PAPER- CRITICAL THEORY

THE PRIMACY OF THE READER

Seminar paper submitted to the Pre- Doctoral Department of English

G.A. Gopika

M.Phil. English

Roll no: 7

SreeAyyappa Collage for Womem

Chunkankadai

October 2016
The Primacy of the Reader

Cleanth Brooks is one of the leading critics of the group called the New

Critics in U.S.A., who laid emphasis on the close reading of the text. A reader can

be provisionally defined as a person who evaluates intellectually a given

manuscript or image in an effort to comprehend or interpret its contents or form for

a range of reasons, whether these reasons are defines as ‘entertainment’,

‘education’, ‘enlightenment’, ‘pleasure’ or a combination of these and other

purposes. Cleanth Brooks in his critical essay “The Primacy of the Reader” gives

his views on reader-oriented criticism. In this essay, he focuses the importance of

the reader and how the text is evaluated by them. Brooks too express the types of

readers and there way of style in reading.

According to Cleanth Brooks there is no limitation for criticism. He refers

to Monroe Beardsley and W.K. Wimsatt term ‘Intensional Fallacy’- a fallacy he

remind referring not to mistake made by the author but to one made by the reader

or the critic. The famous English poet and critic S.T.Coleridge too while defining

poetry, describes the ideal poet than poetry. Harald Bloom writes about the

importance of the author. According to him, the poet’s main characteristic is that

he must resist to the work of poetic forebears (ancestors) that is the ‘strong poet’

must break from tradition and make his work fresh and new, but the ‘weak poet’

will imitate, the best book of the past. This concept was condemned obviously by

the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century. Rebellious energy, according

to William Blake, is the way to the only truth that experience and the Oedipal

attack upon the father is inevitable in literature as well as in life.

 A genuine poet not only imitates his literary masters or his father but also

he will forge a style of his own. We cannot say that a typical poet is anxious to

throw away his literary career from whom he first derived the energy. Cleanth

Brooks believes that a poet is not particular or concerned to stay his literary father

and create confusion among his brother poets. Brooks expect that the

competitiveness among men of letters is mostly with their living contemporaries

rather than with their dead ancestors. Bloom has called it as “anxiety of influence”.

Yet Bloom believed that a writer as a man, will struggle to free himself

from both literary conventions or from the “benumbing effects” of an established

tradition. In short, Bloom is more interested in the maker than in the thing that he

had made. The maker’s struggle is entitled in a poet agonizing by Bloom. Denis

Donoghue sums up Bloom’s practical criticism is concerned not with the structure

or internal relations of the poem or to its diction or to its tone. It is concerned to

isolate the primal gesture which the critical paradigm has predicted. In any case,

Bloom’s basic affinities are with the poet rather than the historical scholar, with

Nietzsche rather than with Taine. In his most recent book, Bloom tells us that

writes as a “Jewish Gnostic” Bloom makes it clear that his fundamental motive is

now philosophical and theological, not primarily literary.

Gnosticism is antedated to Christianity. The early Christian father attacked

it as a heresy and it was not restricted to Christianity. But now the spirit of

Gnosticism is very much alive in our days. Eric Voegelin is interested in this field

and wrote many volumes in its modern johases. The Gnostic view is that the belief

that the creator God was a wicked demon. It is the task of the enlightenment soul
or a soul with the proper esoteric knowledge to reject this wicked and ill-made

world and to return to the true God who is found behind. The façade of our daily

experience. There are two aspects of the Gnostic religion. One aspect cultivates the

secret to wisdom, which helps to emancipate the soul and to rejoin the true God.

Another aspect is an active and practical rebellion against this world to remark the

world according to the secret windom.

Brooks finds both the mystical and positivistic aspects in the poets like

Blake, Shelly and Emerson. In Bloom there is a mystical and individual aspect.

Now Brooks turns to view literary criticism from the side of the reader or from the

readers exaltation and this view is strongly supported by Stanely Fish while

Stanely Fish is concerned with reader. Bloom is concerned with the writer. But

both agrees on one point that is that they never disparage an accurate reading of a

literary text.

Fish is in favour of the reader who is an element in completing the literary

transaction. If a literary work is unread, it remains inert. But when the reader reads,

it becomes a potential experience. Moreover readers opinions differ. Infact, the

number of criticism or scholarships or textbooks would not have arisen if every

reader agreed with every other in his interpretation. I.A. Richards who gave

importance to the reader his book practical criticism. He did experiments in

reading with his students reader at Cambridge by giving them some thirteen

untitled poems. The results were and the typical poem proved to be very slippery

object. Some experiment was done with the poem. In his book Keats’s “Well

Wrought Urn”. But the readers were not students but scholars and critics. The
result produced was quite a number of diversity. The Poem was “well-read” in the

sense “well-thumbed” or “worn by the hands of many readers”. It means the poem

was differently interpreted by different types of readers. Brooks accepts the

diversity in reading. Fish in his last book, ‘Is There a Text in Class?’, Insists on the

inevitable variability of interpretation. He says that the author of the text dissolves

into a shadowy wraith which means the man disappears. He gives an example to

prove this.

At Johns Hopkins school, once Fish forgot to erase the names of authorities

in linguistic theory from the another course (students studying religious poetry of

the seventeenth century) entered the class, he draw a frame round the names and

titled it as “P. 43”. He mischievously told them that it is a seventeenth century

religious poem, without any apprehension, the students interpreted the group of

names in terms of Christian symbolism. They interpreted Jocobs as Jocob’s ladder

meaning the ascent to heaven. “Rosan – baum” as rose tree, that is to the virgin

Mary and the “rose of sharom” as the mother of man-God and ‘ohman’ as ‘Omen’

or ‘Amen’ or ‘Oh man’. All these detail fitted into a Christian poem about man’s

need for salvation to the acceptance of Jesus Christ , the savior. Fish’s examples

show that poems are really created by the readers. According to Fish, the process

of reading is necessarily broken into small units.

Bloom illustrates the reading process of Fish’s Start-Stop theory. It also

reminds of Zeno’s paradox of the race between Achilles and the tortoise. By this

he express the slow readers as well as the fast readers, he stand in the side of the

slow readers. Fish’s Start-Stop theory supports that the language is truly
indeterminate by meanings. Fish claims that his theories of reading and the

interpretive process are not related to complete relativism. There is no doubt that

interpretive communities exists and they change from time to time. Fish is against

‘subjectivity’. “ Beauty is truth, truth beauty?-that is all/ ye know on earth and all

ye need to know”, this Keats’s poetry line got much interpretations from T.S.

Eliot, Robert Bridges, S.A. Richards in many ways. He told that there is no

“correct” interpretation in any criticism.

Cleanth Brooks refers to Susan Sontag’s essay “Against Interpretation” and

makes use of her argument in his essay. Brooks support Sontag’s ideas and says

that the discussion of literature and literary theory should not spoil literature itself.

The reader must read with innocent eye to experience the thrill of making his own

discovery. In his essay he distinguishes three types of criticism, namely an author-

oriented, a work- oriented, and a reader- oriented. He tells that each has its own

special appeal and use. He sum up, both author as well as the readers are equally

important in the world of literarure.

WORKS CITES

Primary source:

Brooks, Cleanth. “The Primacy of the Reader”.Contemporary criticism ; An

Anthology. Ed. V.S. Seluraman,Macmillian publisher Chennai.,1989. 474- 488.

Print.

Secondary source:

Das, Bijay Kumar. Twentieth Century Literary Criticism.Atlantilpublisher:New

Delhi, 2012. 286-291.print.

Wolfereys, Julian. Ruth Robbins and Konneth Womack.Key Concepts in Literary

Theory.Atlantil publisher: New Delhi, 2005. 71-72. Print.