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
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