The Fourth Dimension of a Poem by M H Abrams

Author:M H Abrams [Abrams, M H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780393089233
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2012-08-08T04:00:00+00:00

VI

As the upshot of all these considerations, I am confirmed in my assurance that the traditional interpretation of “A Slumber” is correct. But I am confronted by a disconcerting discovery. Certain though I am that the traditional reading is right and Davies’ reading is wrong, I find that some of the graduate students in the seminar I described disagree with me; that my fellow director of the seminar, Max Black, disagrees with me; and that several of my literary friends also disagree with me.

What to do when, myself so certain, I am confronted by a contrary judgment by indubitably qualified readers? My first and very human impulse is to get angry. But I resist the impulse, and run again through all the reasons for my interpretation that I have formulated. When I have done this, I can do no more; I have reached the point in giving reasons at which, as the philosopher Wittgenstein put it, “the spade turns.” If a qualified reader of lyric poems stubbornly holds to a contradictory reading, I can only wait, with what patience I can muster, for an infusion of grace—an interpretive conversion—that will get the reader to see what to me is so evident. But upon considering the matter, I realize that such a reader feels the same way about my stubbornness in maintaining my interpretation. So I have to admit that in this, and in similar instances of interpretive deadlock, some qualified readers’ certainty will be contradicted by the certainty of other qualified readers. And by this admission, I seem to have reasoned myself into sharing the skepticism I set out to disprove: that in interpreting poems, no reading can claim to be the right reading.

At this juncture, I find illuminating observations by Ludwig Wittgenstein, which I venture to summarize in this way: Our uses of language are inter-involved with “forms of life”—activities which incorporate a diversity of language games that have been formed to accomplish a diversity of human purposes. Each language game operates according to a set of rules, some of which may overlap with the rules of other language games, while others are specific to its particular enterprise. In consequence of the differences in their rules, although a number of language games undertake to achieve certainty, Wittgenstein points out, “the kind of certainty is the kind of language-game.”2

It is certain, for example, that “ten divided by five equals two.” It is also certain that Newton’s laws of motion are valid. Certainty in the language game of mathematics, however, and certainty in that of physical science depend on the application of rules specific to each. The two language games nonetheless have a common feature: both are highly specialized, designed systematically to exclude any role by individual human differences, in order to achieve universal agreement among all those who are competent players in each game.

The language game in the enterprise we call literary criticism, on the other hand, is specifically organized to allow room for the play of individual human differences.

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