Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 3 Number 3, December 2002
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Richards, I.A. Principles of Literary Criticism. 2nd edition. Routledge Classics. London and New York: Routledge, 2001 (1924, 1926). 296 pages. ISBN 0-415-25402-7. £ 9.99 Pbk.
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With the current dialogues between the arts and cognitive research, Routledge has done us a great favor by reprinting I.A. Richard’s Principles of Literary Criticism. Ivor Armstrong Richards is considered a major influence in the creation of what is called New Criticism in literature. He took a psychological approach to literature focussing on the reader, seeing a book as “a machine to think with” (vii).
As Richards states at the end of his Principles of Literary Criticism, he writes “in an age when, in the majority of social circles, to be seriously interested in art is to be thought an oddity” (269). And “[u]nderestimation of the importance of the arts is nearly always due to ignorance of the working of the mind” (222). As attempts at between-field collaborations in the new advances in neurology and the “old” arts proceed, Richards offers a very useful and clear delineation of many of the issues. In his Principles of Literary Criticism, first published in 1924, he writes that the major question that criticism should address is: “What is the value of the arts, why are they worth the devotion of the keenest hours of the best minds, and what is their place in the system of human endeavours?” (3) He discusses briefly various answers given previously to the question, such as exemplars of Beauty and/or of Morality, as having their own inherent value in the Aesthetic experience, as a safety valve, as play, etc. He wanted to move away from the then current styles of criticism which he believed called upon too much emotional language with appeals to mystical wonderment rather than explanation. He was already aware of the potential contribution of the sciences to help answer the questions, but what was available to be tested by laboratory methods was (and still is?) too simple and is negligent of context. He saw many limitations on both sides of the so-called fence; i.e., he wrote that “psycho-analysts tend to be peculiarly inept as critics” (24), and that “very good advances must first be made in neurology before these problems can profitably be attacked” (156). The question for us today is to see how far we have come since 1924.
Richards gives many clear delineations of how he sees literature (and the arts in general) and psychological events linked; for example, through revelation events (aha experiences) (especially Ch. 35), coenthesia (physical, muscular responses [86, 91, 99, 127, 131, 144, 148 and elsewhere]), surprise and rhythm (122ff), pleasure (Ch. 12), etc. He brings in many related aspects of some of the other arts: music, sculpture, painting, dance.
He answers his question about the value of the arts by saying that art helps re-organize mis-aligned parts of our psyche, opens us up to further advancement, brings a kind of satisfaction and liberation. He writes: “We pass as a rule from a chaotic to a better organized state by ways which we know nothing about. Typically through the influence of aother minds. Literature and the arts are the chief means by which these influences are diffused” (51). Why the arts? Because the artist is “most likely to have experiences of value to record. He is the point at which the growth of the mind shows itself” (55). The artist is “pre-eminently accessible to external influences and discriminating with regard to them. He is distinguished further by the freedom in which all these impressions are held in suspension and by the ease with which they form new relations between themselves” (166).
Richards makes some interesting comments about the role of consciousness. For example, he writes: “The extent to which any activity is conscious seems to depend very largely upon how complex and how novel it is.” (100) He contrasts reflex activities as simple physical responses. This is important for the arts which try to present novel settings and in which almost no physically overt action entails.
For these responses are commonly of the nature of solutions to problems, not of
intellectual research, but of emotional accommodation and adjustment, and can usually
be best achieved while the different impluses which have to be reconciled are still in an
incipient or imaginal stage, and before the matter has become further complicated by the
irrelevant accidents which attend overt responses. (102)
Yet it is in terms of attitudes, the resolution, inter-inanimation, and balancing of
impulses—Aristotle’s definition of Tragedy is an instance—that all the most valuable
effects of poetry must be described. (103)
The means by which art effects this reconciliation are not always those aspects that seem most evident. Art often does this indirectly, sometimes through formal elements, the most primitive and the most reliable means, but also perhaps the least explained. Words do not always affect us because of their denotations or colors because of their vividness. “[W]hat matters is not the sensory resemblance of an image to the sensation which is its prototype, but some other relation, at present hidden from us in the jungles of neurology” (110). “But if the value of the visual image in the experience is not pictorial, if the image is not to be judged as a picture, how is it to be judged?” (112) In speaking specifically of T.S. Eliot’s poetry, Richards writes: “For the items are united by the accord, contrast, and interaction of their emotional effects, not by an intellectual scheme that analysis must work out. The value lies in the unified response which this interaction creates in the right reader” (274). Richards refers to the use of words as musical notes, an idea going back at least to the time of the symbolist poets.
Since Richard’s day, modern criticism has examined literature from many different angles, most notably informed by advances in psychology, anthropology, and sociology. The current state of neurological studies may have reached the point where some of Richards’ insights can now be profitably approached and evaluated from that direction.