Journal of Language and Literature Volume 2 Number 1 2003 ISSN 1478 - 9116

Review

John Constable (Ed.) I.A. Richards: Selected Works 1919-1938
Routledge, ten volumes, 3824 pp, £595, 0 415 21731 8

The cover title which the London Review of Books gave to Terry Eagleton's review of I.A. Richards's Selected Works 1919-1938 is symptomatic of the latter's contemporary status: "Terry Eagleton exhumes I.A. Richards" (LRB, 25 April 2002). The metaphor is telling, implying as it does that Richards's only relevance today is either archaeological (he can yield clues concerning the long-lost society in which he lived) or forensic (he can yield clues to a crime long-since committed). Either way, the function of the metaphor is the same: to consign Richards to the past; to deny his contemporary relevance. (It should be stressed that the metaphor is the LRB's rather than Eagleton's, and that Eagleton's review is largely positive).

Richards is easily dismissed because his reputation is restricted to the narrow field of literary criticism, and because his literary criticism has become synonymous with practical criticism, a reading technique by which the literary text is isolated from its social and historical context, with the reader focusing exclusively upon "the words on the page". Yet, Richards's practical criticism was an experiment in which anonymous poems were used to elicit responses, with the emphasis very much upon the responses rather than the poems, and certainly not a model of how to approach literature. Furthermore, his interest in literature was subordinate to other interests, which is why he refers to the poems in his experiment as "bait".

Like the early anthropologist Malinowski, who is given an appendix in Richards and Ogden's The Meaning of Meaning (1923; Volume Two), Richards was a "field-worker" on "the peculiarly difficult border-lands of linguistics and psychology", and his approach to literature was very much that of a linguist and a psychologist. Richards's primary concern throughout his life was with interpretation, the interaction of mind and language in the making of meaning ("An account of the process of Interpretation", write Richards and Ogden, is "the beginning of wisdom"), and literature was simply another domain of language ("emotive" language) with which the mind interacted. Indeed, Richards's work in literature is, unless seen within the context of these other, broader concerns, certainly of archaeological or forensic interest only.

The Meaning of Meaning was the founding text in Richards's career - it set the agenda for his work over the next half century (he died in 1979). The account of meaning and interpretation which Richards and Ogden outlined was at least in part a response to Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Générale, which had been published posthumously in 1916, and a comparison of the two texts is fruitful - both for an understanding of early adventures in semiotic theory, and for an insight into the roots of Richards's subsequent theories of mind, language and literature.

Both Saussure and Richards/Ogden began from the premise that "words … 'mean' nothing by themselves", i.e., that there is "no direct connection between say 'dog', the word, and certain common objects in our streets". What, then, generates meaning? Saussure's basic notion is the sign, which is "a two-sided psychological entity"; on the one side is the signifier (or sound/graphic pattern) and on the other is the signified (or concept). Meaning (or value) is generated through difference - one signifier gains value (i.e., is significant) through its contrast with other signifiers, in the same way that one signified gains value through its contrast with other signifieds. Language, then, is entirely self-supporting and discrete: meaning is generated from within the linguistic structure itself.

In contrast to Saussure's synthetic and binary model, Richards and Ogden's is analytic and tripartite, with the three elements placed at different angles in the Triangle of Interpretation: there is symbol or word (which corresponds roughly to Saussure's signifier), thought or reference (roughly, Saussure's signified), and referent or thing (which has no correspondence in Saussure's model). It is the central element - reference, or "what happens to (or in the mind of) an Interpreter" - that is crucial.

In their foregrounding of mental activity within the hermeneutic process, and in their stress upon the independence of the mind "both from the sign and from that for which the sign stands or to which it refers", Richards and Ogden can be described as proto-cognitivists. Yet, ironically, the psychology which they used to explain interpretation had as its sine qua non the rejection of the human mind as an independent and spontaneous entity. "All mental events", wrote Richards in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924; Volume Three), "occur in the course of processes of adaptation, somewhere between a stimulus and a response". Thus, Richards and Ogden's model of interpretation is cast very much within S-R terms, with symbol acting as stimulus which causes the interpreter to respond by thinking of a particular referent. Moreover, our interpretation of - our response to - a symbol in the present is conditioned wholly by how we responded to the same or a similar symbol in the past.

Unlike Saussure, then, who saw both elements in the sign as "psychic entities", Richards and Ogden separated thought (or reference) from language (or symbol), with the former being pure response, and the latter, pure stimulus: tellingly, The Meaning of Meaning is subtitled A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought. It is, I suspect, because Richards and Ogden drained the mind of its spontaneous interpretative power that they included a third element to ground meaning: namely, the referent, which corresponds to a concrete, non-linguistic reality. It is also why Saussure could forfeit reality from his model ("Il n'y a pas de hors-texte", as Derrida commented): the mind, an integral part of the sign, generates meaning because, like language, it functions through associative and syntagmatic comparison - in other words, Saussure invested the mind with spontaneous interpretative power, a move that rendered reality redundant in the making of meaning.

Richards was a proto-cognitivist whose work, paradoxically, was steeped in the stimulus-response behaviourism which dominated psychology in the post-War period. In contrast, Saussure, who died in 1913, the same year as Watson's founding lectures on behaviourism, emerged from the speculative or philosophical tradition of psychology personified by his precursor Descartes. Writing in Principles of Literary Criticism, Richards urged his reader to bear in mind "that the knowledge which the men of AD 3000 will possess, if all goes well, may make all our aesthetics, all our psychology, all our modern theory of value, look pitiful". Our knowledge in these areas has not progressed yet to such an extent as to leave Richards in need of exhumation, and the publication of his Selected Works 1919-38, covering the most significant phase in his career, is evidence of his continuing importance.

David West, University of Northumbria, UK

Email: d.west@northumbria.ac.uk