The Newer Criticism: Prisoner of Logical Positivism?

The Burning Fountain: A Study In The Language Of Symbolism by Philip Wheelwright. Indiana University Press. $6.00.

Despite the modest claim of its subtitle, the book pretty well epitomizes the major concepts, preoccupations, and procedures of the Newer Criticism of the 1950’s. Its starting point is the antithesis between literal or “steno-language”—the language of science—and expressive or “depth language”—the language common to poetry, myth, religion, and metaphysics. Expressive language is opposed to that of science, not in lacking cognitive reference, but in possessing such “trans-logical” attributes as plurisignation (Wheelwright’s useful substitute for Empson’s “ambiguity”), a variability of meaning according to the context, the possibility of fusing universal and particular in a single concrete universal, freedom to transgress the law of contradiction by the use of “the paradox of depth,” and a cognitive and assertive mode (hence, a special truth-value) transcending the propositions and methods of verification proper to science. The meanings of this expressive language are the products of an imaginative activity which enters into our creative perception of the world by particularizing and intensifying an object, by imposing aesthetic distance, by fusing diverse objects into metaphor, and by envisioning the archetypal significance in the single object. Metaphor is analysed in detail as essentially “a tension which is maintained among . . . heterogeneous elements,” and the archetype as a transient image which is apprehended as a “preconsciously rooted” and hereditary symbol of something universal and enduring. The opinion that the same archetypes appear in both myth and poetry motivates a sustained excursion into the nature of the primitive world-view, the relations of ritual, myth, and poetry, and the origins of tragedy in the ritual celebrating the death and rebirth of a vegetation god. Poetic images, particularly those of an archetypal nature, often occur in significant patterns; here Wheelwright introduces the concept of multiple levels of meaning, in which the author’s surface-story may either be reinforced or counterpointed by the unconscious depth-meanings of this “thematic imagery.” In the course of the book, all these concepts are applied to writings ranging from Buddha’s Fire Sermon through the Oresteia to the Four Quartets.