The Catch-22 of New Criticism

In this class, we have read Barthes and Foucault and their views on the role (or lack thereof) of the author. Again, we have returned to this idea with Wimslatt and Beardsley. In "The Intentional Fallacy", they argue that the words on the page are all that matter, that anything outside the text (text being defined as the work itself) is a distraction and detraction. I had trouble swallowing this pill in the first weeks of the class, and it has become no easier.

These are self-fulfilling prophecies in the study of literature. One is the relation of the author to the episteme: authors are both influenced and influence the time, place and literary conventions in which they exist. They feed the cycle. With this in mind, the New Criticism tradition is a self-isolating trend in literature. The critics remove the author from the equation, and the author, with this in mind, composes a work in a corresponding mindset. To me, however, after having studied structuralism this seems logically impossible. "Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work." WHAT? One does not demand that a poem "work": it works, regardless of the New Critic's ascertainment of whether or not it does. I'll try to explain.

Language, according to structuralism, is a signifier of reality: just as Burke said, the letters b-i-r-d are not--together, in that order--a feathered, winged animal, but they do stand for the animal in a text. They represent something which exists in the real world. But why? Because we humans (specifically, we English-speaking humans) have said so. We have slapped a label on a thing with a beating heart, a pair of wings and a multitude of feathers so that we have something by which we can call it. This leads into my point: to judge from a New Criticism point of view is to judge the language as abstract, as something which simply exists, which was not made but came into being of its own accord. One can say that the stars, the planets or the empty aether of space simply exist because the elements of which they are composed have eternally been present and in existence, but language, civilization and other human inventions are just that: inventions.

Back to the poem. It exists because the world from whence it comes exists. The words which the author chooses to construct a poem are individual reflections of singular concepts or objects found within oneself (emotions, feelings, even something as banal as an internal organ) or without oneself (the sky, the trees, the ground). The manner in which the author uses words to depict a thing, whatever it may be, are indicative of the lens with which the poet views the world. If you ask a Romantic poet and a minimalist poet to write a poem about, say, love, you will get wildly different results. If a New Critic sits down to judge both, by his or her own convictions there will be no point of reference, no episteme into which the poems fall. They may both be about the same topic but they will be approached by the poets from wholly different perspectives, and thus the actual process of writing will be executed in totally differing manners.

So where is the line drawn? At what point does New Criticism stop interpreting and start dictating the course of literature? Again, going back to Burke, this is my qualm with criticism overshadowing literature itself as a field of study. Structuralism assigns signifiers to the world, which allows the author to combine them at will to shape a message, intent or simple portrayal. The attitude and approach of New Criticism shackles the author because it removes the human aspect of this invention, language, and eliminates the episteme as a factor of consideration. But if the author is disregarded, what is the point of origin of literature?