CRITICISM, Inc. JOHN CROWE RANSOM

CRITICISM, Inc.

 JOHN CROWE RANSOM

 (Lecture notes by Dr S. Sreekumar)

 

(Revised )

Introduction

 J. C. Ransom (1888 –1974), one of the founders of the American New Criticism was a celebrated poet, critic, and a great teacher who had few equals as a companion and guide for many distinguished students like George Lanning, Robert Lowell, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks. The term ‘New Criticism’ (itself) originated from the title of a volume of essays— The New Criticism— published by him in 1941. The New Criticism and theory dominated American literary thought throughout the middle of the 20th century, and the method of close reading introduced by the New Critics continues to be relevant in literary studies/criticism even today.  

 

‘Criticism Inc.’ (1937) is an important document in the history of literary criticism [like the Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1801)], bringing together in one place all the distinctive ‘aims, attitudes, and assumptions’ of the American New Criticism. The essay envisages an ‘objective’ or ‘ontological’ (what exists) criticism that is the product of a ‘rigorous, disciplined, collaborative effort’ in the elucidation and evaluation of literary texts. Ransom believes that "criticism must become more scientific, or precise and systematic." To this end, he argues that ‘obstructive rival methods and approaches’ like impressionistic appreciation, historical approach (‘dry as dust’), linguistic scholarship, and "moral studies” should not influence literary criticism. ‘Criticism, Inc.,’ along with his other theoretical essays set forth some of the guiding principles the New Critics later developed. However, his former students like Allen Tate, Cleanth Brooks, and Robert Penn Warren played a more significant role in developing many of the key concepts like close reading that later became the hallmarks of the New Criticism.

 

This preview will not be complete without mentioning a pejorative connotation of the title, ‘Criticism Inc.’  By the closing decades of the twentieth century, the ‘hyperbolic, extravagant …explosion’ (J. Hillis Miller) of the technique of close reading^@   had led to many hermeneutic eccentricities in American universities.  For many traditional scholars and critics, annoyed by the radical shifts of interpretative thought, criticism has become a sort of industry [that reminded them of Detroit auto assembly lines?]. For them, the title, ‘Criticism, Inc.’ served as a mocking catechism. [Inc. is used in commercial circles as an abbreviation for ‘incorporated’—a legal corporation]. To be fair, criticism was a ‘humane pursuit’ for Ransom, never a commercial venture.

  [^@Let us look at an extreme example: Jacques Derrida's essay, ‘Ulysses Gramophone’ devotes more than eighty pages to an interpretation of the word "yes" in James Joyce's modernist novel Ulysses.

 

‘Criticism, Inc.’ has five parts.

 

I.  The opening part speaks about the business of criticism. [‘Business’ has no pejorative connotations].  Nobody has spoken anything about the ‘the proper business of criticism’. The people who speak about criticism are ‘for the most part’ amateurs. These amateurs ‘have not been trained to criticism’. They have ‘undertaken’ the ‘job’ (of being critics) because it needs no ‘specific qualification’. Their output (‘what they call criticism’) is not the real criticism.

According to Ransom, there are three types of ‘trained performers’ who appear to possess the talents needed for a critic.

 

a. The artist.

 

Ransom seems to believe that the artist is a good judge of his art. ‘He should know good art when he sees it’. But the artist’s understanding of the work is ‘intuitive and not dialectical’^#.  ‘He cannot very well explain his theory’. Artists are better equipped to speak about the technical rather than the theoretical nature of their works. 

 

^#Intuitive= based on a feeling rather than on knowledge or facts. Dialectical= a method of examining and discussing ideas in order to find the truth, in which two opposing ideas are compared in order to find a solution that includes them both.

In other words, the artist’s understanding of the work is based on feeling and not on facts. This is exactly what D. H. Lawrence had in his mind when he advised the critic:

‘Never trust the artist. Trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it. The reason the tale has to be saved from the artist is that, of the two opposing 'morals,' the artist's can't be trusted’.

The view (that the artist is a good judge of his art) does not seem to be properly balanced.

 

 b. The philosopher.

 

He should know ‘all about the function of fine arts’. ‘But the philosopher is apt to see a lot of wood and no trees’. His theory is very general. His familiarity with particular works will not be intimate. The ‘handsome generalizations’ he makes are based ‘more on other generalizations’ and not based on ‘acute study of particulars’.

 

c. The University teacher of Literature.

 

The university teacher ‘should be the very professional we need to take charge of the critical activity’. But unfortunately, he proves to be ‘a greater disappointment’ (than the poet or the philosopher) because ‘we … expect more of him’. ‘Professors of literature are learned but not critical men’. Their ‘professional morale’ is very low and they have mastered all the techniques of escaping from their responsibility. It has become easy for a professor to spend a lifetime ‘compiling the data of literature’ without ever passing a literary judgment’. Nevertheless, it is from the professors that we should expect intelligent standards of criticism. ‘It is their business’.  

 

The proper seat of criticism is in the universities.

 

Criticism ‘must become more scientific, or precise and systematic…’ This means that it must be developed by ‘the collective and sustained effort of learned persons’. Therefore, its proper place is in the universities.  Criticism is not an exact science (like Physics or Chemistry). It is not even ‘a nearly exact’ science. Psychology, sociology, and economics are also not exact sciences. It is better to call them ‘systematic studies’. But these have improved ‘immeasurably’ since they were ‘taken over by the universities’. The same ‘looks possible’ for criticism too. The enterprise of criticism must then be handled by professionals and not by amateurs. ‘…I have the idea that what we need is Criticism, Inc., or Criticism, Ltd.’.

 

Ransom says that the idea is not his private one. Professor Ronald S. Crane, of the University of Chicago, is ‘the first of the great professors to have advocated it as a major policy for departments of English’.

[Professor Crane was a leading figure of the Neo-Aristotelian Chicago School. His landmark book, The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry, formed the theoretical basis of the group. Although Crane was an outspoken opponent of the New Criticism, he argued persuasively for pluralism that values separate, even contradictory, critical schools. Encyclopaedia Britannica].

 

II.    The second part looks at the attempts of Professor Crane to reform English studies at the University of Chicago. In an article entitled, “History Versus Criticism in the University Study of Literature”, Crane had argued that ‘historical scholarship has been overplayed heavily in English studies’ and that it was high time that the ‘emphasis’ must be shifted to the ‘critical’. Ransom agrees:  ‘To me this means, simply: the students of the future must be permitted to study literature, and not merely about literature’. ‘All good students of literature’ always wanted to do that but was denied the opportunity. Professor Crane, with some others in the University, is ‘putting the revolution into effect in his own teaching’. It is hoped that the steps taken by Crane would make the University a place of distinction.

 

‘This is not the first time’ that English professors have objected to historical studies.  But they did not succeed in the past as they were not ‘well versed’ in historical studies or had ‘the credentials to judge in such matters’. Moreover, they did not offer any ‘glowing alternative’ to historical studies.

 

The essay, then, looks at some of the alternatives offered as diversions from historical studies.

 

1. The New Humanism

 

The New Humanists brought about the most important ‘diversion’ from the ‘orthodox course’ of literary studies.

[New Humanism (Neo-humanism) was a critical movement in the United States between 1910 and 1930.  It was based on the literary and social theories of the English poet and critic Matthew Arnold, who sought to recapture the moral quality of past civilizations—‘the best that has been thought and said—in an age of industrialization, materialism, and relativism. New Humanists refused to accept deterministic views of human nature. They argued that: (1) human beings are unique among nature’s creatures; (2) the essence of experience is fundamentally moral and ethical, and (3) the human will, although subject to genetic laws and shaped by the environment, is essentially free. With these points of contention, the New Humanists—Paul Elmer More, Irving Babbitt, Norman Foerster, and Robert Shafer, to name only a few—outlined an entire program and aesthetic to incorporate their beliefs. By the 1930s, the New Humanists had come to be regarded as cultural elitists and advocates of social and aesthetic conservatism and their influence became negligible (Encyclopaedia Britannica).]

 

This ‘refreshment’ offered by the New Humanists was a welcome change for those resentful of historical studies. However, New Humanism proved to be as ‘unliterary’ as the historical studies from which it diverged.

 

The New Humanists were, and are, moralists. They are ‘historians and advocates of a certain moral system’. Criticism is ‘the attempt to define and enjoy the aesthetic or characteristic values of literature’. The New Humanists were more concerned about the ethical values of literature than about aesthetic values. New Humanists like Irving Babbitt fought against Romanticism ‘for purely moral reasons’. His ‘preoccupation was ethical, not aesthetic’.

 

Irving Babbitt (1865 -1933) was an American critic and teacher and leader of the movement known as “New Humanism,” or Neo-humanism. A vigorous teacher, lecturer, and essayist, Babbitt was the unrestrained foe of Romanticism and its offshoots, Realism and Naturalism; instead, he championed the classical virtues of restraint and moderation. His early followers included T.S. Eliot and George Santayana. (Encyclopaedia Britannica)

There is nothing wrong in attacking Romantic literature if it is ‘flabby, intemperate, escapist, unphilosophical, or simply adolescent’, says Ransom. He believes that there is some truth in moral objections to Romantic literature because it shows a ‘large- scale failure of adaptation, and defense of that failure to adapt to the social and political environment’. But the objections of T.S.Eliot (the neo-humanist) are ‘aesthetic’—‘romantic literature is imperfect in objectivity, or “aesthetic distance”’, the ‘romantic poet fails to understand the aesthetic attitude’ and is ‘not the pure artist’. It is premature to say that when a moralist objects to a work, the literary critic must also follow suit.

 

2. Leftists/Proletarians

 

Similarly, the diversion offered by Leftists or the Proletarians is also ‘moral’ and their procedures are also the same. Both are ‘intent on ethical values’. Their debates on ethical grounds are very animated and the ‘conventional scholars and their pupils’ are often carried away from ‘their scheduled English exercises’ (from historical studies and hence the diversion).

                                                                                                                                                              

The Role of the Department of English

 

The humanists have no professional importance in English studies. In the departments of English, ‘gentlemen who have gone through the historical mill’ with ‘laborious Ph. D.’s and historical publications’ as their ‘patents’ occupy positions of professional importance. These gentlemen develop vested interests and ‘perpetuate a system in which the power and the glory’ belong to them’. Crane’s ‘disaffection’ with historical studies becomes significant because there are few others with better credentials than him to question its relevance.  

Ransom says that the policy of the departments of English is ‘atrocious’:

·        The departments have abdicated their own ‘self-respecting identity’.

·        The departments, entrusted with the task of understanding and communicating literature, have forgotten ‘to inquire into the peculiar constitution and structure of its product’ (literature).

·      English ‘might almost as well announce that it does not regard itself as entirely autonomous but as a branch of the department of history, with the option of declaring itself occasionally a branch of the department of ethics’.

 

The situation is aggravated by the attitude of some professors who believe that criticism is not ‘exact scholarship’ and that it is ‘something …anybody can do’. These professors sincerely believe that ‘history is firmer ground than aesthetics’.

 

Ransom does not think that ‘anybody … can do criticism’. Many eminent professors are not able to write ‘decent criticism’ because of their ‘historical scholarship’. When they are ‘confronted with a new work’, they do not find anything ‘particular to say’. ‘Contemporary criticism is not at all in the hands of those who direct the English studies’. It is ‘barely officialised as a proper field for serious study’.

 

While contemporary literature is waiting for its criticism, the professors of literature are ‘watering their own gardens, elucidating the literary histories of their respective periods’. The persons who ‘rescue contemporary literature from the humiliation of having to go without a criticism’ are the ‘home-made critics’. They are not ‘too wise’.  They are the people who ‘furnish our reviews and critical studies’.

 

III. The third part begins with some views on “appreciation”. Some of the ‘best’ works of criticism done in the departments of English are ‘private act(s) of appreciation’.   Appreciation is based on private perception, whereas criticism is public. Appreciation is intuitive, and it does not benefit from instruction.  Historical studies are ‘indispensable’ for both ‘appreciation’ and criticism. ‘But it is instrumental and cannot be the end itself. In this respect historical studies have the same standing as linguistic studies: language and history are aids’. This is not to underestimate the importance of historical studies which play a crucial role in our understanding of poets like Chaucer:

 

            Chaucer writes allegories for historians to decipher, he looks out upon institutions and customs unfamiliar to us. Behind him are many writers in various tongues from whom he borrows both forms and materials. His thought bears constant reference to classical and mediaeval philosophies and sciences which have passed from our effective knowledge.  

 

In short, without a proper historical study, the aesthetic study of Chaucer is impossible. The same is true of ‘any author out of our own age’. ‘The mind with which we enter into an old work is not the mind with which we make our living, or enter into a contemporary work’. From the 'contemporary mind', we have to suspend all modern ideas and fill their place with the ‘precise beliefs and ways of thought’ of the past ages.

 

Modern historical scholarship has phenomenal achievements to its credit. We will get a good impression of these achievements by reading a few chapters of the Cambridge History or the ‘handbooks’ (on various authors) or the ‘period books’ (books related to Romantic/Neoclassical, etc.)

 

For the aesthetically minded, the historical study brings very few rewards.  ‘The official Chaucer course is probably over ninety-five per cent historical and linguistic, and less than five per cent aesthetic or critical’. “A thing of beauty is a joy forever”. But the student cannot enjoy this beauty if he has to ‘tie his tongue before it’. As an artistic object with a ‘heroic human labor behind it’, a work ‘calls for public discussion’. When we recognise the vast ‘dialectic possibilities’ of such discussions, we understand that ‘we are engaged in criticism’.

 

IV. The fourth part of the essay begins with a paradoxical situation. Ransom says that it is better to ask ‘What is criticism not?’ instead of asking ‘What is criticism^*?’ because the act of criticism is now ‘notoriously arbitrary and undefined’. It is not done by professors or their students but by writers with ‘perfectly indeterminate qualifications’ in ‘loose compositions’ that appear as ‘reviews of books’.

^*We are reminded of another famous paradox, from Boswell’s Life of Johnson.

Boswell: "Then, Sir, what is poetry?" Johnson: "Why, Sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is."

 

Professor Crane had kept out historical and ethical studies from criticism. Ransom lists six more items that can be kept out of criticism.

 

1. Personal Registrations.

 

Mention the impact of a work upon the critic as a reader. Criticism must be objective. It must ‘cite the nature of the object rather than its effect’ on the reader. It is hardly criticism to assert that the work is ‘moving’, ‘exciting’, ‘entertaining’, ‘pitiful’, ‘great’, ‘admirable’,  or ‘beautiful’. Aristotle himself had committed the mistake of speaking about the effect of a tragedy on the spectators (catharsis).  The Broadway directors, who follow a ‘crude’ method of placing reliable persons among the audience to count the number of laughs, are not very different from Aristotle.  Such concerns on the effect of a work on the audience deny the autonomy of the artist.

 

2. Synopsis and paraphrase.

 

This is the method adopted in schools and women’s clubs. This is the easiest of all systematic exercises.

 

3. Historical Studies.

 

These have a wide range that includes studies of the ‘general literary background; author’s biography… with special reference to autobiographical evidences in the work itself; bibliographical items; the citation of literary originals and analogues, and therefore what, in general, is called comparative literature’. Such studies may be stimulating. But if done superficially, the comparisons may become ‘perfunctory and mechanical’.

 

4.  Linguistic Studies.

 

 

Under these studies the meaning of idioms and words are explained, allusions are identified, etc. Familiarity with the language does not make a man a good critic though it may save him from ‘damaging errors’.

 

5. Moral Studies

 

The reviewer may apply a particular moral standard which he likes and is familiar with. But we must remember that the moral content of a work is not the whole content.

 

6.  Other special studies.

 

These deal with something taken from the work. Studies, for example, have been made about Chaucer’s command of medieval sciences, of Shakespeare’s understanding of the law, of Milton’s geography, and of Hardy’s place names. The critic can be familiar with all these things, but his business as a critic is to discuss the assimilation of all of them into the work.

 

V. The fifth and final part begins with a critique of Austin Warren’s views on the ‘academic development of the critical project’. Warren sees no reason why criticism should ‘dissociate’ itself from historical/scholarly studies. He believes that all sorts of studies including the critical ones can flourish together in academics. Ransom says that though various studies are ‘supposed’ to flourish ‘at present’, the fact is that criticism has not progressed.  Therefore, he says: ‘Strategy requires now…that criticism receive its own charter of rights and function independently’. He adds that it is impossible to turn reviews into ‘pure criticism’. The reviewer’s job is one of ‘presentation and interpretation as well as criticism’. He has no specialist to turn to for judging his work. For the present ‘each critic must be his own authority’.  For the ‘ambitious critic’, ‘studies in the technique of the art’ is a promising area:

 

A very large volume of studies is indicated by this classification. They would be technical studies of poetry… its metric; its inversions, solecisms [an ungrammatical combination of words in a sentence], lapses from the prose norm of language, and from close prose logic; its tropes; its fictions, or inventions, by which it secures “aesthetic distance” and   removes itself from history; or any other devices, on the general understanding that any systematic usage which does not hold good for prose is a poetic device.

 

Studies in the technique belong to criticism. The critic must ‘speculate’ on ‘why poetry, through its devices’, tries to distance itself from prose, and ‘what it is trying to represent that cannot be represented by prose’.

Poetry with the help of its devices escapes from prose because ‘something is continually being killed by prose which the poet wants to preserve’.

 

A poem should be considered as ‘nothing short of a desperate ontological [relating to or based upon being or existence] or metaphysical manoeuvre’. The poet ‘perpetuates in his poem an order of existence’ (like the pleasure dome of Kubla Khan in Xanadu) which it is impossible to realize in actual life. He knows that practical life will reduce this living object (his poem) to a ‘mere utility’, and that science will ‘disintegrate it for their convenience into their respective abstracts’. The poet tries to protect his poem against its ‘enemies’ (a ‘formidable’ expression as Ransom admits elsewhere). The critic wants to know ‘what he (the poet) is doing and how’ (he is doing it). The critic finds in the poem a total poetic/ individual object which tends to get universalized. But the poetic form saves it from getting universalized (becoming mundane/commonplace. The ‘red, red rose’ of Robert Burns can easily become a marketable commodity if taken out of the poetic frame).  The critic identifies the poetic object in terms of the universal or commonplace. But he also looks at the ‘totality of connotation’ (poetry employs connotative language as against the denotative language of prose) which keeps poetry as poetry. How does a critic find out the universal object? Ransom says that the prose object can be discovered through an ‘immediate paraphrase’ (whether the subject is ‘a kind of story, character, thing, scene, or moral principle’).

 

‘A poet is … distinguishable in terms of his style. His technical devices contribute to his style. They elaborate or individualize the universal which is his core object. In each poem, there is a logical/universal object and also a lot of irrelevant details. The critic has ‘to take the poem apart or analyse it’, for the sake of uncovering these features (the logical/universal and also the irrelevant details). This is a ‘rude and patchy business’ when compared to the living integrity of the poem. But without this ‘rude and patchy business’, it is not possible to understand the value of poetry or the ‘natural history behind any adult poem’.

 

Whatever be the terminology used by a critic, there are two things in his mind—

• ‘the prose core to which he can violently reduce the total object’, and
• the  differentia, residue, or tissue, which keeps the object poetical’.

 

The ‘character of the poem resides for the good critic in its way of exhibiting the residuary quality’. On the other hand, ‘the character of the poet is defined by the kind of prose object to which his interest evidently attaches, plus his way of involving it firmly in the residuary tissue’.

 

By the way, the ‘wise critic can often read behind his poet’s public character his private history as a man with a weakness for lapsing into some special form of prosy or scientific bondage’. [This is an interesting observation. Milton’s views on the Roman Catholic religion serves as an example. Wordsworth’s views on science and Sir Isaac Newton give us another example].  

 

The principles that apply to the criticism of poetry applies to fiction also. Ransom concludes this piece with the comment that he wants to leave the question of whether all arts are ‘fundamentally one’ to people who are better qualified to judge such things.

 

Dr. S. Sreekumar