility of diamond-like

hardness.

One could go on. But the purpose of this example has not

been exegesis. I have attempted to demonstrate how Fish’s method

might be a helpful resource for teaching poetry. If successful,

it should be clear that this method has the desirable consequence

of requiring the reader to slow down and appreciate the effects

of individual words and their syntactic relations.

In considering the practical application of the methods of

Brooks and Fish, one must resist the temptation to regard the two

theories as mutually exclusive. Though at first glance their

relation seems to admit something of a binary opposition, the

case is not so simple. Neither is easily undermined, not on

logical grounds at any rate; since validating one will not

necessarily negate the other, and one would be hard-pressed to

prove the falsehood of either empirically. Like the

epistemological debate between Locke and Kant, Brooks and Fish

embody two mutually-adjusting perspectives of which neither can

claim supremacy. Furthermore, despite their nearly antipodal

relation, preference for one does not preclude the utility of the

other. Both have their uses. In fact, one could argue that, as

two distinct models for categorizing our experience of

literature, they serve an essential function: for their

coexistence stimulates debate. The search for a resolution

encourages literary critics to expand their search into new and

undiscovered areas of thought.

Works CitedBrooks, Cleanth. "From My Credo: Formalist Criticism" and “Irony as a

Principle of Structure” Ed. David H. Richter. The Critical Tradition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007. 798-806. Print.

Brooks, Cleanth. "The Primacy of the Author." The Missouri Review 6.1 (1982): 161-72. JSTOR. Web. Oct.-Nov. 2012.

Brooks, Cleanth. "The Primacy of the Reader." The Missouri Review 6.2 (n.d.): 189-201. JSTOR. Web. Oct.-Nov. 2012.

Brooks, Cleanth. "The State of Letters." The Sewanee Review 87.4 (1979): 592-607. JSTOR. Web. Oct.-Nov. 2012.

Fish, Stanley. "How to Recognize a Poem When You See One” Ed. David H.Richter. The Critical Tradition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007. 1023-1030. Print.

Fish, Stanley Eugene. Is There a Text in This Class?:The Authority of Interpretive

Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980. Print.Hardy, Thomas. ""The Going"" Thomas Hardy Selected Poems. Comp. Robert

Mezey. London: Penguin, 1998. 79. Print