Wimsatt and Beardsley seem to take issue with an approach to poetic interpretation they call "author psychology," or "personal studies." Section IV of "The Intentional Fallacy" focuses on the conflation they see happening between criticism of poetry and personal studies, and the dangers lying therein. I had a very difficult time understanding both the significance of this section and the distinctions between internal and external and intermediate evidences for the meaning of a poem. I am going to try and piece at least part of their discussion together here.
It seems that Wimsatt and Beardsley are not trying to write-off personal studies completely as irrelevant or not useful because in the first paragraph they say, "Certainly it need to be with a derogatory purpose that one points out personal studies, as distinct from poetic studies, in the realm of literary scholarship," (814). So they at least see something useful in personal studies, but they do not want it to be considered alongside or as the same as poetic studies, because the next sentence says, "Yet there is danger of confusing personal and poetic studies; and there is the fault of writing the personal as if it were poetic." I do not see what is meant when they say "writing the personal as if it were poetic." Could it be that they do not want to take into account a poet's personal life into poetic criticism, because the poem should be able to stand on its own outside of the author and his/her life? After all, it is not so much what happens to a person that is important to writing a poem, but rather how the poet interprets their life. I wonder if this is what Wimsatt and Beardsley are trying to convey?
They then proceed to outline the three types of evidence so that the reader can see the subtle differences critics must discern in a poem. First is internal, which Wimsatt and Beardsley say is "also public," (814). If I understand this correctly, they are saying the internal is the semantics/syntax of a poem, which is a part of the greater language we all use to communicate, which therefore makes it public. Next comes the paradox that the "external is private" (814), which is to say that while language is a public good, it is used to illustrate things most personal to the poet. The external is used to make the private available to the public. And finally, the intermediate type of evidence is one that straddles both the public and private. I think this means that language may be used that some, but not all, will understand to have a particular meaning.
What I am now trying to understand is why these distinctions are necessary, and why is it so disconcerting to Wimsatt and Beardsley that some critics will emphasize certain types of evidence over others? Or is it not the emphasis that is troubling, but rather that the distinctions are not given explicitly by critics when analyzing a poem?
Katharine, I think you have managed to answer your own question in the final statement:
ReplyDelete"[W]hy is it so disconcerting to Wimsatt and Beardsley that some critics will emphasize certain types of evidence over others? Or is it not the emphasis that is troubling, but rather that the distinctions are not given explicitly by critics when analyzing a poem?"
I think this resonates with most of their complaints throughout Section IV of the article. It is useful to keep in mind that, in naming "personal studies," they are drawing on a Professor Tillyard's "personality approach," and we don't have the benefit of seeing this text (814). But they do give us a clue that this approach reflects the kind of "author psychology" that causes poetry to be read as a kind of "inspirational promotion" (814).
By "writing the personal as if it were poetic" (814), perhaps they mean that personal experiences are too variable (perhaps too unreliable) to act as sufficient interpretive evidence. And I think you already articulate this quite well in your second-to-last paragraph above, while sussing out the differences between "internal/external." That "intermediate" kind of evidence seems to stand in for any real dichotomozing, in that it allows a critic/reader to bring to the poem some biographical evidence without slipping into intentional fallacy (815), simply because this biographical evidence can account for the language of the poem just as much as it can account for the supposed "motives" of the poet.
-Prof. Graban
Katharine-
ReplyDeleteReading your post, Andrew Wyeth's "Christina's World" came to mind. Maybe the painting illustrates the ideas Wimsatt and Beardsley talk about on p .814 pretty well; "internal" as anything in the painting itself; the paint, the scene, the techniques, the subject... whereas "external" would be what's outside the painting in Wyeth's life; whatever doesn't have to do with the paiting. It turns out, I think, that "Christina's World" is rich in "intermediate" evidence, which I read to be the aspects about the author that are so commonly known they can be easily inferred to have influenced the work. "evidence about the character of the author or about semiprivate meanings attached to words or topics...and the associations that (word) had for (the author)" is what Wimsatt and Beardsley say(p. 814).
I knew the young woman depicted actually had a physical impairment, and I knew she was an acquaintance of Wyeth, (intermediate evidence)but I didn't know that the tone of the painting was influenced by Wyeth's father's death or that another model sat in for the woman depicted. (also intermediate evidence...) It seems like intermediate evidence is the more "plastic" of the concepts, kind of moving along the spectrum among private, biography, and intentional fallacy relative to public discourse...
http://arthistory.about.com/od/famous_paintings/ss/andrew_wyeth_christinas_world.htm
Does it seem like I went off on a tangent or missed anything significant?