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Performing "The Solitary Reaper" and "Tears, Idle Tears." - interpretive versus aesthetic literary criticism
Criticism, Spring, 1996 by Kerry McSweeney
In the years since Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" (1964) and Roland Barthes's Le Plaisir du texte (1973), there have been numerous attempts to distinguish between interpretative/hermeneutic models of literary criticism and other models.(1) In some cases, the alternative model has been performative. Helen Vendler, for example, drew on Barthes's work in arguing that interpretative and aesthetic models were "radically incompatible." Practitioners of the former look "for meaning, import, philosophy, social truth; [they] remind us of the links between literature and its social and philosophical milieu." It is from this model, "with its persistent allegorizing tendency, that the vulgar notion of there being a `hidden meaning' in literature has arisen." Aesthetic critics, on the other hand, remind one "of the links between literature and the other expressive arts--music, painting, and sculpture." They offer explication rather than interpretation; their "analysis is, so to speak, admiration methodized." They are interpreters not in the exegetical sense, but rather "as a pianist or a conductor is an interpreter, holding up the work in a new and coherent manifestation." Their analysis is "terminable rather than interminable, as every performance of a musical work implies final choices of emphasis and color."(2)
Since critics of both sorts "are always with us, though under different names,"(3) Vendler's distinction has a general usefulness. But her account is too simplified to be helpful in more than a rudimentary way. For one thing, the analogy between a literary and a musical artwork is not well grounded. Vendler could, for example, have made use of Barbara Herrnstein Smith's reflections on Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art, which led her to formulate a distinction between literary works that are "representations of inscribed discourse" and thus "constituted by their own texts," and those (for example, lyric poems) which, "as representations of spoken discourse, bear [a] special relation to their own texts... that is, the relation between a performable work and its score."(4) Moreover, the medium of literature is words, not simply sounds, and while Vendler's two models might be logically distinct, it is hard to think of them as empirically distinct. Any aesthetic rendering of a literary artwork will involve choices and emphases closely similar to, even if not coterminous with, interpretative operations. And if aesthetic pleasure can arise from appreciation of the manner in which "the cognitive content, moral import or political message" of literary work is "embodied in or communicated by the work's specific elements and organization,"(5) such appreciation will presuppose at least some degree of interpretative inquiry.
A more nuanced distinction between interpretative models of criticism and other models has been attempted by Paisley Livingston, who contrasts two "broad kinds of question": (a) "What does a particular text mean?"; and (b) "What are the consequences of an utterance in the context of the interaction in which it occurs?" The former is "an indeterminate question, whereas the latter is determinate relative to the specifications of context, agents, and so forth." Since the specific determinants that Livingston has in mind are "concrete interactional systems requir[ing] a reliable knowledge of the social history in question,"(6) it might seem that, from Vendler's point of view, his two questions simply discriminate between interpretative emphases. But when the literary artwork in question is a lyric poem, it could be argued that the primary interactive context is interpersonal, between speaker and listener, and that the "utterance" is the latter's performance of the work.
This suggestion, however, need not involve the disregard of the "social history in question" or of other contextual factors. One way of showing this would be to pursue the analogy between the performance of a lyric poem and that of a musical work. Stephen Davies, for example, has described the "thicker characterization" of the ontology of the latter (the characterization that allows one to say that the work is created rather than discovered) "as necessarily including a performance-means and as necessarily being indexed to a person, time and place." And he has insisted that an authentic performance of a musical work (as opposed to "improvising or fantasising on that work") must respect these properties.(7)
In reflecting on these matters, it is useful to consider particular poems. When one does so, the "criterion of... validity" of a critical model "becomes the profitability of what it proves capable of doing."(8) I propose to consider two of the best-known nineteenth-century lyric poems in English-Wordsworth's "The Solitary Reaper" and Tennyson's "Tears, idle tears." The subject of the former is its speaker's reception of a song that is sung in a language he does not understand. The latter was first published in Tennyson's narrative poem The Princess, where it is presented as a song sung by a young woman to the accompaniment of a harp. My discussions, which include a consideration of the genesis of each poem, will suggest that while interpretative analysis (as of any artwork composed of words) is always possible, an aesthetic rendering may more satisfactorily account for and integrate the essential features of a poem, including those pointed up by that analysis.(9) I shall also suggest that the difference between a hermeneutic critical model and an aesthetic one is analogous to the difference between reading a lyric poem with the eyes only and listening to it or performing it.(10)
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