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Fallacies for
Advanced Readers
Samir K. Dash.
December 18th, 2003
It was in the
neo-classical age, when Pope aimed his bitter agonies upon Colliey Cibber
– because he [Cibber] had severely criticized Pope’s earlier work – Cibber
commented that once a writer writes something, it becomes no longer his
own, and therefore he should not be sentimented due to the criticism that
is to be made on his work , as a man who goes to the rain, should not be
worried about being wet.
This is perhaps the
best expression of mankind on the rising tendencies related to the field
of judgement of literature. I say this because, the work of a critic and
the criticism on it are two dimension of whole literary study, and every
scholar knows that there is an age old conflict between these two to gain
supremacy over the other. This fact that a conflict is going on is even
not simply in black or white, rather it turned out to be in a range of
shades of grey – i.e. the critical discussion of literature has a tendency
to diverge the aim with which one starts to enter into the process of
critical evaluation of any work of art. We see from Plato’s time that the
discussion of literature hangs over mainly two aspects:
1.
What is the literature (or
poetry )?
2.
What is its aim?
But while analyzing
literature, the supposed aim seems more blur and undergoes a process of
shifting. The more one tries to reach at the aim, the more it slips back
like a mirage. We may use post-structuralism views that each time the
“signified” is replaced by a signifier due to the fact that multiplicity
of meaning exists and a text can’t have ‘a meaning’. So, what I am trying
point out here is that due to such “shifts” in our presupposed aim to find
out truth related to any piece of work of art, there arises the errors ,
which the New Critics had, in their attempt to categorize the end of their
ideology, grouped under the common term ‘fallacy’.
All the well
established fallacies, that have secured their seats in various glossaries
of literary terms, such as ‘Affective Fallacy’, ‘Tragic Fallacy’,
‘Internal Fallacy’, are in fact some kind of the ‘conflict’ that I have
mentioned at the very beginning of this paper.
This conflict between
writer and critic can be seen as the junction where diverging paths of
exploration to the studies of different fallacies are originated. And this
was recognized first by C.S. Lewis, who termed this ‘root of conflict’ as
‘Personal Heresy’. In 1934, C.S.Lewis published an article ‘The Personal
Heresy in criticism’ in Essays and Studies, wherehe reacted heavily
to E.M.W.Tilliyard’s view that poetry is a state of mind of the poet – a
reflection of the personality of the poet. Then the replies and counter
replies of the two were later came up in a single volume in 1939 under the
title The Personal Heresy.
The seed of such
conflict was there back in the 20s, in the criticism of T.S.Eliot and
I.A.Richards. Eliot’s view on ‘tradition’ squeezed the personality of the
author out of his work as he described the expression by the poet as the
product of past authors’ dead metaphors, language, ideas, expressions, by
which he concluded that there is no individual pure-contribution of the
author present in his work. Richard’s dissection of human mind and its
working in the context of literary creation and judgment presented the
similar view. And these views were concluded as ‘Internal fallacy’ in 1946
by W.K.Winsmatt in his book The Intentional Fallacy (reprinted in
his The Verbal Icon,1954),where he summed up the “age old conflict”
and declared it an error to assign the possession of any of the either of
the writer or the critic on any work of art – that a poem ‘is not the
critic’s own and not the author’s.’ and it is concluded that the work of
art ‘goes about the world beyond his [ author or critic] to intend about
it or control it.’
This view was later
made the ‘punch line’ of the readers response theory, that exploited the
newly invented structure and post structural jargon to sell this very old
wine in a new bottle. Each critic of the readers response theory used a
shade that is not exactly black or white, but a ‘grey’ to tell the same
old theory.
But the difference that
was there in the readers response theory was that, it instead of talking
about the conflict directly, tried to gossip on one of the aspect of the
conflict – the ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ aspect of whole literary
process from author to critic (or reader).
What we see here is how
we slip from the original aim (we slip from focousing on the conflict to
an aspect of this conflict). This ‘deferring’ from the soul aim is another
kind of fallacy about which W.K.Wnsmatt, talked in 1954 in The Verbal
Icon. This he termed as ‘Affective Fallacy’.
This fallacy is the
error, which arises from the ‘deference’ from the ontological aspect of
literature to a dimension which is relatively near to the centre of the
discussion, but is in fact not the exact centre – ‘a confusion between the
poem and its results (what it is and what it does).’
This critical error
that ‘results in the mind of the reader’ is in fact the very base on which
deconstructionist ideas are based upon. Derrida’s, Focault’s theories are
always insisting upon the ‘gap’ that exists between ‘signiufier and
‘signified’, which ultimately leads the ‘signifier’ to be a ‘zaum’
(Russian term indicating that ultimate truth can be never expressed).
And from this whole
discussion, we can form a rough hypothesis that the knowledge (if seen as
a ‘tantalization’) is in fact lacks any reason or logic to be expressed
through any means of articulation. But that does not mean that we must
start to make our literature devoid of the sequence or logic, so that
(foolish enough) our literature will resemble the experience. Because,
that would be a process of unleashing. And what I am talking here in this
very paragraph is all about another fallacy known as ‘Fallacy of
Expressive Form’. This term, R.P.Blackmur had adopted , from the
observations of Yover Winters, who talked about ‘Heresy of Expressive
Form’— that stands for the error due to the attempt to express or or
describe the ‘disintegration of a belief or a civilization in a chaotic
form’. And Winters was on the view that though the world is chaotic, we
must not use disintegrating form of mode of expression (such as Ulysses
by Joyce).
Though Winters believed
that it is impossible to discipline the indiscipline in any expression, I
feel that after deconstruction theory, such a thinking can’t be any more a
part of our optimistic consciousness, because no meaning is possible due
to the absence of the centre in our belief system – no point of
convergence exists – and which ultimately prescribes us just (to quote
Edward Said) ‘to attempt in spite of the impossibility of success’.
© Samir
K. Dash, 2003
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