Date: Thu, 19 Mar 1998 14:57:05 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-TH: Richard Ohmann on New Criticism


Richard Foster, in a helpful book on the New Criticism, argues that most of
these critics have a quasi-theological bent. They are the proper heirs of
Matthew Arnold in substituting poetry for religion as man's "ever surer
stay." It seems to me that in spite of their talk about the decline of
culture and sensibility, the "ever surer stay" they offer us the assurance
that we can after all, "come to terms with experience"--by containing it,
by striking balanced attitudes, as a successful poet does, and emphatically
not by acting to change the society that gives rise to our experience. 

Not only is this a passive solution, it is, also, importantly, a personal
one. The New Critics see poetry as serving the individual reader, and only
very indirectly as amending the flawed society. In fact, many of the
formulas they offer of desirable social goals are so abstract as to call
into question the seriousness of their interest. When Richards says that
our sickness is being cut off from the past and that myths and poetry will
"remake our minds and with them our world," when Tate says that the man of
letters is "to attend to the health of society not at large but through
literature--that is, he must be constantly aware of the condition of
language in his age," and that "the end of social man is communion through
love"; when Eliot says in After Strange Gods that the function of
literature is to combat liberalism; when Ransom says that "the object of a
proper society is to instruct its members how to transform instinctive
experience into aesthetic experience" --I find it easy to believe that they
are thinking, not about the whole of any society, real or imagined, but
about the style of life available to a comfortable man of letters within
society. If so, it doesn't really matter how the society is organized,
short of totalitarianism, since the main of letters can cope. "If modern
man wishes to save himself as a human being in an abstractionist society,
say all the New Critics, let him turn to literature and the arts." But for
"modern man" we had better substitute "the literary intellectual," for to
whom else is this solution readily available? Murray Krieger holds that the
social mission of criticism, according to the New Critics, is "to affirm
the uniqueness and indispensability of art's role in society." This has to
mean society as it is; for Krieger the issue is how we defend poetry within
the status quo, and primarily to those who have any say about "art's role
in society," the classes with power or influence. 

Now, against any substantial analysis of society, all of this is a parlor
game, and the social pieties of the New Critics themselves are the sort of
horn-tooting that you might indulge in while asking the National Endowment
for the Humanities for some money. Why are these generally sophisticated
men so very inept when they discuss society? I think it is partly because
everything in their ideology turns them away from politics. They see art as
freeing man from politics by putting him above his circumstances, giving
him inner control, affording a means of salvation, placing him beyond
culture. 

It will be obvious that this is an angled shot of the New Criticism. I have
deliberately tried to draw out those implications of the New Critics' work
that will serve my present purpose, and my account has been critical. Now I
want to reiterate the perspective from which the criticism is leveled. I
can myself understand if not accept Foster's labeling the New Criticism the
"chief movement for literary humanism of this century." I think that the
New Critics were sensitive and well-intentioned men, whose practical
influence on the academy was good. I do not hold them to blame for the
recent crisis of confidence in academic literary culture, much less for the
viciousness that is widespread in American society. To go looking for the
villain among critics and English teachers is, in my view, completely to
misconceive the task of cultural analysis. Plainly the New Criticism, like
its opponents, was a relatively minor cultural force. It did not create the
academic literary scene of the fifties and sixties, but merely presented
itself as a timely instrument to serve purposes of our own and of the
larger society. A few words about that. 

Many aspects of the New Criticism answered to our needs, but the one aspect
I wish to single out is its flight from politics. Trilling said of
intellectuals today that "we all want politics not to exist." This is
particularly true in America, where the social pressures that drive people
to conscious politics have rarely existed for long; for us "there has
always seemed a way out." Americans have generally been able to move on
when a situation calling for politics arose--across the frontier, to a
suburb, into technologically ensured privacy. What has increasingly
governed American public life is what Philip Slater calls the 

Toilet Assumption--the notion that unwanted matter, unwanted difficulties,
unwanted complexities and obstacles will disappear if they are removed from
our immediate field of vision. . . . Our approach to social problems is to
decrease their visibility: out of sight, out of mind. This is the real
foundation of racial segregation, especially in its most extreme case, the
Indian "reservation." The result of our social efforts has been to remove
the underlying problems of our society farther and farther from daily
experience and daily consciousness, and hence to decrease, in the mass of
the population, the knowledge, skill, resources, and motivation necessary
to deal with them. 

In America we use technology and production to shut out social ills, and so
to evade politics at whatever cost. 

Academic humanists in the fifties had special reasons for wanting politics
not to exist. McCarthy had made activism improvident for college teachers
at the start of the decade, and, in any case, the cold war had reduced
ideology to seeming inevitabilities of free world and iron curtain, while
drastically narrowing the range of domestic political positions available
and pretty much guaranteeing that support for Adlai Stevenson would seem
the most daring political act within the bounds of realism. At the same
time, technological advance and the rapid increase in production kept
before us a vision of steady improvement, and made radical social change
seem both remote and disturbing. What those of us who studied and taught
literature particularly needed, therefore, was a rationale for our
divorcing work from politics, for lying low in society. 

Kenneth Burke wrote an analysis of such tranquil historical moments, back
in 1937, that is worth quoting apropos the fifties: 

The ideal conditions for thought arise when the world is deemed about as
satisfactory as we can make it, and thinkers of all sorts collaborate in
constructing a vast collective mythology whereby people can be at home in
that world. Conflicts are bridged symbolically; one tries to mitigate
conflict by the mediating devices of poetry and religion, rather than to
accentuate the harshness. 

In such a period, ironic "frames of acceptance" are bound to be wanted. The
New Criticism was such a frame, already built and ready for use by the end
of the war. 

Some homelier truths are also worth recalling. Academic salaries in this
country touched bottom at the end of the forties, in terms of purchasing
power. I well recall that as I came to graduate school in 1952, those
leaving Harvard with Ph.D.'s counted $3,000 a good salary. Professors were
poor; I thought of entering the profession as tantamount to taking vows of
poverty. But economic conditions gradually improved for us through the
decade, for demographic and political reasons (universities, recall, became
an instrument in the cold war--the battle for men's minds). A new,
distinctly less ragged style of life became possible, and with it an
almost-earned upper- middle-class self-image. As we were switching from
beer to booze and buying second cars, few felt any hard economic interest
in politics. The social change that was carrying us along was quite
satisfactory. And with this frame of mind, the New Criticism accorded well. 

So far I have virtually equated theory of literature in the postwar period
with the New Criticism. In so doing I have of course greatly oversimplified
the actual situation in universities, both by omitting the other schools
and by slighting the polemical and contentious side of the New Criticism
itself. I will not make up this deficiency. To do so would require roughly
equal time for philologists, literary historians, Chicago critics, and so on. 

Instead I will say just enough to suggest that in the terms I have
outlined, the opponents of New Criticism offered no real alternative to it. 

What kept the English department busy before New Criticism arrived was, of
course, philology and literary history. Philology, whose territory was not
deeply invaded, never really entered into battle with the New Critics, but
literary history very much did. It could not help doing so, since the New
Criticism challenged its right to control the curriculum and the budget. To
be sure, the challenge came more in the form of physical presence than of
doctrine, though Ransom did attack English faculties for being "mere
historians," unable to recognize a good new poem when they saw one, much
less deal with the texture of literature. In any case, the mere historians
were embattled, and those of us who were in graduate school 15 to 25 years
ago will remember their grumblings and disparagings. Douglas Bush handed
down the official indictment in a 1949 MLA talk. According to his bill of
charges, the New Critics ignore historical context; they therefore make
damaging errors; they glorify technical method and assume that "literature
exists for the diversion of a few sophisticates"; they are "aesthetes" who
"create a moral vacuum. Poetry deals with morality and so should criticism. 

But in spite of the high feelings and the real antagonisms that split the
profession for a while, the division was not deep. Bush would bring
morality back into criticism--by siding with one or another ethic drawn
from the past, as we know from his other writings and their championing of
Christian humanism. Such free-swinging uses of the past do not bring
criticism into any closer touch with the concrete moral situation of the
present than the New Criticism. The distance, with Bush, is simply of time
rather than of abstraction. As I have said, the New Critics did not lack
for moral sentiments. 

As for the dispute about method, the scholars and the critics had after all
a common intent: to get at the ethos of a work or a poet, to mediate his
wisdom (his coming to terms), with empathy for all systems of thought, in
the dispassionate way of the intellectual. The scholar would do this by
coming at the work from outside, the critic by exploring its interior.
Either method will suffice to withdraw the work from our history and
politics. So scholar and critic have long since realized their community of
interest, in a setting where differences of method--specializations--are a
positive professional asset rather than a contradiction. It reduces anxiety
if one can succeed as a scholar or as a critic, and leave half the "field"
to another guild of experts with whom one is no longer in competition. 

The other collective assault on the New Criticism came from Ronald Crane
and the Chicago critics. They bore down on the New Critics' attempt to see
all poems as importantly alike and as distinct from prose or from science.
The Chicago group would dwell more on the various genres and subgenres of
literature, those traditional forms that shape individual works. In other
words, for the criticism of a given poem it may be more helpful to say at
the start that it is an elegy than that it is a poem. I reduce this
doctrine to such a minimum, not to imply that no significant philosophical
issues were at stake (there were some), but to show that the issues for
teachers of literature were once again primarily those of method. Almost
everything I said about the ethos of New Criticism applies equally to
Chicago Aristotelianism. In fact, in the elaborate taxonomy of literary
works that Chicago promised, in the prospect of a well- ordered and
infinitely large body of practical criticism, and in Crane's plea for "much
inductive theoretical research . . . into problems both of general poetics
and of the specific poetics of literary forms," the Chicago critics were
even better equipped for the professional decade than the New Critics. And
needless to say, their call for a "pluralistic" criticism, one that would
take systems of thought as premises for inquiry rather than as competing
doctrines, promised to reduce values to methodological preferences and make
an unthreatening place for them in the professional life. My contemporaries
in graduate school might recall maneuvering their way through first an
Aristotelian paper on a narrative poem, then a myth-and-ritual job on a
Restoration comedy, and on to a synthesis of Brooks and Lovejoy applied to
several metaphysical lyrics. At many universitites the graduate course in
literary theory laid these methodological riches out before us and left us
free to make the choice appropriate to the critical occasion. If the
Chicago critics had not come so much later onto the stage, and if they had
offered more easily adaptable styles of practical criticism, they might
well have stolen the scene, for their ideas met the same needs as did those
of the New Critics. 

Of the other attacks on the New Criticsm, most were even less abrasive.
Mark Spilka, in an article whose subtitle was "A New Critical Revision,"
praised the movement for "its promise of something like objective certainty
about subjective truths," but accused it of partly losing this aim in a
self-defeating formalism, succumbing to the methods of science in an effort
to defeat science. 

About the same time, Roy Harvey Pearce, arguing that language itself
embodies history, pled for a more historical understanding of literature.
Yet Pearce had no particular view of the meaning or direction of history,
such as to put us and our literature in dynamic relation to it; rather, he
appropriated history as "an indefinite series of examples of what we would
possibly have been were we not what we are." Such a view preserves the New
Critics' denial of our particular historical being and their attempt to set
us above history as "users" of the past. Probably Hyatt H. Waggoner
expressed the consensus of academic literary people at the end of the
fifties when, in registering some complaints against the New Criticsm, he
nonetheless called it "the best criticism we have or are likely to have for
a long time." And studies like Krieger's and Foster's represent further
stages in the domestication, adjustment, and assimilation of what was at
the outset a moderately iconoclastic body of criticism The waters were
fairly calm. 

Moreover, those few who did frontally attack the New Criticism often did so
on premises that would exclude almost allcriticism. Very early Mark Van
Doren set himself in opposition to a criticism "obsessed with a desire to
be scientific about poetry," and so destroy its beauties: "The poem is a
bird that threatens to escape the net of analysis, so that the net grows
ever wider, and tougher with interwoven analytic threads." Although this
was and is a common complaint, it can easily be recognized as an attack on
thinking, not a call to a better mode of thought. And though Karl Shapiro,
when he excoriated New Criticsm 20 years later for being concept-ridden,
dogmatic, and abstruse, avoided Van Doren's misty nostalgia in favor of a
gritty plainness, he shared Van Doren's preference for intuition and a
hegemony of taste. The critic's real job, he can only say, is
"discriminating between" works of literature, without appar- ently
employing any system of concepts. These are aristocratic positions, rooted
in the pride of the natural-born critic (and, usually, poet) who needs no
shared ways of thinking, and whose advice to teachers would no doubt be
"look into your guts and write--if you dare." It is not surprising that
such views made little headway against the New Criticism, which at least
aimed toward a democracy of critical ideas, available to all. 

Meanwhile, there were a few explicitly political critiques of the New
Criticism. The most influential, perhaps, was the argument offered in 1949
and 1959 by Robert Gorham Davis, and revived many times since, that the New
Criticism implies a "reactionary position in politics and a dogmatic
position in theology." Though this is a bit closer to my own view, I hope I
have made it clear that it won't hold up. There are indeed many remarks by
Eliot, Tate, Ransom, and others praising monarchy, aristocracy, the
ante-bellum South, etc. But the criticism and literary theory, in sharp
contrast to these political manifestos and asides, are square in the middle
of the bourgeois liberal tradition. The explicit politics of these men is a
pseudo-politics. It constitutes an enabling mythology that ties their
criticism to social yearnings and nostalgia but not to any possibility of
action or affiliation. And it has little or nothing to do with the implicit
political content of their writings about literature. In implicit politics,
all the competing criticisms of the fifties were pretty much the same. At
the risk of vulgarization, I would say that the main political effect of
our theorists was to help emplant literary criticism, along with its
producers, tightly and securely within the network of bourgeois institutions. 

In the postwar period, as American universities underwent enormous growth,
a much larger segment of the population came into these institutions than
before. This meant that market condi- tions required a great increase in
the professoriat. One consequence was the new academic prosperity to which
I have already alluded. And along with the prosperity came unaccustomed
prestige, as intellectuals and technocrats were brought into the making of
national policy, not as in the past because of their social backgrounds but
for their expertise. In short, the university was a place where large
numbers of people were trying to cut loose from their social origins and
join an intellectual elite. And a new elite of this sort needs a set of
myths to justify its status to itself and to the larger society. 

Here a general principle of ideology is helpful: a privileged social group
will generalize its own interests so that they appear to be universal
social goals ("What's good for General Motors . . ."). In America, in the
fifties, the bourgeois intellectual needed assurance that his privileges
were for the general good. For example, a critic and teacher of literature
whose work is fun and respectable, but who sees little evidence that he is
helping to ameliorate social ills, or indeed serving any but those destined
to assume their own positions in the ruling class--a teacher in this
dubious spot will welcome a system of ideas and values that tells him that
politics and ideology are at an end, that a pluralistic society is best for
all, that individual freedom is the proper social goal for rich and poor
alike, and that the perfection of self can best be attained through
humanistic intellec- tual endeavor. And this is what the New Criticism and
its rival theories had to offer. The tacit ideology has its proper place in
bourgeois culture; its main features are practically inevitable, given the
position of critics and teachers in this capitalist society. 

Bourgeois culture rests on the idea of freedom. In our society, people
interact mainly through the market, and this medium tends to obscure all
social ties except those mediated by commodities, the cash nexus. An
example: the patent law is our way of dealing with useful knowledge. It
regularizes and makes legal the private ownership of ideas, for a time, and
emphasizes their cash value, but ignores the social origin of all
inventions--the shared knowledge that underlies them--and also the
sometimes devastating social consequences of their use. 

It is easy in a free-enterprise system to ignore one's total dependence on
other people and especially easy for the affluent. Their relationship to
other people is indirect, effected through money. Possession of means gives
them frictionless control over other people's labor, and such control feels
like freedom. The affluent can do as they please, up to a point, and it is
natural enough for them to conclude that their well-being derives from
freedom. It is but a short step to elevate freedom into a universal social
goal, not seeing that the kind of freedom they enjoy can't be made
universal because it depends on the servitude of others: on the other side
of the cash nexus is someone whose choices are fewer and who does not feel
free. 

Though bourgeois culture declares its allegiance to freedom, the security
of the well-to-do demands that there be close limits (law and order) to
freedom of action by the powerless. Hence, the ideologue settles on freedom
of thought as fundamental, and he is willing to allow everyone that freedom
so long as it does not lead to "disruption." The university perfectly
embodies this notion. Our dogma is academic freedom, which in practice
means that you can think and write what you like, but as your speech
approaches to political action you are more and more likely to find
yourself without a job. Universities are supposed to remain neutral, stay
politically pure, as are other academic institutions like the MLA. 

The literary wing of the academy wholly subscribed to these doctrines
through the fifties, as I hope I have sufficiently shown, and developed its
own version of them. Literature was divorced from particular ideologies and
identified with a pluralism that would help preserve individual freedom.
The doctrine of diversity is often advance, even in the midst of doctrinal
wars ("I disagree with what you say but I will defend to the death your
right to say it"), by the Chicago critics and by their opponents. Even an
often dogmatic man like Tate finds it natural to say, in the midst of
controversy, "nobody knows what criticism is relevant to a democratic
society. I like a lot of free play. I think that people ought to find out
the truth wherever they can." It is easy to translate this into the implied
language of the powerful: "You are entitled to your opinion, and it won't
affect my actions one whit." 

As a corollary of this stress on freedom, the bourgeois intellectual sees
art and aesthetic values as independent of social process. Caudwell points
out that beauty can only be a construct generated by culture, a "specific
social product." But since the bourgeoisie relies for its comfort on the
discomfort of others, it has good reasons for cloaking or ignoring the
realities of social process and it looks away from labor and economic
activity to find beauty. Art is, in brief, a means of freedom from society.
And that seems to me the best explanation of the way our criticism has
justified literature: as freeing man by setting him above his
circumstances, by letting him "come to terms" intellectually, but taking
him out of the present and making him one with "the tradition." All the
schools of criticism agree that literature is a very special and separate
thing, whose privileged cultural position needs defending--against science,
against politics, against commercialization, against vulgarity, against
nearly the whole social process. 

The other cardinal principle of bourgeois culture is that we must prefer
thought to action--in fact, abstain from all social action except the
pursuit of our individual economic goals in the market, and voting for
candidates for public office. I have pointed to the distancing of action by
the New Criticism. In part, the preference for contemplation is due to a
natural wish for protection against social upheaval. But it is also surely
the case that we prefer thinking to action because thinking is the mark of
our separation from and economic superiority to those who do physical
labor. As Caudwell says, thought is "favored socially to the extent to
which it separates itself from action, because it is just this separation
which has generated its superior status as the mark of the ruling,
'cunning,' or administrative class." In our technological time, the
university is built on precisely this distinction. That is why the cliche
used by its enemies is "ivory tower." It is where the administrative class
learns to think, where the scientific foundations of technology are laid,
and where ideology is built to sanction the distribution of power and
wealth. In this last task the American literary profession has cooperated,
in part by insisting that the means to personal well- being and wholeness
is through withdrawal from social action and the achievement of
all-embracing states of mind. That is where the New Criticism pointed us,
and where most of us, under the banner of humanism and the advancement of
knowledge, gladly went. 

Where else we might have gone, under different historical circumstances, it
is profitless to guess. Marxism did, of course, offer a logical
alternative: criticism written as part of a world revolutionary movement.
Marxism could connect literature and goals for action, thus rebuilding
somewhat the whole person. It could bridge the seeming gulf between high
culture and the lives of ordinary people. And it could use literature as an
agent of liberation, rather than of bourgeois freedom, which depends on
exploitation. But that is another story. Given how American academic
intellectuals were functioning in the forties and fifties, Marxian
criticism was bound to be excluded from among the possibilities for
respectable discourse about literature. 

A few words of recapitulation. After the war, the academic literary
profession in this country set an exciting course for itself: to revive
literary culture and disseminate it widely and democratically, to the
general benefit of society. This project was, as Richard Foster said of the
New Criticism, "perhaps the most extraordinarily successful of all
consciously waged literary revolutions." And its legacy has been in many
ways admirable. To quote Foster again, education in English departments
trains students to be "more alive and catholic" than an earlier generation.
They and we constitute a "coherent and meaningful literary culture," which
has advanced a "religiously felt resurgent humanism." In all this the
socioliterary history of the last 25 years has indeed nearly fulfilled
Arnold's wishful prophecy. Yet many of us are deeply dissatisfied with
where we have arrived, with the elitism at institutions like the Advanced
Placement Program and the MLA, the vestigical disdain for the unwashed, the
"second environment" of which Trilling spoke. 

I think that in retrospect we can see the origins of our present malaise in
the core of our earlier beliefs. We wanted to move out of social action; we
wished politics out of existence. But as Georg Lukacs says, "everything is
politics"; every human thought and act is "bound up with the life and
struggles of the community." The denial of politics could not continue
forever. For one thing, external events caught up with us and disturbed the
great bourgeois peace of the fifties--the war in Vietnam, the uprising of
oppressed peoples here and abroad, the destruction of the biosphere through
un- checked forces of the free-market economy. No walls built around the
free play of intellect could exclude these world-historical events. 

But, also, the very humanism we learned and taught was capable, finally, of
turning its moral and critical powers on itself. Not directly. First, the
humanism saw the inhumanity of the society outside the university--and
credit to it for doing so. No one can tell exactly how much the values and
perceptions of literary culture, as diffused among the young, helped make
visible the war on Vietnam and, at home, racism and poverty. But there can
be no doubt that those living in the "second environment" were among the
first to wake from two decades of political sleep. From the burning of
draft cards to the perception of humanism's role in maintaining class
privilege and exploitative consumerism is not, perhaps, very far. I would
like to think not, because I take seriously Caudwell's prediction, made 40
years ago: "Humanism, the creation of bourgeois culture, finally separates
from it." It "must either pass into the ranks of the proletariat or, going
quietly into a corner, cut its throat." 




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