Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism

Spinoza belongs much more in company of those critics and theorists who have held out against the dominant idea of interpretation as the normal mode of literary-critical activity, and of multiple meaning (or the ‘plural text’) as its most rewarding object of study. This alternative tradition goes right back to Aristotle, with his stress in The Poetics on the virtues of an orderly, disciplined method of approach that starts out from observed regularities of structure in various types of text, and then proceeds inductively to specify the rules or conventions governing that genre. The most obvious heirs of Aristotelian thinking are those modern formalist or structuralist movements which likewise see no virtue in producing ever more sophisticated interpretations of individual texts, but concentrate rather on the various poetic devices (or modes of narrative employment) that characterize literary discourse in general (Todorov, 1977; Genette, 1979; Rimmon-Kenan, 1983).

So Spinoza’s example is immensely significant in the present context of debate, though not in quite the way that Kermode suggests. His influence has been greatest on those thinkers (critical theorists of various persuasion) whose work is aimed squarely ‘against interpretation’, or at any rate against the view—widely held among literary critics—that the object of reading is somehow to release the largest possible range of meanings from a given text or passage. This idea can of course be traced back to Coleridge and his set-piece examples of ‘practical criticism’ as applied to Shakespeare, Wordsworth and others (Coleridge, [1817] 1983). But its real apotheosis comes at the point when T.S. Eliot—in a series of canonical essays (in particular ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ and ‘The Metaphysical Poets’)—effectively equates the proper interests of criticism with those of close-reading or rhetorical exegesis (see Eliot, 1964a, b). The subsequent story is familiar enough, from William Empson’s Seven Types Of Ambiguity (1930)—where multiple meaning is taken as the hallmark or touchstone of poetic value—to the American New Criticism, French post-structuralism, and at least one variety of deconstruction, as practised by literary critics for whom it offers a degree of hermeneutic freedom denied by other, more orthodox schools (e.g. Hartman, 1980, 1981; Miller, 1985; also Leitch, 1983).

It seems to me that a good way of grasping what is involved in recent literary-critical debates is to go right back to one of their major sources in Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise (1670). This work raises all the relevant issues and does so, moreover, in a context of highly charged political and ideological argument which resembles our own at numerous points. These include (1) the question of interpretative truth, or whether literature provides any kind of veridical knowledge, as distinct from its purely aesthetic or imaginative yield; (2) the relation between scriptural exegesis and secular literary criticism, a theme taken up from Spinoza by Matthew Arnold ([1865] 1973) and Frank Kermode (1979), among others; (3) the status of narrative understanding vis-à-vis philosophy, history and political theory; and (4) the extent to which these other disciplines may themselves be affected by bringing them into contact with certain techniques of rhetorical close-reading, techniques most familiar to students of literature.

It should be realized that the modern period’s theorization of ‘Literature’ as ‘text’ took place in the context of the exclusion of mimetic, pragmatic and expressive factors, or at least of their falling into disfavour. Thus the basic strategy of modern textual theory is the drawing of a boundary around the text. The literary text is said to be ‘autonomous’, existing independently of its origins in history and in the life of an individual writer, not directed to any practical purpose nor indeed affecting the reader in any flesh-and-blood way.

‘Literature’, with other ‘art’ forms, came to be treated as a cultural and moral force in the twentieth century, institutionalized as canons of books whose textual worlds were to be emulated, teaching humane and dignified values, a counter-balance to philistinism.

A different view of the relationship between ‘Literature’ and readers is argued by Russian Formalism. In formalism the text is the central focus, but the theory of ‘defamiliarization’ can be regarded as a psychological theory about reading and perception. Viktor Shklovsky ([1917] 1965) argued that in ordinary life perception is dulled, habituated; art, by making language strange, making reading difficult, forces the reader to discard the veil of common sense and see the world in a new light. The theory of defamiliarization treats the reader as an active and responsible percipient, not as a passive absorber of values or a mere reactor.

The key terms are ‘fiction’ and ‘imagination’, apparently used synonymously. This is only one sense of the term ‘imagination’, and means the exercise of an inventive or creative power to give the illusion of a possible but not actual world, a world which may even be an enhancement of the ‘real world’. This view of poetic invention received its classic formulation in Sir Philip Sidney’s Apologie for Poetrie (1595): even Wellek and Warren’s semantic distinction between fictional and historical statements harks back to Sidney’s ‘the poet… nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth’.

Stylistics as a discipline within Anglo-American literary studies is conventionally assumed to have begun in 1966 with the publicatin of Essays on Style and Language, edited by Roger Fowler. It can be seen as a logical extension of New Criticism, with its emphasis on the text, but it was also a reaction against that school in the sense that stylistics demands a much more detailed and systematic treatment of the language of texts. However, early stylistics gained much of its impetus and insight from Russian Formalism and Czech Structuralism. These movements in Eastern Europe early in this century has already achieved significant results in the linguistic analysis of poetry in particular, but their work only became known in the West in the 1960s.

If the imagination was to continue to reign supreme then art alone must make up the kingdom. Or, in what was to become familiar phrasing: ‘art for art’s sake’, ‘l’art pour ‘l’art’.

The French phrase makes its formal debut in English aesthetic discourse through one English poet’s revaluation of another. In his pioneering book on Blake of 1868, Algernon Charles Swinburne chose to endorse Blake’s vision of the ‘Idiot Questioner’ by equating science with scepticism, and scepticism with restraint. This helped him to dismiss as absurd the contemporary tendency to merge art with science.