The Literary Transaction: Evocation and Response
Author(s): Louise M. Rosenblatt
Source: Theory Into Practice, Vol. 21, No. 4, Children's Literature (Autumn, 1982), pp. 268277
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/1476352
Accessed: 02-01-2019 04:37 UTC
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Theory Into Practice
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Louise M. Rosenblatt
The Literary Transaction:
Evocation and Response
The term response seems firmly established in the In order to deal with my assigned topic, it becomes
vocabulary of the theory, criticism, and teaching of necessary, therefore, to sketch some elements of
literature. Perhaps I should feel some satisfaction my view of the reading process,2 to suggest some
at the present state of affairs since I am sometimes aspects of what happens when reader meets text.
(Note that although I refer mainly to reading, I shall
referred to as the earliest exponent of what is
termed reader-response criticism or theory.1 Yet be defining processes that apply generally to encounters with either spoken or written symbols.)
the more the term is invoked, the more concerned
I become over the diffuseness of its usage. In the This will require consideration of the nature of language, especially as manifested in early childhood.
days when simply to talk about the reader's reOnly then shall I venture to develop some implisponse was considered practically subversive, it
cations
concerning children, literature, and rewould undoubtedly have been premature to demand
greater precision in the use of the term. Now that
sponse.
the importance of the reader's role is becoming
The Reading Process and the Reader's Stance
more and more widely acknowledged, it seems esReading is a transaction, a two-way process,
sential to differentiate some of the aspects of the
involving a reader and a text at a particular time
reading event that are frequently covered by the
under particular circumstances. I use John Dewey's
broad heading of "response."
term, transaction, to emphasize the contribution of
Response implies an object. "Response to
both reader and text. The words in their particular
what?" is the question. There must be a story or
pattern stir up elements of memory, activate areas
a poem or a play to which to respond. Few theories
of consciousness. The reader, bringing past exof reading today view the literary work as readyperience of language and of the world to the task,
made in the text, waiting to imprint itself on the
sets up tentative notions of a subject, of some
blank tape of the reader's mind. Yet, much talk framework into which to fit the ideas as the words
about response seems to imply something like that,unfurl. If the subsequent words do not fit into the
at least so fr as assuming the text to be allframework, it may have to be revised, thus opening
important in determining whether the result will be, up new and further possibilities for the text that
say, an abstract factual statement or a poem. Un-follows. This implies a constant series of selections
fortunately, important though the text is, a story from the multiple possibilities offered by the text
or a poem does not come into being simply because and their synthesis into an organized meaning.
the text contains a narrative or the lines indicate
But the most important choice of all must be
rhythm and rhyme. Nor is it a matter simply
of the
made
early in the reading event-the overarching
reader's ability to give lexical meaning to thechoice
words.
of what I term the reader's stance, his "men-
tal York
set," so to speak. The reader may be seeking
Louise M. Rosenblatt is professor emeritus at New
University.
information, as in a textbook; he may want direc-
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tions for action, as in a driver's manual; he may
be seeking some logical conclusion, as in a political
article. In all such reading he will narrow his attention to building up the meanings, the ideas, the
example, and we adopt the appropriate effe
stance. Or we note broad margins and uneven
and automatically fall into the stance that will
us to create and experience a poem.
Any text, however, can be read either way
cumulating what is to be carried away at the end may approach novels as sociological documen
of the reading. Hence I term this stance efferent, efferently seeking to accumulate evidence con
from the Latin word meaning "to carry away."
ing, say, the treatment of children in the 19th
If, on the other hand, the reader seeks a story, tury. The "pop" poet may select a "job wan
a poem, a play, his attention will shift inward, will advertisement, arrange its phrases in separate
center on what is being created during the actual and thus signal us to read it aesthetically, t
reading. A much broader range of elements will be perience its human meaning, as a poem. Someallowed to rise into consciousness, not simply the times, of course, readers adopt an inappropriate
abstract concepts that the words point to, but also attitude-for example, reading a political article
what those objects or referents stir up of personal aesthetically when they should be efferently paying
feelings, ideas, and attitudes. The very sound and attention to facts. And many people, alas, read the
rhythm of the words will be attended to. Out oftexts of stories and poems efferently.
these ideas and feelings, a new experience, the
Recognizing that the reader's stance inevitably
story or poem, is shaped and lived through. I call affects what emerges from the reading does not
this kind of reading aesthetic, from the Greek word deny the importance of the text in the transaction.
meaning "to sense" or "to perceive." Whether the Some texts offer greater rewards than do others.
product of the reading will be a poem, a literary A Shakespeare text, say, offers more potentialities
work of art, depends, then, not simply on the text for an aesthetic reading than one by Longfellow.
but also on the stance of the reader.
We teachers know, however, that one cannot pre-
directions to be retained; attention focuses on ac-
I am reminded of the first grader whose teacher
dict which text will give rise to the better evocation
told the class to learn the following verses: - the better lived-through poem-without knowing
In fourteen hundred and ninety-two
Columbus crossed the ocean blue.
the other part of the transaction, the reader.
Sometimes the text gives us confusing clues.
I'm reminded of a letter a colleague received. "Dear
When called on the next day, the youngster
Professor Baldwin," it began, "You will forgive my
recited:
long silence when you learn about the tragedy that
has befallen me. In June, my spouse departed from
In fourteen hundred and ninety-three
Columbus crossed the bright blue sea.
the conjugal domicile with a gentleman of the vi-
cinity." The first sentence announces that we should
Questioned as to why she had changed it, she adopt an aesthetic stance. The second would be
appropriate in a legal brief, since the vocabulary
simply said she liked it better that way.
I submit that this represents a problem in stance. seems adapted to an impersonal, efferent stance.
Any reading event falls somewhere on the conThe teacher had wanted her to read efferently, in
tinuum between the aesthetic and the efferent poles;
order to retain the date "1492." The pupil had read
aesthetically, paying attention to the qualitative ef- between, for example, a lyric poem and a chemical
fect, to her own responses, not only to the image formula. I speak of a predominantly efferent stance,
of the ship crossing the sea, but also to the sound because according to the text and the reader's
purpose, some attention to qualitative elements of
discomfort evidently occasioned by the reversal of consciousness may enter. Similarly, aesthetic reading involves or includes referential or cognitive elethe normal adjective-noun order.
Freeing ourselves from the notion that the text ments. Hence, the importance of the reader's
dictates the stance seems especially difficult, pre- selective attention in the reading process.
cisely because the experienced reader carries out
We respond, then, to what we are calling forth
many of the processes automatically or subcon- in the transaction with the text. In extreme cases
sciously. We may select a text because it suits our it may be that the transaction is all-of-a-piece, so
already chosen, efferent or aesthetic, purposes. Or to speak. The efferent reader of the directions for
we note clues or cues in the text-the author
first aid in an accident may be so completely abannounces the intention to explain or convince,
for
sorbed in
the abstract concepts of the actions ad-
of the words in her ear, and in this instance the
Volume XXI, Number 4 269
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vised that nothing else will enter consciousness.
Or an aesthetic reader may be so completely absorbed in living through a lyric poem or may so
need to adopt a predominant stance to guide the
completely identify with a character in a story that
process of selection and synthesis; the construction
of efferent meaning or the participation in aesthetic
evocation; the current of reactions to the very ideas
nothing else enters consciousness. But in most
and experiences being evoked. To develop the ca-
reading there is not only the stream of choices and
pacity for such activities is the aim of "the teaching
syntheses that construct meaning; there is also a
stream of accompanying reactions to the very
meaning being constructed. For example, in reading
of reading and literature." We shall find support
and clarification in going on to consider children's
early entrance into language and into literature. It
will then perhaps be possible to arrive at some
implications for desirable emphasis in the child's
early transactions with texts.
panying feeling of acceptance or doubt about the
evidence cited or the logical argument.
In aesthetic reading, we respond to the very
Entrance into Language
a newspaper or a legal document, the "meaning"
will be constructed, and there will be an accom-
story or poem that we are evoking during the trans-
action with the text. In order to shape the work, The transactional view of the human being in
we draw on our reservoir of past experience with
a two-way, reciprocal relationship with the envipeople and the world, our past inner linkage of
ronment is increasingly reflected in current psywords and things, our past encounters with spoken
chology, as it frees itself from the constrictions of
or written texts. We listen to the sound of the
words in the inner ear; we lend our sensations, our
behaviorism.3 Language, too, is less and less being
considered as "context-free."4 Children's sensori-
emotions, our sense of being alive, to the new
motor exploration of the physical environment and
experience which, we feel, corresponds to the text. their interplay with the human and social environWe participate in the story, we identify with the ment are increasingly seen as sources and condicharacters, we share their conflicts and their feeltions of language behavior. During the prelinguistic
ings.
period, the child is "learning to mean,"5 learning
At the same time there is a stream of responses
the functions of language through developing
being generated. There may be a sense of pleasure
personal sound-system for communicating with othin our own creative activity, an awareness of pleasers before assimilating the linguistic code of th
ant or awkward sound and movement in the words,
social environment.
a feeling of approval or disapproval of the charRecent research on children's early language
acters and their behavior. We may be aware of a supports William James's dynamic picture of the
contrast between the assumptions or expectations
connection among language, the objects and reabout life that we brought to the reading and the lations to which it refers, and the internal states
attitudes, moral codes, social situations we are
associated with them-sensations, images, per-
living through in the world created in transaction
cepts and concepts, feelings of quality, feelings of
with the text.
tendency. James says, "The stream of conscious-
Any later reflection on our reading will therefore
ness matches [the words] by an inward coloring of
encompass all of these elements. Our response willits own. ... We ought to say a feeling of and, a
have its beginnings in the reactions that were confeeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by,
current with the evocation, with the lived-through
quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a
experience. Thus an organized report on, or articfeeling of cold."6
ulation of, our response to a work involves mainly
Werner and Kaplan, in their study of symbol
efferent activity as we look back on the reading
formation, show us the child at first internalizing
event-an abstracting and categorizing of elements
such "a primordial matrix" of sensations and posof the aesthetic experience, and an ordering and
tural and imaginal elements. The child's early vocdevelopment of our concurrent reactions.
ables "are evoked by total happenings and are
I have tried briefly to suggest some major asexpressive not only of reference to an event external to the child," but also of "the child's attitudes,
pects of my view of the reading process-reading
as basically a transaction between the reader and
states, reactions, etc."7 Evidence of this early sense
the text; the importance of the reader's selective
of words as part of total happenings is the fact
attention to what is aroused in consciousness
that some children at five years of age may still
through intercourse with the words of the
text;that
thethe name is an inherent part of the
believe
270 Theory Into Practice
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referent. Cat at first is as much an attribute of the
mainly to the "token" top-of-the-inner-iceberg, to
creature as its fur or pointed ears. Thus, in languageorganizing the abstract concepts the verbal symbols
as in experience in general, the child is faced with point to. These can yield the information, the dithe need for a process of differentiation of percep- rections, the logical conclusions that will be the
tion.8 The child's movement toward conventional
residue of the reading act.
linguistic forms entails a sorting out of these various
In aesthetic reading, the child must learn to
elements.
draw on more of the experiential matrix. Instead
Werner and Kaplan describe the sorting-outof looking outward mainly to the public referents,
process as an "inner-dynamic or form-building" or
the reader must include the personal, the qualita"schematizing" activity. Acquisition of languagetive,
is kinesthetic, sensuous inner resonances of the
a "twin process," they show us, because the child
words. Hence attention is turned toward what is
must learn to link the same internal, organismic
immediately lived-through in transaction with th
state both to the sense of an external referent or
text, toward what is being shaped as the story
object, on the one hand, and to a symbolic or
the poem.
linguistic vehicle, on the other. What links a word,
cat, to its referent, the animal, is their connection
Both efferent reading and aesthetic readin
should be taught. If I concentrate on aesthetic rea
with the same internal state.
ing, it is not only because our interest here tod
Bates similarly sees the emergence of symbols
is in children and literature, but also because it is
as "the selection process, the choice of one aspect
the kind of reading most neglected in our schools.
of a complex array to serve as the top of the
Contrary to the general tendency to think of
the
efferent, the "literal," as primary, the child's
for the whole "mental file drawer" of associations
earliest language behavior seems closest to a priand can be used for higher-order cognitive operamarily aesthetic approach to experience. The poet,
tions.9 In other words, the child learns to abstract
Dylan Thomas, told a friend, "When I experience
from the total context in order to arrive at a genanything, I experience it as a thing and as a word
eralized concept of "cat."
at the same time, both amazing."12 Such a bond
This process of decontextualization is, of
between language and the inner experiential matrix
course, essential to the development of the ability
continues to be stressed in recent studies of chilto think, to apply the symbol to new contexts and
dren's early language. Words are primarily aspects
situations. The "mental token" is the public meanof sensed, felt, lived-through experiences:
ing of the word. Understandably, parents and
schools welcome and foster this phase. But much
Beginning about the last quarter of the first
less attention has been paid to the broad base of
year and continuing through the second, in"the iceberg" of meaning.10 "The sense of a word,"
creased differentiations of self and other, the
Vygotsky reminds us, "is the sum of all the psy- sharpening of self-awareness and the self-conchological events aroused in our consciousness by cept, and the ability to form and store memories
the word. It is a dynamic, fluid, complex whole ....
enable the infant to begin the development of
The dictionary meaning of a word is no more than
affective-cognitive structures, the linking or
a stone in the edifice of sense ..."11 Along with
bonding of particular affects or patterns of afthe cognitive abstraction from past experiences
fects with images and symbols, including words
which is the public meaning of the word, there are
and ideas. ...
the private kinesthetic and affective elements that
Since there is essentially an infinite varie
comprise the complex, fluid matrix in which lanof emotion-symbol interactions, affective-c
guage is anchored.
nitive structures are far and away the pred
iceberg, a light-weight mental token" that can stand
inant motivational features in consciousness
The Literary Transaction
The connection can now be made with the view
of the reading process that I have sketched. The
role of selective attention in the two kinds of reading
becomes apparent. In predominantly efferent reading, the child must learn to focus on extracting the
public meaning of the text. Attention must be given
soon after the acquisition of language.13
Dorothy White, in her classic diary of her child's
introduction to books before age five, documents
the transactional character of language. She note
how, at age two, experience feeds into language
and how language helps the child to handle further
experience.
Volume XXI, Number 4 271
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The experience makes the book richer and
the book enriches the personal experience even
at this level. I am astonished at the early age
this backward and forward flow between books
the story puzzles or frightens, or because it offers
no links with the child's past experiences.
When an adolescent girl calls the story of a
wallflower at her first dance "the greatest tragedy
I have ever read" we must recognize that this is
dren one cannot observe it so easily, but here a sign of the intensity of the lived-through transat this age when all a child's experiences are action with the text, and not a judgment on the
known and the books read are shared, when
relative potentialities of this book and, say, King
the voluble gabble which is her speech revealsLear. This transactional process is especially dem-
and life takes place. With adults or older chil-
all the associations, the interaction is seen veryonstrated in early reading and listening to stories.
clearly. Now and again Carol mystifies me withWhite tells of reading to her three-year-old the story
a reference to life next door, or with some
of a small boy who wakes one morning to find
transposed pronunciation which defeats me, himself the sole inhabitant of his town. White re-
but on the whole I know her frame of reference.14
marks:
All this to an older child might well represent
White also illustrates the private facet of the a delirium of joy and liberty, but to Carol, whose
child's acquisition of the public language. Having pleasure is the presence of people, not their
observed the actual experiences that fed into the absence, it was stark tragedy. "He's all by
child's words, the mother realizes that she underhimself," she said, overcome and deeply
stands the child's particular meanings and emphasis
mournful. Paul's isolation obviously wounded
on words that even the father cannot grasp. Of
and shocked her, but I had the feeling that in
course, it is such private overtones that we all draw
creating this dismay, the book provided her
on in our aesthetic reading.
with the most tremendous emotional experience she has known in all her reading. HowParents and teachers have generally recogever, here's the rub, this emotional experience
nized signs of the young child's affinity for the
aesthetic stance. Joseph Conrad tells us that the
was of a kind totally different from anything
aim of the novelist is "to make you hear, to make
the author had planned to provide, for planned
he had.16
you feel-it is, before all, to make you see."15
Children enthralled by hearing or reading a story
or a poem often give various nonverbal signs of The author, she points out, may plan a particular
such immediacy of experience. They delightedly book, but "one cannot plan what children will take
sway to the sound and rhythm of words; their facial
expressions reveal sensitivity to tone; their postural
from it."
Understanding the transactional nature of read-
responses and gestures imitate the actions being ing would correct the tendency of adults to look
described. That they are often limited by lack of only at the text and the author's presumed intenknowledge, by immature cognitive strategies, in no tion, and to ignore as irrelevant what the child
way contradicts the fact that they are living through actually does make of it. As in the instance just
aesthetic experiences, their attention focused on cited, it may be that the particular experience or
what, in their transaction with the words, they can preoccupations the child brings to the spoken or
see and hear and feel.
printed text permit some one part to come most
intensely
alive. Let us not brush this aside in our
A most eloquent verbal sign that the story
or
eagerness
to do justice to the total text or to put
poem is being aesthetically experienced is the child's
that part into its proper perspective in the story.
"Read it again." White's account of her daughter's
is more important that we reinforce the child's
"voluble gabble" as stories are read testifiesItthat
discovery that texts can make possible such intense
a relaxed, receptive atmosphere, with no questions
personal experience. Other stories, continued reador requirements, is conducive to children's verbal
ing,to
the maturation of cognitive powers, will conexpressions of that second stream of reactions
tribute to the habit of attending to the entire text
the work that is the source of "responses." White's
or organizing the sequence of episodes into a whole.
book shows a child, even before age five, offering
We have the responsibility first of all to develop
various kinds of verbal signs of aesthetic listening
the habit and the capacity for aesthetic reading.
- questions, comments, comparisons with life experiences and with other stories, rejection because Responsibility to the total text and the question of
272 Theory Into Practice
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"real" events and "real" people can be read wit
all the sensuous, kinesthetic, imaginative rich
The notion that first the child must "underthat are applied to fantasy. Imagination is nee
also
stand" the text cognitively, efferently, before it
canin cognitive processes, in the process of
membering, in thinking of the past, in thinking
be responded to aesthetically is a rationalization
solutions to a problem. Again, we n
that must be rejected. Aesthetic reading, wealternative
have
"the author's intention" comes later - with all the
indeterminacy of meaning that implies.17
to see that the reader's stance transcends the
seen, is not efferent reading with a layer of affective
distinction between the real and the fictive.
associations added on later. (I call this the "jam
on bread" theory of literature.) Rather, we have
The obvious question, in all such developmental
seen that the aesthetic stance, in shaping what
is
generalization,
is-to what extent are the changes
observed due to innate factors and to what extent
understood, produces a meaning in which cognitive
and affective, referential and emotive, denotational
are they the result of environmental influences
and connotational, are intermingled. The child Fortunately,
may
an ethnographic emphasis is beginnin
listen to the sound, hear the tone of the narrative
to be valued in contemporary research on the teach
"voice," evoke characters and actions, feel the
ing of English,19 and I should wish only to broaden
quality of the event, without being able to analyze
its purview. Hence the question: to what extent
or name it. Hence the importance of finding ways
does the emphasis in our culture on the primarily
to insure that an aesthetic experience has happractical, technical, empirical, and quantitative conpened, that a story or a poem has been livedtribute to the reported loss of aesthetic receptivity
through, before we hurry the young listener or reader as the child grows older? Why do we find teachers
into something called "response." This is often
at every level, from the early years through high
largely an efferent undertaking to paraphrase, sum- school and college, seeming always to be having
marize, or categorize. Evocation should precede
to start from scratch in teaching poetry?
response.
The fact of the great diversity of the cultures
evolved by human beings is in itself testimony to
the power of the environment into which the child
Maintaining Aesthetic Capacity
is born. Anthropologists are making us aware of
how subtle signals from adults and older children
Why, if the capacities for aesthetic experience
are assimilated by the infant. "In depth" studies of
are so amply provided at the outset of the child's
child-rearing and particular customs or rituals doclinguistic development, do we encounter in our
ument the complexity of the individual's assimilation
schools and in our adult society such a limited
to his culture.20 All who are concerned about edrecourse to the pleasures of literature? We cannot
ucation and children have a responsibility to intertake the easy route of blaming television for this,
pret this process to our society, and to be actively
since it was a problem already lamented at least
critical of the negative aspects of our culture. Just
50 years ago.
as the medical profession is helping us relate our
One tendency is to assume a natural develphysical health to general environmental and culopmental loss of aesthetic capacity, or at the least,
interest, as the child grows older. We often still tural conditions, so we as professionals need to
share Wordsworth's romantic view that "Shades
emphasize the importance of the child's general
economic, and intellectual environment both
of the prison-house begin to close/Upon the social,
growing
outside
and in the school.
boy."'8 Some believe that in the early school
years
children become mainly concerned with the "real"
A nurturing environment that values the whol
and reject "the worlds of the imaginative range
and the
of human achievements, the opportunity fo
fantastic." This idea, and confusion of the aesthetic
stimulating experiences, cultivation of habits of o
stance with the fictive, with the imaginativeservation,
or fan- opportunities for satisfying natural cur
tasy, may have contributed to the neglect
of litosity
about the world, a sense of creative freedom
erature in the middle years.
all of these lay the foundation for linguistic devel
The child's problem of delimiting the opment.
objects Reading, we know, is not an encapsulat
and the nature of the real world may at askill
certain
that can be added on like a splint to an arm.
stage foster a preoccupation with clarifying
the dwelt so long on the organismic basis
If I have
boundary between reality and fantasy. But distrust
all language, it is because reading draws on the
of fantasy should not be equated with rejection
whole
ofperson's past transactions with the environaesthetic experience. Literary works representing
ment. Reading, especially aesthetic reading, exVolume XXI, Number 4 273
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tends the scope of that environment and feeds the
growth of the individual, who can then bring a richer
more disconcerting is the neglect of the aesthetic
stance when the declared aim is "the teaching of
We must at least indicate awareness of broader
literature," when stories and poems are presented,
not as exercises for reading skills, but presumably
self to further transactions with life and literature.
underlying societal or cultural needs before
we
go value as literature, for their capacity to
for
their
on to talk about the teaching of reading, and
es-images of life, to entertain, to deal with
present
pecially the teaching of literature, the kind of human
reading
situations and problems, to open up vistas
our economy-minded school boards often consider
of different personalities and different milieus. Here,
too, the concern in most classes still seems to be
elitist and dispensable.
of all with the kinds of response that can be
In my sketch of the child's acquisition first
of the
by efferent reading. Questions often ask for
environing language system, I presented asmet
a nathighly
ural and desirable development the selective
proc-specific factual details - What did the boy
do, where did he go, what did he see, what does
ess by which the child detaches a sense of the
public meaning of a verbal symbol from its personalthis word mean? At the other extreme is the tendency to nudge the young reader toward a labeling,
organismic matrix. But in our society the emphasis,
a generalization, a paraphrase, a summary that
at home and at school, is almost entirely on that
again requires an abstracting analytic approach to
decontextualizing, abstracting process. Parents quite
what has been read. Repeated questions of that
rightly welcome the child's abstracting-out of words
so that they can be applied to other instances ofsort soon teach the young reader to approach the
next texts with an efferent stance. Studies of stuthe same category and be used in new situations.
Of course, the child needs to participate in thedents' responses to literature have revealed the
extent to which in a seemingly open situation the
public, referential linguistic system. Of course, the
young reader will respond in ways already learned
child needs to distinguish between what the society
from the school environment.21 The results of the
considers "real" and what fantasy. Of course, the
1979-80 National Assessment of Reading and Litrational, empirical, scientific, logical components of
our culture should be transmitted.
erature demonstrate that the traditional teacher-
dominated teaching of literature, with its emphasis
Nevertheless, are these aptitudes not being
on approved or conventional interpretations, does
fostered - or at least favored - at the expense
of other potentialities of the human being andnot
of produce many readers capable of handling their
initial
our culture? The quality of education in general
is responses or relating them to the text. Questions calling for traditional analyses of character or
being diluted by neglect of, sacrifice of, the rich
theme, for example, reveal such shallowness of
organismic, personal, experiential source of both
response.
efferent and aesthetic thinking. Is there not evidence
of the importance of the affective, the imaginative, Educators and psychologists investigating chilthe fantasizing activities even for the development
dren's aesthetic activities and development reflect
of cognitive abilities and creativity in all modes of
a similar tendency to focus on the efferent-a leg-
human endeavor?
acy, perhaps, from the hegemony of traditional beThroughout the entire educational process, the
haviorist experimental research methodology.
child in our society seems to be receiving the same
Investigations of children's use of metaphor seem
signal: adopt the efferent stance. What can be
quantified - the most public of efferent modes
often actually to be testing children's cognitive
metalinguistic abilities. Studies of the "grammar"
becomes often the guide to what is taught, tested,
of story tend also to eliminate the personal aesthetic
or researched. In the teaching of reading, and even
event and to center on the cognitive ability to abof literature, failure to recognize the importance of stract out its narrative structure. Stories or poems
the two stances seems to me to be at the root of
can thus become as much a tool for studying the
child's advance through the Piagetian stages of
cognitive or analytic thinking as would a series of
One of the most troubling instances of the
much of the plight of literature today.
confusion of stances is the use of stories to teach
history texts or science texts.
efferent reading skills. Is it not a deception to induce
the child's interest through a narrative and then, in
Implications for Teaching
the effort to make sure it has been (literally, efferently) "understood," to raise questions that imply What, then, are the implications for teaching?
that only an efferent reading was necessary? Even The view of language and the reading process I
274 Theory Into Practice
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have sketched demonstrates the importance of the
early years for the development of adult readers
able to share in the pleasures and benefits of literature. The theoretical positions I have sketched
apply, I believe, throughout the entire educational
span, from the beginning reader to the adult critic.
At every stage, of course, knowledge of students
and books is essential to the sound application of
any theoretical guidelines. At best, I can only suggest criteria for differentiating between potentially
counterproductive or fruitful practices. I shall undoubtedly only be offering theoretical support for
what many sensitive teachers are already doing.
A reading stance is basically an expression of
purpose. Children will read efferently in order to
greater emphasis in the earlier stages on aesthe
listening and reading.
This view of the two stances opens up the
necessity for a new and more rounded concept
comprehension in both efferent and aesthetic rea
ing. I shall venture here only the suggestion t
this will involve attention to the transactional, two-
way, process and to affective as well as cognitive
components of meaning. Recent interest of some
psychologists in the role of context in comprehen-
sion indicates movement in this direction.23
In the teaching of literature, then, our primary
responsibility is to encourage, not get in the way
of, the aesthetic stance. As the child carries on the
process of decontextualization that serves the logical, analytic, cognitive abilities whose development
question, some explanation of a puzzling situation,
Piaget traced so influentially, we need also to keep
some directions as to procedures to be followed
in the habit of paying selective attention to the
alive
an interesting activity.
inner states, the kinesthetic tensions, the feelings,
Aesthetic reading, by its very nature, has the
an colorings of the stream of consciousness, that
accompany all cognition, and that particularly make
intrinsic purpose, the desire to have a pleasurable,
possible the evocation of literary works of art from
interesting experience for its own sake. (The older
texts.
the students, the more likely we are to forget this.)
arrive at some desired result, some answer to a
We should be careful not to confuse the student
Much of what we need to do can fortunately
be viewed as a reinforcement of the child's own
by suggesting other, extrinsic purposes, no matter
how admirable. That will turn attention away from
earliest linguistic processes, richly embedded in
participating in what is being evoked.
cognitive-affective matrix. Transactions with text
Paradoxically, when the transactions are that
lived offer some linkage with the child's own e
and concerns can give rise aestheticall
through for their own sake, they will probablyperiences
have
to new experiences. These in turn open new linas by-products the educational, informative, social,
and moral values for which literature is often praised.
guistic windows into the world. Recall that when
Even enhancement of skills may result. By therefer
same to a reading event, it can be either hearin
token, literary works often fail to emerge at all
theiftext read or having the printed text. Both type
the texts are offered as the means for the demof literary experience should continue into the elonstration of reading skills.
ementary years.
A receptive, nonpressured atmosphere will fre
Exercises and readings that do not satisfy such
meaningful purposes for the child, but are considthe child to adopt the aesthetic stance with pleasan
ered defensible means of developing skills,anticipation,
should
without worry about future demand
There If
will be freedom, too, for various kinds of
be offered separately, honestly, as exercises.
spontaneous
nonverbal and verbal expression durneeded, they should be recognized as ancillary
and
supplementary to the real business of reading
ing the
for
reading. These can be considered interminmeaning, whether efferent or aesthetic.22 gled signs of participation in, and reactions to, the
evoked story or poem.
I speak of both the teaching of efferent reading
and the teaching of aesthetic reading becauseAfter
the the reading, our initial function is to deepen
distinctions in purpose and process should bethe
made
experience. (We know one cannot predict declear from the outset. (Of course, I do notvelopments
mean
in a teaching situation, but we can think
to imply theoretical explanation of them to the
in child.)
terms of priority of emphasis.) We should help
If reading is presented as a meaningful, purposive
the young reader to return to, relive, savor, the
activity, and if texts are presented in meaningful
experience. For continuing the focus on what has
situations, the two kinds of stance should naturally
been seen, heard, felt, teachers have successfully
emerge. Texts should be presented that clearly
provided the opportunity for various forms of nonsatisfy one or another purpose. Given the linguistic
verbal expression or response: drawing, painting,
development of the child, probably there should
be
playacting,
dance. These may sometimes become
Volume XXI, Number 4 275
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ends in themselves, perhaps valuable for a child's
development, but only very generally relevant to
young readers have made of the text, the teacher
can provide positive reinforcement by leading to
the reading purposes. Such activities can, however,
offer an aesthetic means of giving form to a sense
of what has been lived through in the literary trans-
further reflection on what in the experienced story
or poem had triggered the reactions. Comments by
action. This can give evidence of what has caught
the young reader's attention, what has stirred
pleasant or unpleasant reactions. This can lead
other children and the teacher, of course, also con-
tribute to this imaginative recall of the experience.
Second, if for some reason the teacher finds
it appropriate to initiate discussion, remarks (or
questions, if necessary!) can guide the reader's
attention back toward the reading event. Questions
Requests for verbal responses create the greatcan
be sufficiently open to enable the young readers
est hazards. Adults may, often unconsciously,
reto select concrete details or parts of the text that
veal a testing motive. Perhaps there will be a
suggestion of what the approved or "correct" re- had struck them most forcibly. The point is to foster
sponse should be. Sometimes there is a tacit steer- expressions of response that keep the experiential,
ing toward an efferent or analytic stance, toward qualitative elements in mind. Did anything especially
the kinds of subjects the adult thinks interesting or interest? annoy? puzzle? frighten? please? seem
important. The reader is often hurried away from familiar? seem weird? The particular text and the
teacher's knowledge of the readers involved will
the aesthetic experience and turned to efferent
analysis by questions such as those appended to suggest such open-ended questions. The habit of
stories in various basal readers and anthologies the aesthetic stance, of attention to concrete detail,
and by teachers' questions or tests "checking
will be strengthened for further reading. Cognitive
back to the text.
whether the student has read the text." Questions
abilities, to organize, to interpret, or to explain, will
be rooted in the ability to handle responses. (And
that call for the traditional analyses of character,
setting, and plot are often premature or routine,
enhanced "reading skills" will probably be a byproduct!)
contributing to shallow, efferent readings.
Some object that the formalists and post-struc-The young reader will be stimulated to make
theits
connections among initial responses, the evoked
turalists are right in identifying literature with
work, and the text. He may then be motivated to
system of conventions, its technical traits. My reply
is that, by focusing on these components of return
the to the actual words of the text, to deepen
the experience. As students grow older, sharing of
text, they fail to do justice to the total aesthetic
responses becomes the basis for valuable interexperience. Metaphor, narrative structure, linguistic
conventions, verbal techniques are, of course,change.
im- Discovering that others have had different
responses, have noticed what was overlooked, have
portant elements of "literary" texts, and they conmade alternative interpretations, leads to selftribute much to the quality of the aesthetic
transaction. But they are vacuous concepts without awareness and self-criticism.24
recognition of the importance of stance. Poetic metAt the opening of these remarks, I mentioned
aphors or narrative suspense, for example, become the need to clarify my own version of reader-reoperative, come into existence, only if the readersponse theory, but felt no urge to survey the gamut
pays attention to the inner states that these verbal of competing theories. It seems important, however,
patterns arouse. After this repeatedly happens, we to recall that the transactional theory avoids con-
can communicate to our students the appropriate centration solely on the reader's contribution or on
feeling for its own sake,25 but centers on the reciprocal interplay of reader and text. For years I
How, then, can we deal with the young reader's have extolled the potentialities of literature for aidresponses without inhibiting the aesthetic experi-ing us to understand ourselves and others, for
ence? Two answers to this quite real dilemma sug-widening our horizons to include temperaments and
gest themselves. First, a truly receptive attitude on cultures different from our own, for helping us to
the part of teacher and peers - and this requires clarify our conflicts in values, for illuminating our
world. I have believed, and have become increasstrong efforts at creating such trust - can be
sufficient inducement to children to give sponta- ingly convinced, that these benefits spring only from
neous verbal expression to what has been lived
emotional and intellectual participation in evoking
through. Once nonverbal or verbal comments have the work of art, through reflection on our own
given some glimpse into the nature of what the aesthetic experience. Precisely because every aesterminology - when they need it! "Form" is something felt on the pulses, first of all.
276 Theory Into Practice
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thetic reading of a text is a unique creation, woven
out of the inner life and thought of the reader, the
literary work of art can be a rich source of insight
and truth. But it has become apparent that even
when literature is presented to young readers, the
efferent emphasis of our society and schools tends
to negate the potential interest and benefits of the
reading. Literature is "an endangered species." By
establishing the habit of aesthetic evocation and
personal response during the elementary years,
teachers of children's literature can make a prime
contribution to the health of our culture.
Notes
13. Izard, Carroll E. On the ontogenesis of emotions and
emotion-cognition relationships in infancy. In Michael Lewis
and Leonard Rosenblum (Eds.), The development of affect.
New York: Plenum Press, 1978, p. 404.
14. White, Dorothy. Books before five. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1954, p. 13.
15. Conrad, Joseph. Preface. The nigger of the narcissus.
New York: Doubleday, Page, 1922, p. x.
16. White, p.79.
17. The problems of validity in interpretation and of the
author's intention are treated in Rosenblatt, The reader,
the text, the poem, Chapters 5 and 6.
18. Wordsworth, William. Ode, intimations of immortality.
Poetical works. London: Oxford University Press, 1959,
p.46.
19. See Research in the teaching of English, 15 (4), De1. Tompkins, Jane P. (Ed.) Reader-response criticism. cember 1981, pp. 293-309, 343-354, and passim.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980, p xxvi;
20. Bateson, Gregory, and Mead, Margaret. Balinese
Suleiman, Susan R. and Crosman, Inge (Eds.) The reader
in the text. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980,character. New York: New York Academy of Sciences,
1942; Geertz, Clifford. The interpretation of cultures. New
p. 45.
2. Rosenblatt, Louise M. The reader, the text, the poem.
Carbondale, III.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978
York: Basic Books, 1973.
21. Purves, Alan. Literature education in ten countries.
Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1973.
22. Cf. Huey, Edmund Burke. The psychology and pe"correctness" of interpretation, the author's intention, the dagogy of reading. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968
openness and constraints of the text, or the role of the (original edition, 1908), pp. 345, 380.
critic.
23. See Harste, Jerome C., and Carey, Robert F. Comprehension as setting. In New perspectives on compre3. This is conveniently documented by articles by 11
hension, Monograph in Language and Reading Studies,
leading psychologists (Jerome Bruner, Richard Lazarus,
Indiana University, No. 3, October 1979.
Ulric Neisser, David McClelland, et al.) on "the state of
In a volume and an article that reflect the psycholthe science" in Psychology Today, May 1982, pp. 41-59.
ogists' usual preoccupation with efferent reading, I find
See especially the article by Ulric Neisser.
presents the fullest statement of the transactional theory.
The present article cannot deal with such matters as
4. Keller-Cohen, Deborah. Context in child language, Annual Review of Anthropology, 1978, 7, pp. 433-482.
5. Halliday, M.A.K. Learning to mean. New York: Elsevier,
this concession: "It may be in the rapid interplay of feelings
... that the source of the creation of ideas, later to
receive their analytic flesh and bones, may be found. If
so, how sad it would be if it were discovered that the
real problem of many readers is that their instruction so
automatizes them that they do not develop a feeling for
6. James, William. The principles of psychology. New
what they read or use the feelings available to them in
York: Dover Publications, pp.245-246.
the development of new understandings from reading."
Spiro, Rand J. Constructive processes in prose compre7. Werner, Heinz, and Kaplan, Bernard. Symbol formation.
hension and recall. In Rand J. Spiro, Bertram Bruce, and
New York: Wiley, 1963, p. 18.
William Brewer (Eds.), Theoretical issues in reading com8. Gibson, E.J. How perception really develops. In David
prehension. Hillside, N.J.: L Erlbaum, 1980, p. 274.
Laberge and S. Jay Samuels (Eds.), Basic Processes in
24. Rosenblatt, L. Literature as exploration, 1976 (disReading. Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1975, p. 171;
tributed by the National Council of Teachers of English)
Rommetveit, Ragnar. Words, meanings, and messages.
1975.
develops further the implications for teaching.
New York: Academic Press, 1968, pp. 147, 167; Werner
and Kaplan, Symbol Formation, pp.23-24 and passim. 25. The recent publication of On Learning to Read, by
9. Bates, Elizabeth. The emergence of symbols. New
York: Academic Press, 1979, pp. 65-66.
10. See Dewey, John. How we think. Lexington, Mass.:
D.C.Heath, 1933, Ch. X; Dewey, John. Qualitative thought,
Philosophy and civilization. New York: Minton, Balch, 1931,
pp. 93-116.
11. Vygotsky, L.S. Thought and language, (Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar, Ed. and trans.) Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1962, p. 8.
Bruno Bettelheim and Karen Zelan, with its subtitle, The
Child's Fascination with Meaning, and its emphasis on
response, leads me to disclaim any actual resemblance
to my views. These authors reiterate what many of us,
from Dewey on, have been saying about the importance
of meaning and the child's own feelings, and about the
narrow, dull approach of much teaching of beginning read-
ing. But the book's concentration on a doctrinal psychoanalytic interpretation of response, disregard of the
process of making meaning out of printed symbols, and
treatment of the text as a repository of ready-made mean-
12. Tedlock, Ernest (Ed.) Dylan Thomas. New York: Mer- ings or didactic human stereotypes, add up to an inadequate view of the relationship between reader and text.
cury, 1963, p. 54.
Volume XXI, Number 4 277
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The Affective Fallacy
Author(s): W. K. Wimsatt Jr. and M. C. Beardsley
Source: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 57, No. 1 (Winter, 1949), pp. 31-55
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27537883
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THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY
By W. K. WIMSATT, JR., and
M. C. BEARDSLEY
We might as well study the properties of wine by get
ting drunk?Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music.
AS the title of this essay invites comparison with that of
an earlier and parallel essay of ours, "The Intentional
Fallacy" (The Sewanee Review, Summer, 1946), it
may be relevant to assert at this point that we believe ourselves
to be exploring two roads which have seemed to offer conveni
ent detours around the acknowledged and usually feared ob
stacles to objective criticism, both of which, however, have
actually led away from criticism and from poetry. The In
tentional Fallacy is a confusion between the poem and its origins,
a special case of what is known to philosophers as the Genetic
Fallacy. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism
from the psychological causes of the poem and ends in biography
and relativism. The Affective Fallacy is a confusion between
the poem and its results (what it is and what it does), a special
case of epistemological skepticism, though usually advanced as
if it had far stronger claims than the overall forms of skepti
cism. It begins by trying to derive the standard of criticism
from the psychological effects of the poem and ends in impres
sionism and relativism. The outcome of either Fallacy, the In
tentional or the Affective, is that the poem itself, as an object
of specifically critical judgment, tends to disappear.
"Most of our criticism in literature and the arts," complains
Mr. Ren? Wellek in one of his English Institute essays, "is still
purely emotive: it judges works of art in terms of their emo
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32
THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY
tional effect . . . and describes this effect by exclamations, su
gested moods."1 We are perhaps not so pessimistic as M
Wellek about the pervasiveness of the critical method which
describes, but we believe there can be no doubt that his mistr
of the method is well-founded. Mr. C. S. Lewis in three l
tures entitled The Abolition of Man has recently turned w
we should judge to be a discomforting scrutiny on the doct
of emotive relativism as it appears in textbooks of English co
position for use in schools. Mr. John Crowe Ransom in a c
ter of his New Criticism, "I. A. Richards: the Psychologic
Critic," has done the like for some of the more sophistica
claims of neuro-psychological poetics. In the present essay,
would discuss briefly the history and fruits of affective critici
some of its correlatives in cognitive criticism, and hence cert
cognitive characteristics of poetry which have made affective
ticism plausible. We would observe also the premises of af
tive criticism, as they appear today, in certain philosophic
pseudo-philosophic disciplines of wide influence. And first
mainly that of "semantics."
1
The separation of emotive from referential meaning was
urged very persuasively, it will be remembered, about twenty
years ago in the earlier works of Mr. I. A. Richards. The
types of meaning which were defined in his Practical Criticism
and in the Meaning of Meaning of Messrs. Ogden and Rich
ards created, partly by suggestion, partly with the aid of direct
statement, a clean "antithesis" between "symbolic and emotive
use of language." In his Practical Criticism Mr. Richards spoke
of "aesthetic" or "projectile" words?adjectives by which we
project feelings at objects themselves altogether innocent of
these feelings or of any qualities corresponding to them. And
in his succinct Science and Poetry, science is statement, poetry is
pseudo-statement which plays the important role of making us
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY
33
feel better about things than statements would. After
Richards?and under the influence too of Count Korzybski
Aristotelian Science and Sanity?came the semantic schoo
Messrs. Chase, Hayakawa, Walpole, and Lee. Most rec
Mr. C. L. Stevenson in his Ethics and Language has giv
account which, as it is more careful and explicit than the ot
may be taken as most clearly pleading their cause?and be
vealing its weakness.
One of the most emphatic points in Mr. Stevenson's sy
is the distinction between what a word means and what
gests. To make the distinction in a given case, one applies
the semiotician calls a "linguistic rule" ("definition" in
tional terminology), the role of which is to stabilize respon
a word. The word "athlete" may be said to mean one inte
in sports, among other things, but merely to suggest a tall y
man. The linguistic rule is that "athletes are necessarily
ested in sports, but may or may not be tall." All this is o
side of what may be called the descriptive (or cognitive)
tion of words. For a second and separate main functi
words?that is, the emotive?there is no linguistic rule to
lize responses and, therefore, in Mr. Stevenson's system
parallel distinction between meaning and suggestion. Alt
the term "quasi-dependent emotive meaning" is recomm
by Mr. Stevenson for a kind of emotive "meaning" whi
"conditional to the cognitive suggestiveness of a sign," the m
drift of his argument is that emotive "meaning" is some
non-correlative to and independent of descriptive (or cognit
meaning. Thus, emotive "meaning" is said to survive
changes in descriptive meaning. And words with the sam
scriptive meaning are said to have very different em
"meanings." "License" and "liberty," for example, Mr
venson believes to have in some contexts the same descri
meaning, but opposite emotive "meanings." Finally, ther
3
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34
THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY
words which he believes to have no descriptive meaning
decided emotive "meaning": these are expletives of various
But a certain further distinction, and an important one,
does not appear in Mr. Stevenson's system?nor in those
forerunners?is invited by his persistent use of the word
ing" for both cognitive and emotive language functions
the absence from the emotive of his careful distinction b
"meaning" and "suggestion." It is a fact worth insistin
that the term "emotive meaning," as used by Mr. Stev
and the more cautious term "feeling," as used by Mr. R
to refer to one of his four types of "meaning," do not re
any such cognitive meaning as that conveyed by the name
emotion?"anger" or "love." Rather, these key terms r
the expression of emotive states which Messrs. Stevens
Richards believe to be effected by certain words?for in
"license," "liberty," "pleasant," "beautiful," "ugly"?and
also to the emotive response which these words may ev
hearer. As the term "meaning" has been traditionally a
fully assigned to the cognitive, or descriptive, functi
language, it would have been well if these writers had em
in such contexts, some less pre-empted term. "Import"
have been a happy choice. Such differentiation in voca
would have had the merit of reflecting a profound differ
linguistic function?all the difference between grounds
tion and emotions themselves, between what is imme
meant by words and what is evoked by the meaning of
or what more briefly might be said to be the "import"
words themselves.
Without pausing to examine Mr. Stevenson's belief th
pletives have no descriptive meaning, we are content to ob
in passing that these words at any rate have only the
emotive import, something raw, unarticulated, imprecise.
(surprise and related feelings), "Ah!" (regret), "Ugh
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY
35
taste). It takes a more descriptive reference to specify the feel
ing. "In quiet she reposes. Ah! would that I did too." But
a more central re-emphasis for Mr. Stevenson's position?and
for that of his forerunners including Mr. Richards?seems re
quired by a fact scarcely mentioned in semantic writings: namely,
that a large and obvious area of emotive import depends di
rectly upon descriptive meaning (either with or without words of
explicit ethical valuation)?as when a person says and is be
lieved: "General X ordered the execution of 50,000 civilian
hostages," or "General X is guilty of the murder of 50,000
civilian hostages." And secondly, by the fact that a great deal
of emotive import which does not depend thus directly on de
scriptive meaning does depend on descriptive suggestion. Here
we have the "quasi-dependent emotive meaning" of Mr. Ste
venson's system?a "meaning" to which surely he assigns too
slight a role. This is the kind of emotive import, we should
say, which appears when words change in descriptive meaning
yet preserve a similar emotive "meaning"?when the Com
munists take over the term "democracy" and apply it to some
thing else, preserving, however, the old descriptive suggestion,
a government of, by, and for the people. It appears in pairs of
words like "liberty" and "license," which even if they have the
same descriptive meaning (as one may doubt), certainly carry
very different descriptive suggestions. Or one might cite the
word series in Bentham's classic "Catalogue of Motives":?"hu
manity, good-will, partiality," "frugality, pecuniary interest,
avarice." Or the other standard examples of emotive insinua
tion: "Animals sweat, men perspire, women glow." "I am
firm, thou art obstinate, he is pigheaded." Or the sentence,
"There should be a revolution every twenty years," to which the
experimenter in emotive responses attaches now the name Karl
Marx (and arouses suspicion), now that of Thomas Jefferson
(and provokes applause).
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36
THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY
The principle applies conspicuously to the numerous ex
offered by the school of Messrs. Hayakawa, Walpole, an
In the interest of brevity, though in what may seem a qu
defiance of the warnings of this school against unindexed
alization?according to which semanticist (1) is not sema
(2) is not semanticist (3), and so forth?we call attention
Irving Lee's Language Habits in Human Affairs, partic
Chapters VII and VIII. According to Mr. Lee, every m
that anyone ever makes in acting, since in some direct or
sense it involves language or thought (which is related
guage), may be ascribed to "bad language habits," a k
magic misuse of words. No distinctions are permitted.
Rathbone, handed a scenario entitled The Monster, ret
unread, but accepts it later under a different title. The
imite says "Sibboleth" instead of "Shibboleth" and is s
man says he is offended by four-letter words describing e
in a novel, but not by the events. Another man receiv
erroneously worded telegram which says that his son is
The shock is fatal. One would have thought that wit
example Lee's simplifying prejudice might have broken
?that a man who is misinformed that his son is dead ma
leave himself to drop dead without being thought a vic
emotive incantation. Or that the title of a scenario i
ground for the inference that it is a Grade-B horror m
that the use of phonetic principles in choosing a password
son rather than magic?as "lollapalooza" and "lullabye
used against infiltration tactics on Guadalcanal; that four-l
words may ascribe to events certain qualities which a reade
self finds it distasteful to contemplate and would rathe
ascribe to them. None of these examples (except the ut
anomalous "Sibboleth") offers any evidence, in short, that
a word does to a person is to be ascribed to anything excep
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY
37
it means, or if this connection is not apparent, at the most
with a little reflection, by what it suggests.
A question about the relation of language to objects of
tion is a shadow and index of another question, about the co
tive status of emotions themselves. It is an entirely consi
cultural phenomenon that within the same period as the flo
of semantics one kind of anthropology has delivered a pa
attack upon the relation of the objects themselves to emotio
or more specifically, upon the constancy of their relati
through the times and places of human societies. In the c
treatise of Westermarck on Ethical Relativity we learn, f
ample, that the custom of eliminating the aged and unpr
tive has been practiced among certain primitive tribes an
madic races. Other customs, that of exposing babies, tha
suicide, that of showing hospitality to strangers?or the
trary custom of eating them, the reception of the Cyclops r
than that of Alcinous?seem to have enjoyed in some cult
a degree of approval unknown or at least unusual in our
But even Westermarck2 has noticed that difference of em
"largely originates in different measures of knowledge, base
experience of the consequences of conduct, and in differe
liefs." That is to say, the different emotions, even though t
are responses to similar objects or actions, may yet be respo
to different qualities or functions?to the edibility of Odyss
rather than to his comeliness or manliness. A converse of
is the fact that for different objects in different cultures
may be on cognitive grounds emotions of similar quality
the cunning of Odysseus and for the strategy of Montgo
at El Alamein. There may be a functional analogy for
alien object of emotion. Were it otherwise, indeed, there
be no way of understanding and describing alien emotion
basis on which the science of the cultural relativist migh
ceed.
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38
THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY
We shall not pretend to frame any formal discours
affective psychology, the laws of emotion. At this point,
theless, we venture to rehearse some generalities about ob
emotions, and words. Emotion, it is true, has a well-kn
pacity to fortify opinion, to inflame cognition, and to gro
itself in surprising proportions to grains of reason. W
mob-psychology, psychosis, and neurosis. We have
floating anxiety" and all the vaguely understood and in
states of apprehension, depression, or elation, the pre
complexions of melancholy or cheer. But it is well to rem
that these states are indeed inchoate or vague and by th
may even verge upon the unconscious.3 They are the c
tives of very generalized objects, of general patterns of c
tion or misconception. At a less intensely affective le
have "sensitivity" and on the other hand what has been
"affective stupidity." There is the well-known saying of P
"Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne conna?t pas."
consider these sensitivities and "raisons" as special a
knowing and response makes better sense than to refer th
a special faculty of knowing. "Moral sentiments," we t
are a part of eighteenth-century history. We have, aga
popular and self-vindicatory forms of confessing emoti
makes me boil." "It burns me up." Or in the novels
lyn Waugh a social event or a person is "sick-making.
these locutions involve an extension of the strict opera
meaning of make or effect. A food or a poison causes
death, but for an emotion we have a reason or an object
cause. We have, as Mr. Ransom points out, not unsp
fear, but fear of something fearful, men with machine g
the day of doom. If objects are ever connected by "em
congruity," as in the association psychology of J. S. Mi
can mean only that similar emotions attach to various
because of similarity in the objects or in their relations
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY
39
makes one angry is something painful, insulting, or unjust. O
does not call it an angry thing. The feeling and its correla
far from being the same, are almost opposites. And the
tinction holds even when the name of the correlative quality
verbally cognate with that of the emotion,?as lovable to lovin
Love, as Plato is at pains to make clear, loves that which i
not.
The tourist who said a waterfall was pretty provoked th
lent disgust of Coleridge, while the other who said it was
lime won his approval. This, as Mr. C. S. Lewis so
observes,4 was not the same as if the tourist had said, "I
sick," and Coleridge had thought, "No, I feel quite well."
The doctrine of emotive meaning propounded recently
the semanticists has seemed to offer a scientific basis for one
of affective relativism in poetics?the personal. That is, i
person can correctly say either "liberty" or "license" in a g
context independently of the cognitive quality of the cont
merely at will or from emotion, it follows that a reader
likely feel either "hot" or "cold" and report either "bad"
"good" on reading either "liberty" or license"?either an o
by Keats or a limerick. The sequence of licenses is end
Similarly, the doctrines of one school of anthropology have g
far to fortify another kind of affective relativism, the cultu
or historical, the measurement of poetic value by the degree
feeling felt by the readers of a given era. A different psych
gical criticism, that by author's intention, as we noted in our
lier essay, is consistent both with piety for the poet and w
antiquarian curiosity and has been heavily supported by the h
torical scholar and biographer. So affective criticism, though
its personal or impressionistic form it meets with strong dis
from scholars, yet in its theoretical or scientific form finds st
support from the same quarter. The historical scholar, if
much interested in his own personal responses or in those of
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40
THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY
students, is intensely interested in whatever can be di
about those of any member of Shakespeare's audience.
II
Plato's feeding and watering of the passions5 was an early ex
ample of affective theory, and Aristotle's counter-theory of ca
tharsis was another (with modern intentionalistic analogues in
theories of "relief" and "sublimation"). There was also the
"transport" of the audience in the Peri Hupsous (matching the
great soul of the poet), and this had echoes of passion or en
thusiasm among eighteenth-century Longinians. We have had
more recently the contagion theory of Tolstoy (with its inten
tionalistic analogue in the emotive expressionism of Veron), the
Einf?hlung or empathy of Lipps and related pleasure theories,
either more or less tending to the "objectification" of Santa
yana: "Beauty is pleasure regarded as the quality of a thing."
An affinity for these theories is seen in certain theories of the
comic during the same era, the relaxation theory of Pen j on, the
laughter theory of Mr. Max Eastman. In their Foundations
of Aesthetics Messrs. Ogden, Richards, and Wood listed sixteen
types of aesthetic theory, of which at least seven may be de
scribed as affective. Among these the theory of Synaesthesis
(Beauty is what produces an equilibrium of appetencies) was the
one they themselves espoused. This was developed at length by
Mr. Richards in his Principles of Literary Criticism.
The theories just mentioned may be considered as belonging
to one branch of affective criticism, and that the main one, the
emotive?unless the theory of empathy, with its transport of
the self into the object, its vital meaning and enrichment of
experience, belongs rather with a parallel and equally ancient
affective theory, the imaginative. This is represented by the
figure of vividness so often mentioned in the rhetorics?eficacia,
enargeia, or the phantasiai in Chapter XV of Peri Hupsous.
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY
41
This if we mistake not is the imagination the "Pleasure
which are celebrated by Addison in his series of Spectato
is an imagination implicit in the theories of Leibniz and
garten, that beauty lies in clear but confused, or sensuous,
in the statement of Warton in his Essay on Pope that
lection of "lively pictures . . . chiefly constitutes true po
In our time, as the emotive form of psychologistic or affe
theory has found its most impressive champion in Mr.
Richards, so the imaginative form has in Mr. Max Eastm
whose Literary Mind and Enjoyment of Poetry have m
say about vivid realizations or heightened consciousness.
But an important distinction can be made between thos
have coolly investigated what poetry does to others and
who have testified what it does to themselves. The theo
intention or author-psychology, as we noted in our earlier
has been the intense conviction of poets themselves, W
worth, Keats, Housman, and since the Romantic era, of
persons interested in poetry, the introspective amateurs an
cultivators. In a parallel way, affective theory has often
less a scientific view of literature than a prerogative?th
the soul adventuring among masterpieces, the contagious tea
the poetic radiator?a magnetic rhapsodic Ion, a Saintsb
Quiller-Couch, a William Lyon Phelps. Criticism on this
has approximated the tone of the Buchmanite confessio
revival meeting. "To be quite frank," says Anatole F
"the critic ought to say: 'Gentlemen, I am going to speak
myself apropos of Shakespeare, apropos of Racine. . . .' "
sincerity of the critic becomes an issue, as for the intenti
the sincerity of the poet.
"The mysterious entity called the Grand Style," says S
bury. . . . "My definition . . . [of it] would . . . come nea
the Longinian Sublime."
Whenever this perfection of expression acquires such
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42
THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY
that it transmutes the subject and transports the hear
reader, then and there the Grand Style exists, for so
and in such degree, as the transmutation of the one an
transportation of the other lasts.
And if we follow him further in his three essays on the s
(the Grand Style in Shakespeare, in Milton, in Dante),
cover that "It is nearly as impossible to describe, meticulo
the constituents of its grandeur as to describe that of the
of the sun itself."
The fact is . . . that this Grand Style is not easily t
or discovered by observation, unless you give yours
primarily to the feeling of it.
With Dante, "It is pure magic: the white magic of style
grand style." This is the grand style, the emotive st
nineteenth-century affective criticism. A somewhat less r
style which has been heard in our columns of Saturday an
day reviewing and from our literary explorers is more
connected with imagism and the kind of vividness sponso
Mr. Eastman. In the Book-of-the-Month Club News Do
Canfield testifies to the power of a new novel: "To re
book is like living through an experience rather than ju
ing about it."7 "And so a poem," says Hans Zinsser,
means nothing to me unless it can carry me away with
gentle or passionate pace of its emotion, over obstac
reality into meadows and covers of illusion. . . . Th
criterion for me is whether it can sweep me with i
emotion or illusion of beauty, terror, tranquillity, or
disgust.8
It is but a short step to what we may call the physiological form
of affective criticism. Beauty, said Burke in the Eighteenth
Century, is small and curved and smooth, clean and fair and
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY
43
mild; it "acts by relaxing the solids of the whole system." More
recently, on the side of personal testimony, we have the oft
quoted goose-flesh experience in a letter of Emily Dickinson,
and the top of her head taken off; the bristling of the skin while
Housman was shaving, the "shiver down the spine," the sensa
tion in "the pit of the stomach." And if poetry has been dis
cerned by these tests, truth also. "All scientists," said D. H.
Lawrence to Aldous Huxley, "are liars. ... I don't care about
evidence. Evidence doesn't mean anything to me. I don't feel
it here" And, reports Huxley, "he pressed his two hands on
his solar plexus."9
An even more advanced grade of affective theory, that of
hallucination, would seem to have played some part in the neo
classic conviction about the unities of time and place, was given
a modified continuation of existence in phrases of Coleridge
about a "willing suspension of disbelief" and a "temporary half
faith," and may be found today in some textbooks. The hyp
notic hypothesis of E. D. Snyder might doubtless be invoked in
its support. As this form of affective theory is the least theo
retical in detail, has the least content, and makes the least claim
on critical intelligence, so it is in its most concrete instances not
a theory but a fiction or a fact?of no critical significance. In
the Eighteenth Century Fielding conveys a right view of the
hallucinative power of drama in his comic description of Part
ridge seeing Garrick act the ghost scene in Hamlet. "O la!
sir. ... If I was frightened, I am not the only person. . . . You
may call me coward if you will; but if that little man there up
on the stage is not frightened, I never saw any man frightened
in my life." Partridge is today found perhaps less often among
the sophisticates at the theater than among the myriad audience
of movie and radio. It is said, and no doubt reliably, that during
the war Stefan Schnabel played Nazi roles in radio dramas so
convincingly that he received numerous letters of complaint, and
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+4
THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY
in particular one from a lady who said that she had rep
him to General MacArthur.10
Ill
As the systematic affective critic professes to deal not merely,
if at all, with his own experiences, but with those of persons in
general, his most resolute search for evidence will lead him into
the dreary and antiseptic laboratory, to testing with Fechner the
effects of triangles and rectangles, to inquiring what kinds of
colors are suggested by a line of Keats, or to measuring the
motor discharges attendant upon reading it.11 If animals could
read poetry, the affective critic might make discoveries analogous
to those of W. B. Cannon about Bodily Changes in Pain,
Hunger, Fear and Rage?the increased liberation of sugar from
the liver, the secretion of adrenin from the adrenal gland. The
affective critic is today actually able, if he wishes, to measure
the "psycho-galvanic reflex" of persons subjected to a given
moving picture.12 But, as a recent writer on Science and Criti
cism points out: "Students have sincerely reported an 'emotion'
at the mention of the word 'mother,' although a galvanometer
indicated no bodily change whatever. They have also reported
no emotion at the mention of 'prostitute,' although the galva
nometer gave a definite kick."13 Thomas Mann and a friend
came out of a movie weeping copiously?but Mann narrates the
incident in support of his view that movies are not Art. "Art
is a cold soliere."14 The gap between various levels of physio
logical experience and the perception of value remains wide,
whether in the laboratory or not.
In a similar way, general affective theory at the literary level
has, by the very implications of its program, produced very
little actual criticism. The author of the ancient Peri Hupsous
is weakest at the points where he explains that passion and sub
limity are the palliatives or excuses (alexipharmaka) of bold
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY
45
metaphors, and that passions which verge on transport are the
lenitives or remedies (panakeia) of such audacities in speech as
hyperbole. The literature of catharsis has dealt with the his
torical and theoretical question whether Aristotle meant a medi
cal or a lustratory metaphor, whether the genitive which follows
katharsis is of the thing purged or of the object purified. Even
the early critical practice of Mr. I. A. Richards had little to do
with his theory of synaesthesis. His Practical Criticism depended
mainly on two important constructive principles of criticism
which Mr. Richards has realized and insisted upon?(1) that
rhythm (the vague, if direct, expression of emotion) and poetic
form in general are intimately connected with and interpreted
by other and more precise parts of poetic meaning, (2) that
poetic meaning is inclusive or multiple and hence sophisticated.
The latter quality of poetry may perhaps be the objective cor
relative of the affective state synaesthesis, but in applied criticism
there would seem to be not much room for synaesthesis or for
the touchy little attitudes of which it is composed.
The report of some readers, on the other hand, that a poem
or story induces in them vivid images, intense feelings, or
heightened consciousness, is neither anything which can be re
futed nor anything which it is possible for the objective critic
to take into account. The purely affective report is either too
physiological or it is too vague. Feelings, as Hegel has con
veniently put it, "remain purely subjective affections of myself,
in which the concrete matter vanishes, as though narrowed into
a circle of the utmost abstraction." And the only constant or
predictable thing about the vivid images which more eidetic
readers experience is precisely their vividness?as may be seen
by requiring a class of average pupils to draw illustrations of a
short story or by consulting the newest Christmas edition of a
childhood classic which one knew with the illustrations of How
ard Pyle or N. C. Wyeth. Vividness is not the thing in the
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46
THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY
work by which the work may be identified, but the res
cognitive structure, which is the thing. "The story is g
the student so often says in his papers, "because it lea
much to the imagination." The opaque accumulation of
cal detail in some realistic novels has been an absurd re
of plastic or graphic theory aptly dubbed by Mr. Mid
Murry "the pictorial fallacy."
Certain theorists, notably Mr. Richards, have anticipated
difficulties of affective criticism by saying that it is not in
of emotion that characterizes poetry (murder, robbery, f
tion, horse-racing, war?perhaps even chess?take care
better), but the subtle quality of patterned emotions whic
at the subdued level of disposition or attitude. We hav
chological theories of aesthetic distance, detachment, o
terestedness. A criticism on these principles has already
important steps toward objectivity. If Mr. Eastman's theo
imaginative vividness appears today chiefly in the excited
of the newspaper Book Sections, the campaign of the seman
and the balanced emotions of Mr. Richards, instead of
ing their own school of affective criticism, have contribute
to recent schools of cognitive analysis, of paradox, amb
irony, and symbol. It is not always true that the emot
cognitive forms of criticism will sound far different
affective critic (avoiding both the physiological and
stractly psychological form of report) ventures to state w
precision what a line of poetry does?as "it fills us with
ture of melancholy and reverence for antiquity"?eith
statement will be patently abnormal or false, or it wi
description of what the meaning of the line is: "the specta
massive antiquity in ruins." Tennyson's "Tears, idle tea
it deals with an emotion which the speaker at first see
to understand, might be thought to be a specially emotive
"The last stanza," says Mr. Brooks in his recent an
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY
47
"evokes an intense emotional response from the reader." But
this statement is not really a part of Mr. Brooks's criticism o
the poem?rather a witness of his fondness for it. "The se
ond stanza,"?Mr. Brooks might have said at an earlier point in
his analysis?"gives us a momentary vivid realization of past
happy experiences, then makes us sad at their loss." But h
says actually: "The conjunction of the qualities of sadness and
freshness is reinforced by the fact that the same basic symbol
?the light on the sails of a ship hull down?has been employed
to suggest both qualities." The distinction between these formu
lations may seem trivial, and in the first example which we
furnished may be practically unimportant. Yet the difference
between translatable emotive formulas and more physiologica
and psychologically vague ones?cognitively untranslatable
is theoretically of the greatest import. The distinction even
when it is a very faint one is at the dividing point between
paths which lead to polar opposites in criticism, to classical ob
jectivity and to romantic reader psychology.
The critic whose formulations lean to the emotive and the
critic whose formulations lean to the cognitive will in the lon
run produce a vastly different sort of criticism.
The more specific the account of the emotion induced by a
poem, the more nearly it will be an account of the reasons for
emotion, the poem itself, and the more reliable it will be as an
account of what the poem is likely to induce in other?suffi
ciently informed?readers. It will in fact supply the kind of
information which will enable readers to respond to the poem.
It will talk not of tears, prickles, or other physiological symp
toms, of feeling angry, joyful, hot, cold, or intense, or of
vaguer states of emotional disturbance, but of shades of dis
tinction and relation between objects of emotion. It is pre
cisely here that the discerning literary critic has his insuperable
advantage over the subject of the laboratory experiment and
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48
THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY
over the tabulator of the subject's responses. The criti
a contributor to statistically countable reports about the
but a teacher or explicator of meanings. His readers,
are alert, will not be content to take what he says as test
but will scrutinize it as teaching. The critic's report w
of emotions which are not only complex and dependen
precise object but also, and for these reasons, stable. T
dox, if it is one, is the analogue in emotive terms of the
formula of the metaphysical critic, that poetry is both in
and universal?a concrete universal. It may well be t
contemplation of this object, or pattern of emotive know
which is the poem, is the ground for some ultimate em
state which may be termed the aesthetic (some empath
synaesthesis, some objectified feeling of pleasure). It m
be. The belief is attractive; it may exalt our view of
But it is no concern of criticism, no part of criteria.
IV
Poetry, as Matthew Arnold believed, "attaches the emotion
to the idea; the idea is the fact." The objective critic, how
ever, must admit that it is not easy to explain how this is done,
how poetry makes ideas thick and complicated enough to attach
emotions. In his essay on "Hamlet and His Problems" Mr.
T. S. Eliot finds Hamlet's state of emotion unsatisfactory be
cause it lacks an "objective correlative," a "chain of events"
which are the "formula of that particular emotion." The emo
tion is "in excess of the facts as they appear." It is "inexpressi
ble." Yet Hamlet's emotion must be expressible, we submit,
and actually expressed too (by something) in the play; other
wise Mr. Eliot would not know it is there?in excess of the
facts. That Hamlet himself or Shakespeare may be baffled by the
emotion is beside the point. The second chapter of Mr. Yvor
Winters' Primitivism and Decadence has gone much further
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY
49
in clarifying a distinction adumbrated by Mr. Eliot. Without
embracing the extreme doctrine of Mr. Winters, that if a poem
cannot be paraphrased it is a poor poem, we may yet with profit
reiterate his main thesis: that there is a difference between the
motive, as he calls it, or logic of an emotion, and the surface or
texture of a poem constructed to describe the emotion, and that
both are important to a poem. Mr. Winters has shown, we
think, how there can be in effect "fine poems" about nothing.
There is rational progression and there is "qualitative progres
sion,"15 the latter, with several subtly related modes, a char
acteristic of decadent poetry. Qualitative progression is the suc
cession, the dream float, of images, not substantiated by a plot.
"Moister than an oyster in its clammy cloister, I'm bluer than
a wooer who has slipped in a sewer," says Mr. Morris Bishop
in a recent comic poem:
Chiller than a killer in a cinema thriller,
Queerer than a leerer at his leer in a mirror,
Madder than an adder with a stone in the bladder.
If you want to know why, I cannot but reply:
It is really no affair of yours.16
The term "pseudo-statement" was for Mr. Richards a patro
nizing term by which he indicated the attractive nullity of
poems. For Mr. Winters, the kindred term "pseudo-reference"
is a name for the more disguised kinds of qualitative progression
and is a term of reproach. It seems to us highly significant that
for another psychological critic, Mr. Max Eastman, so important
a part of poetry as metaphor is in effect too pseudo-statement.
The vivid realization of metaphor comes from its being in some
way an obstruction to practical knowledge (like a torn coat
sleeve to the act of dressing). Metaphor operates by being ab
normal or inept, the wrong way of saying something.17 Without
pressing the point, we should say that an uncomfortable resem
4
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50
THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY
blance to this doctrine appears in Mr. Ransom's logical stru
and local texture of irrelevance.
What Mr. Winters has said seems basic. To venture
slight elaboration of this and a return to the problem of
semantics surveyed in our first section: it is a well-kno
nonetheless important truth that there are two kinds of r
jects which have emotive quality, the objects which ar
literal reasons for human emotion, and those which b
kind of association suggest either the reasons or the re
emotion:?the thief, the enemy, or the insult that ma
angry, and the hornet that sounds and stings somewh
ourselves when angry; the murderer or felon, and the cro
kills small birds and animals or feeds on carrion and i
like the night when crimes are committed by men. The ar
ment by which these two kinds of emotive meaning are br
together in a juncture characteristic of poetry is, roughly
ing, the simile, the metaphor, and the various less clea
fined forms of association. We offer the following cr
ample as a kind of skeleton figure to which we believe
issues can be attached.
I. X feels as angry as a hornet.
II. X whose lunch has been stolen feels as angry
hornet.
No. I is, we take it, the qualitative poem, the vehicle of a meta
phor, an objective correlative?for nothing. No. II adds the
tenor of the metaphor, the motive for feeling angry, and hence
makes the feeling itself more specific. The total statement has
a more complex and testable .structure. The element of apti
tude, or ineptitude, is more susceptible of discussion. "Light
thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood" might
be a line from a poem about nothing, but initially owed much
of its power, and we daresay still does, to the fact that it is
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY
spoken by a tormented murderer who, as night draws on, has
sent his agents out to perform a further "deed of dreadful
note."
These distinctions bear a close relation to the difference be
tween historical statement which may be a reason for emotion
because it is believed (Macbeth has killed the king) and fictitious
or poetic statement, where a large component of suggestion (and
hence metaphor) has usually appeared. The first of course
seldom occurs pure, at least not for the public eye. The coroner
or the intelligence officer may content himself with it. Not
the chronicler, the bard, or the newspaper man. To these we
owe more or less direct words of value and emotion (the
murder, the atrocity, the wholesale butchery) and all the reper
toire of suggestive meanings which here and there in history?
with somewhat to start upon?an Achilles, a Beowulf, a Mac
beth?have created out of a mere case of factual reason for in
tense emotion a specified, figuratively fortified, and permanent
object of less intense but far richer emotion. With the decline
of heroes and of faith in objects as important, we have had
within the last century a great flowering of poetry which has
tried the utmost to do without any hero or action or fiction of
these?the qualitative poetry of Mr. Winters' analysis. It is
true that any hero and action when they become fictitious take
the first step toward the simply qualitative, and all poetry, so
far as separate from history, tends to be formula of emotion.
The hero and action are taken as symbolic. A graded series
from fact to quality might include: (1) the historic Macbeth,
(2) Macbeth as Renaissance tragic protagonist, (3) a Macbeth
written by Mr. Eliot, (4) a Macbeth written by Mr. Pound. As
Mr. Winters has explained, "the prince is briefly introduced in
the footnotes" of The Waste Land; "it is to be doubted that
Mr. Pound could manage such an introduction." Yet in no one
of these four stages has anything like a pure emotive poetry
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THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY
been produced. The semantic analysis which we have off
our first section would say that even in the last stages a p
of pure emotion is an illusion. What we have is a poetry
kings are only symbols or even a poetry of hornets and cr
rather than of human deeds. Yet a poetry about thing
these things are joined in patterns and with what names o
tion, remains always the critical question. "The Roman
the Rose could not, without loss," observes Mr. Lew
rewritten as the Romance of the Onion."
Poetry is characteristically a discourse about both emotio
objects, or about the emotive quality of objects, and this th
its preoccupation with symbol and metaphor. An emotio
for one object is identified by reference to its analogue fe
another?a fact which is the basis for the expressionist doct
of "objectification" or the giving to emotion a solid and ou
objectivity of its own. The emotions correlative to the
of poetry become a part of the matter dealt with?not com
cated to the reader like an infection or disease, not inflicte
chanically like a bullet or knife wound, not administered
poison, not simply expressed as by expletives or grima
rhythms, but presented in their objects and contemplat
pattern of knowledge. Poetry is a way of fixing emoti
making them more permanently perceptible when object
undergone a functional change from culture to culture, or
as simple facts of history they have lost emotive value wit
of immediacy. Though the reasons for emotion in poetr
not be so simple as Ruskin's "noble grounds for the nobl
tions," yet a great deal of constancy for poetic objects of em
?if we will look for constancy?may be traced throug
drift of human history. The murder of Duncan -by Mac
whether as history of the Eleventh Century or chronicle of
Sixteenth, has not tended to become the subject of a Chr
carol. In Shakespeare's play it is an act difficult to dupli
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WIMSATT AND BEARDSLEY
all its immediate adjuncts of treachery, deliberation, and horror
of conscience. Set in its galaxy of symbols?the hoarse raven,
the thickening light, and the crow making wing, the babe
plucked from the breast, the dagger in the air, the ghost, the
bloody hands?this ancient murder has become an object of
strongly fixed emotive value. The corpse of Polynices, a far
more ancient object and partially concealed from us by the diffi
culties of the Greek, shows a similar pertinacity in remaining
among the understandable motives of higher duty. Funeral
customs have changed, but not the web of issues, religious, po
litical, and private, woven about the corpse "unburied, unhon
oured, all unhallowed." Again, certain objects partly obscured
in one age wax into appreciation in another, and partly through
the efforts of the poet. It is not true that they suddenly arrive
out of nothing. The pathos of Shylock, for example, is not a
creation of our time, though a smugly modern humanitarianism,
because it has slogans, may suppose that this was not felt by
Shakespeare or Southampton?and may not perceive its own
debt to Shakespeare. "Poets," says Shelley, "are the unac
knowledged legislators of the world." And it may be granted
at least that poets have been leading expositors of the laws of
reeling.
To the relativist historian of literature falls the uncomfortable
task of establishing as discrete cultural moments the past when
the poem was written and first appreciated, and the present into
which the poem with its clear and nicely interrelated meanings,
its completeness, balance, and tension has survived. A structure
of emotive objects so complex and so reliable as to have been
taken for great poetry by any past age will never, it seems
safe to say, so wane with the waning of human culture as not
to be recoverable at least by a willing student. And on the
same grounds a confidence seems indicated for the objective dis
crimination of all future poetic phenomena, though the premises
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THE AFFECTIVE FALLACY
or materials of which such poems will be constructed cann
prescribed or foreseen. If the exegesis of some poems d
upon the understanding of obsolete or exotic customs, the
themselves are the most precise emotive evaluation of
toms. In th...
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