The Complexity of Criticism: Its Logic and Rhetoric

Abstract

THIS ESSAY is a minute examination of a piece of criticism by Christopher Ricks of a short poem embedded in Tennyson's In Memoriam.' (We also allude to other works for purposes of comparison.) Our primary aim is to demonstrate the enormous logical richness, complexity-and, very often, the elusiveness-of many critical remarks. We shall argue that certain remarks are not only descriptive, but interpretative, evaluative, and that sometimes these elements can scarcely be separated. We shall show that the ways in which these elements are brought together varies in different remarks and that sometimes we cannot say precisely how they are conjoined. Moreover, we shall also try to show, in opposition to such philosophers as Weitz,2 that no monolithic claims can be made, e.g., about interpretative judgments that they are never true or false, or about descriptive ones that in principle they always are true or false; and against a large number of philosophers of criticism,3 that critical judgments often have a causal dimension. We are especially interested in showing the points at which, and ways in which, critical remarks become untestable, and note that there is often little correspondence between the rhetoric of certain passages in this piece, in particular the tone of confidence adopted, and the problematic status of what is being claimed. This suggests that the author is not always aware of the dubiety of what he is saying, or is responding to a half-awareness with insistence. In either case we are left with the questions: is the interesting and sometimes persuasive remark made by the critic true, and how could we test this? And if this attitude sometimes seems inappropriate, why is this so? Our interest is in the nature and status of criticism as a discipline, and hence is epistemological. It is only indirectly critical; and perhaps we should explain that we have chosen this piece by Ricks because it seems a good representative example of contemrary English criticism; and also a good piece of criticism.