Empson’s book was published in 1927, when the Modernist movement, which delighted in puzzling the reader with both its erudition and structural dislocations, was in full cry. But the rise of pluralistic meaning and interpretation can’t be laid at the door of any single person or movement - as with any historical process considered retrospectively, it’s the product of a number of related developments, often working independently of one another.
So the war was fought on many fronts: you could point to the Romantic movement, with its emphasis on private, rather than public truth; to evolutionary theory and the body blow it dealt to literalist interpretations of the Bible; to psychoanalysis which explored realms beyond conscious perception or even the rise of popular education, which encouraged individuals to think more for themselves and not rely on received bodies of wisdom. Praise or blame has been heaped on each of these cultural phenomena for breaking down the notion that there was one all-embracing Truth that governed human thought and behaviour, when in reality it was a cocktail of all of them. And let’s not forget Sir Philip Sidney, the proto-Modernist whose theories we examined earlier.
What we can say for certain is that over the last 500 years, a) we have gradually come to acknowledge that truth in whatever field of endeavour can exist in a number of different forms, not all of which are responsive to rational investigation, and b), that literature has not only embraced this development, but, when the cultural conditions are favourable, has revelled in the freedom it represents. The net result is that what was formerly considered a dangerous form of moral relativism was subsequently praised as liberal, democratic, humanistic and broad-minded by those who could accommodate this seismic change in the accepted way of thinking.
John Keats was not necessarily the first celebrant, but his almost casual formulation of ‘negative capability’ has become one of the touchstones of this tendency to pluralism in literature. In a letter of 1817, he wrote to his brother:
. . . at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
The artist, Keats is saying, does not necessarily have to explain everything to his readers, or even to himself. We must all do the best we can, but if our deliberations reach no tangible conclusion, we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that artistic truth may remain, as it were, in suspension. It’s the power of the experience that counts, not its conceptual neatness or susceptibility to rational analysis. Soon afterwards, Keats was to write ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ which contains the immortal couplet,
Beauty is Truth,--Truth Beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
that elegantly embodies his idea. (1)
Nevertheless, the belief that a work of literature didn’t have to have a single, unitary explanation died hard in certain quarters, and is by no means universally accepted even now. Back in the North-Eastern United States in 1854, Henry David Thoreau noted in his masterpiece ‘Walden’ with amused asperity that “in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man’s writings admit of more than one interpretation.” In the self-regarding coteries of Boston society, he reported, inconclusiveness was viewed as a form of intellectual weakness. “We are inclined,” he wrote, “ to class those who are one-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.” Whether he actually told any of his neighbours they were bourgeois pillocks isn’t known, but he clearly thought it.
Thoreau famously retired to his home-made shack on Walden Pond to ponder these and other metaphysical conundrums, while a couple of miles down the road in Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s friend and landlord, was railing against all forms of mental incarceration in some of the most brilliant essays ever written.
Like William Blake, with whom he shares many aesthetic and philosophical points of view, Emerson really did believe that the universe could be manifest in a single grain of sand, and that within every individual consciousness was the distillation of every shred of human history that preceded its creation. Carrying that weight of super-compressed data around as your birthright means that life almost literally explodes with possibilities, whether you’re an artist or not, and that it’s a crime against nature to try and restrain that energy.
In his essay ‘The Poet’, Emerson remarks that “An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author.” If you try to tie literature down to single meanings, you’re simply left with “trite rhetoric”; so the artist has to keep mankind’s imagination perpetually alive, to make it “flow and not to freeze . . . for all symbols are fluxional.” Bad art makes the symbol “too stark and solid”, whereas good art not only carries its own momentum, it also taps into mankind’s spiritual inheritance; it is the catalyst that transforms “village symbols” into “universal signs”.
Emerson’s wonderfully liberating arguments represent a small corner of a much broader debate which was loosening the stays of many types of man-made authority, which is why the evangelical fervour of his essays would have caused many a raised eyebrow among the chattering classes when the implications of his ideas were translated into, say politics. The concept that meaning could be democratized and that it was forever changing would be deeply unsettling to anyone who had an interest in maintaining the status quo. What would happen if it spread outside literature? Where would this revolution of sensibility end up? Anarchy on the streets of Concord?
So in times of instability, the sort of imaginative freedom exemplified by Emerson and his ilk could be considered unhelpful or even subversive rather than an exciting new way of seeing the world. And so it proved.
In the early years of the twentieth century, many writers and commentators were beginning to find this non-dogmatic approach to meaning a mixed blessing, and while Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists took it for granted that our common humanity gave a necessary shape and discipline to all this mental energy, fifty years on, others didn’t share their confidence. In short, the cohesion of society was going to hell in a hand cart.
It’s perhaps difficult for us now to comprehend the enormity of the intellectual dislocations brought on by World War One and the period immediately preceding it, but they effectively blew away any last shards of concensus on how literature should represent the chaos that contemporary reality had become. To many, this was a profoundly disturbing state of affairs, and a number of writers returned to an almost documentary realism to try and put some solidity back into literary meaning.
Perhaps the most celebrated example of this return to realism was Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’, published in 1906, in which he launched a devastating attack on the Chicago meat-packing industry. As a result of Sinclair’s harrowing exposee of the inhuman conditions some of the workers were experiencing, the Roosevelt administration enacted new food saftey legislation that same year. But though meat preparation was forced to become much more hygienic, the lot of the slaughterhouse employees most certainly didn’t - they still were forced to toil in a sea of blood for practically no money and with no union representation. “I aimed for the public’s heart”, a highly disillusioned Lewis later wrote in his autobiography, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
Urban realism represented a return to the old ways, only they were now describing a civilization whose self-confidence was a much more delicate flower than it had once been, since formal religion (or indeed any framework that represented order and meaning) wasn’t always available to prop it up. Most of these writers were novelists (Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos), but what they were offering was a stylistic response coupled with ‘low’ and localized subject matter that merely served to paper over the cracks of a much deeper underlying problem of perception.
Others looked for more lasting solutions; Ezra Pound, sensing a new dawn rather than a literary apocalypse, told his fellow writers that their “opportunity [was] greater than Leonardo’s” to construct something meaningful and lasting from the wreckage. Many grasped it with both hands, and the years 1912 to 1922 witnessed the most radical re-orientation in aesthetics ever attempted. Depending on your reserves of patience and your level of skepticism, the resulting Modernist movement is either the saviour or the bogey man of art and literature. It either honestly reflected the infinitely more complex world that was emerging, or confused it still further. In what they felt was an era void of traditional forms of authority, the Modernists created an ‘order’ of their own - if society wasn’t going to provide the glue to hold a consensual system of aesthetics together, they’d supply it themselves. They would destroy what was left and re-build it from the ground up using a whole new set of specifications.
Some, like the Imagist poets, believed that the way to rescue meaning was to create art that was hard, clear and exact. Others revelled in the polyvalence of meaning by recording it from every possible perspective, and so we see Picasso painting women with six noses, William Faulkner writing a novel with 13 narrators, and James Joyce gradually turning his art into a giant cryptic crossword.
But in this era of movements and manifestoes, many of which were high on theory and low on results, what we see is each artist seeking to arrive at his own personal armistice with chaos while at the same time often reflecting it in the way his work is presented. That’s my rather charitable assessment of the ‘difficult’ nature of Modernism and I’m sticking to it.
So, without getting too bogged down in literary history, what was happening in the early 20th century was the gradual acknowledgment that, in art at least, unitary meaning was pretty much dead. The artist no longer simply worked within a consensus of meaning, but was at perfect liberty to create his own, which would be just as valid as any received versions (of course, artists had been doing this for centuries - it’s just that now an individual perspective was less likely to be viewed as aberrant or self-indulgent) And this also applied to lit crit; out went the notion that a text meant just one thing, and that there was a ‘right’ way of looking at it. Other perspectives were possible in this new democracy of meaning, and they were vigorously explored as the twentieth century wore on. So the potential meaning in a text began expanding almost exponentially.
Of course, if you take this principle to its logical conclusion (or its reductio ad absurdum) as some critics had by the 1970’s, you abandon the notion of a controlling intelligence altogether and you’re left with a Babel of meaning from which no resolution is possible. Everyone therefore becomes a critic, since everyone’s opinion is just as valid as anyone else’s. There isn’t just one reality, there’s as many realities as there are perceivers of reality. And this, more or less, is Deconstruction, a movement in philosophy and criticism that takes pluralism of meaning about as far as it can go. If everything can mean everything to everyone, it basically means nothing. So let’s all go home. In fact, Deconstruction has become a polite euphemism for intellectual vandalism in its professed aim to think the unthinkable and evaporate all meaning out of literature.
Footnote:
1. Which isn’t dissimilar to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s dictum to “live the question.”
So the war was fought on many fronts: you could point to the Romantic movement, with its emphasis on private, rather than public truth; to evolutionary theory and the body blow it dealt to literalist interpretations of the Bible; to psychoanalysis which explored realms beyond conscious perception or even the rise of popular education, which encouraged individuals to think more for themselves and not rely on received bodies of wisdom. Praise or blame has been heaped on each of these cultural phenomena for breaking down the notion that there was one all-embracing Truth that governed human thought and behaviour, when in reality it was a cocktail of all of them. And let’s not forget Sir Philip Sidney, the proto-Modernist whose theories we examined earlier.
What we can say for certain is that over the last 500 years, a) we have gradually come to acknowledge that truth in whatever field of endeavour can exist in a number of different forms, not all of which are responsive to rational investigation, and b), that literature has not only embraced this development, but, when the cultural conditions are favourable, has revelled in the freedom it represents. The net result is that what was formerly considered a dangerous form of moral relativism was subsequently praised as liberal, democratic, humanistic and broad-minded by those who could accommodate this seismic change in the accepted way of thinking.
John Keats was not necessarily the first celebrant, but his almost casual formulation of ‘negative capability’ has become one of the touchstones of this tendency to pluralism in literature. In a letter of 1817, he wrote to his brother:
. . . at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.
The artist, Keats is saying, does not necessarily have to explain everything to his readers, or even to himself. We must all do the best we can, but if our deliberations reach no tangible conclusion, we can comfort ourselves with the knowledge that artistic truth may remain, as it were, in suspension. It’s the power of the experience that counts, not its conceptual neatness or susceptibility to rational analysis. Soon afterwards, Keats was to write ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ which contains the immortal couplet,
Beauty is Truth,--Truth Beauty,--that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
that elegantly embodies his idea. (1)
Nevertheless, the belief that a work of literature didn’t have to have a single, unitary explanation died hard in certain quarters, and is by no means universally accepted even now. Back in the North-Eastern United States in 1854, Henry David Thoreau noted in his masterpiece ‘Walden’ with amused asperity that “in this part of the world it is considered a ground for complaint if a man’s writings admit of more than one interpretation.” In the self-regarding coteries of Boston society, he reported, inconclusiveness was viewed as a form of intellectual weakness. “We are inclined,” he wrote, “ to class those who are one-and-a-half witted with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.” Whether he actually told any of his neighbours they were bourgeois pillocks isn’t known, but he clearly thought it.
Thoreau famously retired to his home-made shack on Walden Pond to ponder these and other metaphysical conundrums, while a couple of miles down the road in Concord, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thoreau’s friend and landlord, was railing against all forms of mental incarceration in some of the most brilliant essays ever written.
Like William Blake, with whom he shares many aesthetic and philosophical points of view, Emerson really did believe that the universe could be manifest in a single grain of sand, and that within every individual consciousness was the distillation of every shred of human history that preceded its creation. Carrying that weight of super-compressed data around as your birthright means that life almost literally explodes with possibilities, whether you’re an artist or not, and that it’s a crime against nature to try and restrain that energy.
In his essay ‘The Poet’, Emerson remarks that “An imaginative book renders us much more service at first, by stimulating us through its tropes, than afterward, when we arrive at the precise sense of the author.” If you try to tie literature down to single meanings, you’re simply left with “trite rhetoric”; so the artist has to keep mankind’s imagination perpetually alive, to make it “flow and not to freeze . . . for all symbols are fluxional.” Bad art makes the symbol “too stark and solid”, whereas good art not only carries its own momentum, it also taps into mankind’s spiritual inheritance; it is the catalyst that transforms “village symbols” into “universal signs”.
Emerson’s wonderfully liberating arguments represent a small corner of a much broader debate which was loosening the stays of many types of man-made authority, which is why the evangelical fervour of his essays would have caused many a raised eyebrow among the chattering classes when the implications of his ideas were translated into, say politics. The concept that meaning could be democratized and that it was forever changing would be deeply unsettling to anyone who had an interest in maintaining the status quo. What would happen if it spread outside literature? Where would this revolution of sensibility end up? Anarchy on the streets of Concord?
So in times of instability, the sort of imaginative freedom exemplified by Emerson and his ilk could be considered unhelpful or even subversive rather than an exciting new way of seeing the world. And so it proved.
In the early years of the twentieth century, many writers and commentators were beginning to find this non-dogmatic approach to meaning a mixed blessing, and while Emerson and his fellow Transcendentalists took it for granted that our common humanity gave a necessary shape and discipline to all this mental energy, fifty years on, others didn’t share their confidence. In short, the cohesion of society was going to hell in a hand cart.
It’s perhaps difficult for us now to comprehend the enormity of the intellectual dislocations brought on by World War One and the period immediately preceding it, but they effectively blew away any last shards of concensus on how literature should represent the chaos that contemporary reality had become. To many, this was a profoundly disturbing state of affairs, and a number of writers returned to an almost documentary realism to try and put some solidity back into literary meaning.
Perhaps the most celebrated example of this return to realism was Upton Sinclair’s ‘The Jungle’, published in 1906, in which he launched a devastating attack on the Chicago meat-packing industry. As a result of Sinclair’s harrowing exposee of the inhuman conditions some of the workers were experiencing, the Roosevelt administration enacted new food saftey legislation that same year. But though meat preparation was forced to become much more hygienic, the lot of the slaughterhouse employees most certainly didn’t - they still were forced to toil in a sea of blood for practically no money and with no union representation. “I aimed for the public’s heart”, a highly disillusioned Lewis later wrote in his autobiography, “and by accident I hit it in the stomach.”
Urban realism represented a return to the old ways, only they were now describing a civilization whose self-confidence was a much more delicate flower than it had once been, since formal religion (or indeed any framework that represented order and meaning) wasn’t always available to prop it up. Most of these writers were novelists (Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, John Dos Passos), but what they were offering was a stylistic response coupled with ‘low’ and localized subject matter that merely served to paper over the cracks of a much deeper underlying problem of perception.
Others looked for more lasting solutions; Ezra Pound, sensing a new dawn rather than a literary apocalypse, told his fellow writers that their “opportunity [was] greater than Leonardo’s” to construct something meaningful and lasting from the wreckage. Many grasped it with both hands, and the years 1912 to 1922 witnessed the most radical re-orientation in aesthetics ever attempted. Depending on your reserves of patience and your level of skepticism, the resulting Modernist movement is either the saviour or the bogey man of art and literature. It either honestly reflected the infinitely more complex world that was emerging, or confused it still further. In what they felt was an era void of traditional forms of authority, the Modernists created an ‘order’ of their own - if society wasn’t going to provide the glue to hold a consensual system of aesthetics together, they’d supply it themselves. They would destroy what was left and re-build it from the ground up using a whole new set of specifications.
Some, like the Imagist poets, believed that the way to rescue meaning was to create art that was hard, clear and exact. Others revelled in the polyvalence of meaning by recording it from every possible perspective, and so we see Picasso painting women with six noses, William Faulkner writing a novel with 13 narrators, and James Joyce gradually turning his art into a giant cryptic crossword.
But in this era of movements and manifestoes, many of which were high on theory and low on results, what we see is each artist seeking to arrive at his own personal armistice with chaos while at the same time often reflecting it in the way his work is presented. That’s my rather charitable assessment of the ‘difficult’ nature of Modernism and I’m sticking to it.
So, without getting too bogged down in literary history, what was happening in the early 20th century was the gradual acknowledgment that, in art at least, unitary meaning was pretty much dead. The artist no longer simply worked within a consensus of meaning, but was at perfect liberty to create his own, which would be just as valid as any received versions (of course, artists had been doing this for centuries - it’s just that now an individual perspective was less likely to be viewed as aberrant or self-indulgent) And this also applied to lit crit; out went the notion that a text meant just one thing, and that there was a ‘right’ way of looking at it. Other perspectives were possible in this new democracy of meaning, and they were vigorously explored as the twentieth century wore on. So the potential meaning in a text began expanding almost exponentially.
Of course, if you take this principle to its logical conclusion (or its reductio ad absurdum) as some critics had by the 1970’s, you abandon the notion of a controlling intelligence altogether and you’re left with a Babel of meaning from which no resolution is possible. Everyone therefore becomes a critic, since everyone’s opinion is just as valid as anyone else’s. There isn’t just one reality, there’s as many realities as there are perceivers of reality. And this, more or less, is Deconstruction, a movement in philosophy and criticism that takes pluralism of meaning about as far as it can go. If everything can mean everything to everyone, it basically means nothing. So let’s all go home. In fact, Deconstruction has become a polite euphemism for intellectual vandalism in its professed aim to think the unthinkable and evaporate all meaning out of literature.
Every train of thought is eventually pursued to its extremes, and, if we return to our Meaning Line, a Deconstructionist perspective would sit at the far right, at the absolute opposite end to A=A types of meaning. It’s a critical approach that has been described as ‘knee-jerk nihilism’ or ‘puerile skepticism’, but has nevertheless found a welcoming home in American universities, where it continues to flourish. Surprise surprise. Because you can write just about any old rubbish and get away with it.
Footnote:
1. Which isn’t dissimilar to the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s dictum to “live the question.”
