The Searle article on New Criticism quotes I. A. Richards as saying “that poetry could be an intellectually respectable substitute for religion in an emerging age of science” and that poetry had the power to “change our attitudes without requiring us to believe in the Magical View found in traditional religion.”  Examples of such religious language make their way into literary criticisms frequently.  The New Critic, Cleanth Brooks decried the reduction of poetry to a prose restatement of its theme or plot as the “Heresy of Paraphrase,” as if one was violating rules of orthodox interpretation, which, of course, did not exist.  The Goldstein article quotes Wolfgang Iser: Readers’ “controlled observation of themselves allows them to escape this fallen world and improve their lives.  The literary text can move the reader to adopt positive values and redemptive beliefs.  I believe this idea of literature as a substitute religion is also evidenced in Crosman’s ideas on readers making meaning.

            Crosman works very hard to justify the coexistence of mutually exclusive interpretations of a text.  Believing that “the idea that Truth is One-unambiguous, self-consistent, and knowable– . . . may now have outlived its usefulness,” he campaigns for peace and harmony through tolerance, which he equates with plurality of meaning in texts. In refuting Hirsch’s position that the author is the one who creates meaning, Crosman depicts those who recognize Truth as narrow minded and judgmental (believing “the mass of our fellow men are stupid or perverse”) and commits the fallacy of either/or when he says people who believe they possess Truth can either “turn [their] backs on [those who do not] in cynical contempt, or try to force them to see the light.”            

Crosman admits that Hirsch never said a text could have only one meaning, rather that it is an unstated assumption.  Perhaps it is Crosman who is making the assumption based on his biases against determinable meaning.  He accuses Hirsch of making a social and political argument for univocality, but Crosman’s position is just as socially and politically motivated as he demonstrates with his plea for peace and harmony.

            Crosman claims that if Hirsch is correct in his historical approach to interpreting Wordsworth’s “Lucy,” “we would have to convict Wordsworth of inability to say what he meant.”  Crosman’s conclusion again denies alternative motivations for Wordsworth’s chosen mode of expression.  The accusation leveled at Hirsch by Crosman that his assumptions flawed his interpretations is equally true of Crosman, and Crosman assumes that Truth is an archaic concept and society is best served by embracing contradiction.

            Certainly Crosman speaks correctly when he points out that the ambiguity of words complicates the transference of meaning from the author to the reader. Readers do have to make their best guess on the intended meaning of the words by putting them into a larger context, but if we cannot do so with a fairly high degree of accuracy, there is no meaning at all.  Naomi