Note 3 — JOCASTA

The symbolism of the individual-real in its scientific aspects is best explained in C. K. Ogden’s and I. A. Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning. In this confused mixture of philosophy, psychology, ethnology and literature it is just possible to distinguish between what is meant by ‘bad’ and ‘good’ symbolism. To begin with, the assumption must be made for both varieties of symbolism that words mean nothing by themselves. Bad symbolism is apparently the use of words for collective propagandist purposes which distort the ‘referents’ (original objects or events) of which the words are signs; good symbolism makes language not an instrument of purposes but of the ‘real’ objects or events for which it provides a sort of mathematic of signs. Words in this reformed grammar are thus not vulgar stage-players of images; they are certified scientific representatives of the natural objects, or constructions of objects called events, which man’s mind, like a dust-cloud, is assumed to obscure from himself. To Mr. Ogden and Mr. Richards language is ideally a neutral region of literalness between reality and its human perception. Signs (of which language is this precise mathematical grammar), being the closest the perceiving mind can come to reality, must for convenience be regarded as reality itself; the more faithfully they are defined as signs, the more literally they represent reality. There is no evidence anywhere in this book that perception is properly anything other than a slave of reality. Disobedient perception—language by itself—is an ‘Enchanted Wood of Words.’ There is no hint that individual perception, instead of making a separate approximation of the general sign conveying the object, does in fact where originality is maintained experience a revulsion from the object or event concerned. No hint that the very genesis or utterance of a sign is an assertion of the independence of the mind against what the authors call the sign-situation. Or that the mind is a dust-cloud only when perceptively organized to define reality. Or that language is only an Enchanted Wood of Words when the dragon Reality is searched for in it. Or that words are literal man, not ‘main topics of discussion,’ not literal perception or the science of reality.

The conclusion of this study, if one has patience to extract a conclusion from this science-proud collation of verbal niceties, is that man has no right to meaning: meaning is the property of reality, which is to be known scientifically only through symbols, which in turn are to be regulated as to interpretation by limitations on the use of symbols, called definitions. ‘But in most matters the possible treachery of words can only be controlled through definitions, and the greater the number of such alternative locutions available the less is the risk of discrepancy, provided that we do not suppose symbols to have “meaning” on their own account, and so people the world with fictitious entities.’

But what, then, in this stabilizing of the scientific or symbolic use of words, is to happen to poetry, which is assumed as the deliberately unscientific use of words? Poetry, it appears, deals with evocative as opposed to symbolic speech. ‘In evocative speech the essential consideration is the character of the attitude aroused.’ The corollary to this proposition, which the authors imperfectly and insincerely develop, is that there is no true antithesis between evocative (partisan) speech and symbolic (logical) speech. We deduce that evocative speech is in fact not an independent speech of its own but a persuasive quality that may be added to symbolic speech: the ‘attitude aroused,’ that is, is an attitude toward something—evocative (poetic) speech is false by itself (in opposition to symbolic speech), it is scientifically admissible only where it shows close dependence on symbols meaningless in themselves but showing close, scientific dependence on reality.

This deduction we find confirmed in a little book by Mr. I. A. Richards, Science and Poetry. ‘The essential peculiarity of poetry as of all the arts is that the full appropriate situation is not present.’ The fact that poetry is evocative rather then symbolic gives it a freedom from the hard-and-fast laws of reality that often enables it to convey a more faithful impression of the ‘real thing,’ by a sort of loyal lying, than would painfully truthful symbolic speech. Thus, by making symbolism the purpose of science rather than of art (as it is in the vulgar collective-real) Mr. Richards is able to allow poetry (always by scientific leave, of course) certain aristocratic latitudes of expression—a certain rhetorical finesse—that it lacks when it is erroneously used as symbolic (pseudo-scientific) speech. Poetry as symbolic speech is only figurative speech; it invents a fairy-story of reality. Poetry as evocative speech takes its clue from external (scientific) symbols of reality rather than from internal (imaginative) symbols of reality—it means, in Mr. Richards’ words, ‘The transference from the magical view of the world to the scientific.’

In the magical view the ‘pseudo-statements’ of poetry were connected with belief. In the scientific view they are disconnected from belief; we are returned to the assumption scattered through the pages of The Meaning of Meaning, that man has no right to meaning. The poet armed with the scientific view accepts the ‘contemporary background’ as tentative meaning: so that ‘the essential consideration is the character of the attitude aroused.’ This attitude has literary licence according to the degree of scientific acceptance: the more complete the acceptance, the greater the ‘independence’ (meaninglessness) of the poetry.

Poetry is according to such criticism, therefore, a socially beneficial affirmation of reality by means of a denial, or phantasization, of individual mind. In symbolic (magic) poetic speech reality itself is the principal of the fairy story; in evocative (scientific) poetic speech the principal of the fairy-story is the individual mind. In both cases the one belief from which the poetic mind must not disconnect itself is the belief in reality; which proves itself in either case to be only the most advanced ‘contemporary background’ appreciable.