Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2004. Vol. 4. Eger Journal of English Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 30)
ÉVA ANTAL The Rhetoric and Ethics of Reading
60 Éva Antal each other. The stability is like that of the arch: the very forces which are calculated to drag the stones to the ground actually provide the principle of support —a principle in which thrust and counter thrust become the means of stability. (Brooks "Irony", 1044) Let us pay attention to two things here: first, the figurative language used by the new critics in their close reading/writ ing; secondly, their obsession with a wanted/wished equilibrium and totality in textual understanding. While the first phenomenon leads us to the deconstructive attack on New Criticism, the second one foreshadows the moral implications of close reading. Although the New Critics do not explicitly speak about ethical questions, for them poetry means "a way of knowing something: (if the poem is a real creation,) it is a kind of knowledge that we did not possess before" —as Allen Tate claims in The Essays of Four Decades adding: "it is not knowledge 'about' something else; .. .it is the fullness of that knowledge" (Tate 104-105). When Brooks says that, optimally, the ironical reading process results in "a unification of attitudes into a hierarchy subordinated to a total and governing attitude" (Wimsatt-Brooks LC, 380), he displays his totalizing and somewhat holistic, though dialectic, worldview. In the concluding paragraphs of his "Irony as a Principle of Structure" he confesses that in textual close reading "penetrating insights" can be gained and one of the uses of poetry is to make the readers "better citizens". But poetry, that is, a given figurative text, manages it relying on the expressed relevant particulars, not with the usage of abstraction. More accurately, it carries us "beyond the abstract creed into the very matrix from which our creeds are abstracted" (Brooks "Irony", 1048). Thus, specific moral problems can be the subject matter of literature, but the purpose of literature is not to point a moral. I suppose, it can be guessed that in close reading —due to the critics' concern with true knowledge and wisdom —"such qualities as wit, ambiguity, irony, paradox, complexity, and tension are valued for more than aesthetic reasons; they are indexes to the view of re edit y —and of man and truth — in the work. They are, therefore, not really aesthetic or rhetorical but, since they are modes of apprehending reality, ontological or, in the broad sense, religious" (Spears 240). What's more, in "Cleanth Brooks and the Responsibilities of Criticism" Monroe K. Spears sees the mission of New Critics grounded in the tradition of Christian humanism giving ontological meaning to their reading practice while their irony is taken religiously, or at least ethically. In the modernist close reading of New Criticism the belief in the possibility of order and the quest for order are emphasised, since in literature the reader is supposed to find true knowledge, "knowledge of a value-
